I was also talking to another potter whose work I adore. I said “You have really stepped up your Instagram feed, why?” She said “It’s my retirement plan.” She’s in a big show up here, but she’s in Virginia. She’s older than I am (but not by much) and she wants to just be able to sell from home, that’s her retirement plan, she had actually set a goal for herselffor a certain number of followers. She makes a lot of videos with music and the quality of her output on social media is good, very high quality.

What platforms do you use for selling? You mentioned Facebook?

I don’t sell on FB, I publicize on FB and Instagram, and I sell on Etsy. That’s my big one: Instagram.

No, although my brother is a web designer and he offered, he said, “Do you want to sell from your website? We can set it up that way.” But what I like about Etsy is that you can buy postage from them, the postage is cheaper, they insure for a higher amount. The post office will give you included,$50.00 insurance: Etsy will give you $100 included, and the rate is lower, and then they get the tracking number and I can print out my mailing labels, tape them on, bring them to the post office and drop them off and I don’t have to go through checkout.  Etsy takes that shipping cost out of the money they’re collecting for me and they send a little letter to each person: “Here’s your tracking number” with a little graphic of a car and a map showing Minnesota to wherever I’m sending it. I like not having to do all that, and then they add the tax in automatically and they know which states collect it, because not every state does tax on shipped things, they do all that stuffand then charge me 5%.

Yes, both he and my brother-in-law. My brother-in-law hosted me for a long time, twenty or thirty years. I really went full time in 2008, and that’s when I set up a serious website. Step one was setting up a website, and applying to shows. I’d been doing shows at my home at Holiday time (December) for years, before I had kids, so, thirty-five years at least or more.

Just reading through the instructions and making sure I got it all right. Those platforms (FB, Instagram, Etsy) are all very helpful; Etsy offers a huge amount of customer support. I think the most challenging thing on Etsy for me was estimating shipping. I double box everything. So it’s two boxes, and it’s all recycled, 100% recycled materials except the tape. Sometimes I use popcorn if I run out of peanuts, I use actual popcorn (I have an air popper)and so those things are variables. Etsy isn’t set up for that,  I would guess. The first year I lost money on shipping, after that I never did. Etsy really, really wanted everyone to offer free shipping and so I just folded it into my prices. That made everything so much easier. It says free shipping, of course the shipping is actually in the price of the items. Figuring out what the shipping would be, for awhile, was tough.So that had a learning curve.

But setting it up, because I regularly photograph my work, I had a lot of good quality photos, and then I shifted to photographing with my phone, instead of a camera. I don’t know why I didn’t do it sooner, because with the camera I had to have a tripod if it’s a low light situation, the quality wasn’t as good. The white balance was a nightmare. The phone, you know, you just tap it, it focuses. You can do one like this (eye level), you can do one like tha (from above) t: you don’t have to crank up the tripod.

So I had those photographs (you have to have photographs, right?), I had PR materials anddescriptions. I keep all of them so that I just pull them out from my computer. I do suggest that people collect things that ask for a thirty word description, or ahundred word biography, or a three hundred word artist statement or whatever and you need to have those things ready. The other thing to do is just go and look at what’s required, make a list, and then write all those things up. Because I’ve been at it so long I had all that: I had a bio, I had an artist statement and many descriptions. I’d write the word count by it , so I keepa file, it’s called “art fair phrases”, because each art fair application calls for different “describe your work in 350 words, describe your work in ten words”, so I just have a bunch and I can just slot them in. My work is consistent enough that I’m not, writing a new one for each event. When I did a show in Lanesboro (it was a solo show during Covid) I named it Anthropocene and that required a specific artiststatement. Sometimes if you have a solo show and you have a specific focus then you’ll want to put in a different thing.

So assembling materials, for some people that may bethey’re starting from scratch, but I had been going along for years so I had all that stuff. And of course it evolves and changes all the time. Like my bio before, when I lived in Chicago (and we moved here in 2012),my bio in Chicago was different. Then I moved hereand I sort of incorporated the romance of the farm (my grandfather’s) and we had chickens, and then the chickens had to be scratched out of the bio because we lost all the chickens.
So the romance of the chickens is gone. Sometimes we get sheep. There’s a young couplewhobring sheep and we have bees here that are someone else’s bees. We like to share if we can.

Yeah. Facebook, I was just feeling guilty because I have followers on FB that talk to me all the time. I try very hard to respond to everybody but I don’t go on FB anymore because Instagram posts automatically to FB. When FB bought Instagram, or whatever, then it all became one. So I’ll post on Instagram, I’ll respond to all the comments that areInstagram, and then when I go to FB after a week I’m like, aaaahhhhh.

The other thing I do is I send out an email two or three times a year. I had to switch to a mailing service. It’s called “Sendinblue.” Most people use MailChimp. I couldn’t get MailChimp to work for me for the life of me. So I just gave up on MailChimp and went to Sendinblue which is a French company. I have it for free because they give you a maximum of 300 mailings a day so I usually send my email out over two days.

Yeah, pretty much. I do a beginning of the summer, and in the fall.

Yeah, and when I first started selling on Etsy, I was tracking a little bit, just through name recognition, who was buying from me, and it was Facebook.

Yeah, but I have to tell you. I was trying so hard to get to a thousand followers on Facebook, and I got there, and like six weeks later or two weeks later I got there on Instagram. I don’t know how many followers I have on Facebook, like roughly a thousand maybe still, maybe 1300. On instagram I have 11.7k.Going over 10 is like a whole new world. I was trying so hard to get to 10, and then it just (whistles). I’m sure I’ll be at 12 within a few months.

Well Facebook took me years, and Instagram took me months.

Right. But if you look at my demographics, it’s pretty ironic. Let me see if I can pull it up.

No. I can on Etsy. They claim I get some people through their website too, which I do. I’m trying to pull this up, but it’s froze up. Anyway, they’re from Tehran. Instagram is huge in Iran and there’s a lot of pottery and so I have a lot of, so when it says by city I think my top followers are Chicago and Minneapolis, and Tehran, it’s weird.

Yeah, so they’re not buying, I’m not shipping to them, I won’t try to ship…I have sent things to England. Then the shipping suddenly went way up, and a few people are willing to pay the extra for me to ship to them. One man bought something to go to Ireland and I was trying to track it, I was so worried and then I got this lovely email from his wife: “my husband surprised me with this bowl” and I was like, wow, I mean, he was willing to spend that extra, it was a big, nice expensive bowl anyhow, and it got there. I put it in this styrofoam cooler so that it wouldn’t weigh anything and wouldn’t be big and it was still $67 dollars I think for shipping? I shipped to Canada once. One woman, before I put the Europe shipping addition, somehow she was buying from Holland, and it didn’t add that 50 and I emailed her and I said I can’t send it for what you paid for shipping, and she said “It’s okay, I visit my parents in Florida” so I sent it to Florida, and I gave her a free mug as a thank you for making it so much easier!

And I’ve also traded! That’s the best thing about Instagram: I have three friends, one of them is a close friend, in Mexico that I met on Instagram. Another person’s in Sicily, we visited her.

And then I just met this guy who’s a cyclist out in Connecticut to give him a mug because I admire him so much. But potters trade with each other. So I have a mug from Wales, I have a pitcher from Scotland, I just traded a couple of mugs with American (potters). It’s a thing we do! You just send your piece out there, and then this other pot comes back and it’s a trust thing. Those are the nice things about Instagram.

Connecting with the people. I write copious notes to myself about events: about what to expect and how to prepare based on last years (bring food, or you know, whatever). After my online sale I wrote “Turn off the sound on your computer and try not to check it too often.” Because there’s all these dings, every time I make a sale an email comes in saying “You sold another item” and the dinging was making my dopamine go crazy! After an hour I was completely jazzed up and then of course I ran out of pots, pretty much. So the day after I was like “There’s no point in living” because it’s so exciting you think, “Oh oh, I’m selling, oh oh, everybody loves me so much!” And you get very hopped up on it. So now, no sound and I’m not allowed to check it except every ten or fifteen minutes because people have questions like “How big is this” or can you ship my pieces together? Things like that.

When I first started having the online sale, I used to run it for a week, now I run it for two days, and that’s even ridiculous, I could run it for three hours and I could sell everything. People are crazed: “I had it in my cart and now it’s gone!” happens a lot. It’s how soon you can check it out. I like it when they make three purchases because then it’s easy to box it together, and I still do. But now they’ll email me, “I bought things” but they buy them separately because they want it so badly that they check out and then they go back and buy something else and check out. Sothere’s that.

Yeah, I mean, if I get tired of live events, I’m down to very few art fairs. So next year I have toassess again, because I’m getting old. Like we did the Stockholm Art Fair? It’s the loveliest thing and my husband (he makes jewelry) is in that one too, and I brought five bins of pots, but we’re out of shape. I mean we were both like “oh my god, Ibuprofen!” Sowe’re aging out, I’m 62. In which case (of stopping doing live events) I would definitely do maybe three online sales: Spring, Summer and Fall, to keep the income coming. Physically being a potter, you’ve got to stay in shape! This morning I rode twelve miles.

Yeah, the thing about social media that’s so seductive is people are “that’s beautiful” and I say thank you a lot and sometimes I think “Glynnis, don’t get sucked into this too much” but I have always liked attention and this is a perfect platform for me. And I think that’s part of why I’m so successful.

I do. Somebody said “it’s nice to buy from an artist who’s cheerful” and I was like, who isn’t? You’re all coming here and loving my stuff, I’m so happy! That’s a great atmosphere and , I mean, God,it’s a really old crowd: artists at Art Fairs, they’re old! And they’re working their butts off.

Yeah. I can go either way. I can spend days here working along as long as I have my husband, and sometimes after an event, I’m tapped out. But if I have a two day fair, I can do two days and get energized by people.

I think so, but it’s also, I mean, you have tohave consistency.

Well when I first started, I posted every day. I would just get up in the morning and post somethingand it didn’t matter what. I do this very informal “from the carving bench” in my stories.

Yeah. Or I’ll just take a picture of the cat and say “my assistant’s waiting to help me!” Or “my assistant just added fiber to my clay, um, thanks.” You know, cat fur.

In posting, and in answering people. You know I hate it when I comment (on someone else’s post) “oh, this is wonderful, how did you do it?” and nothing. Then I don’t want to interact with them and I lose interest. So consistency, connecting with people, answering them back, and just, yeah, what else? Gosh,I mean, being an extrovert helps. Forming an image that you want to project, but I try to be real. Consistency is absolutely number one.

Packing. Packing the pots and not getting to talk to the people, not having a conversation about it. Although I get great feedback and questions and I get a lot of return customers. I think when you really get return customers is when people have a good experience of a pot and they want to have that experience again. And I’m kind of quoting Bob Briscoe on that.

I often meet potters who ask “why do you make mugs, they’re just a pain” but we all talk about how this is the most intimate pot you can make: the people’s lips touch it, they hold it, they sip, they wake up with it. This woman contacted me “We have your two mugs and it’s this morning ritual and we’re terrified one will break, we need to order two more.” Then I was making them and she said “It happened! Please make a third one!” Another woman said “We’re fighting over the cup, we need another one.” Another woman ordered six because her daughters kept trying to steal them. So I really work on making them feel good in your hand, to be balanced and light in the handle, not some crap handle. Especially the mug stories come in, other stories too, you know, but they want to have that experience again.

Yeah. It’s sort of a different question.

Yeah, you just have to take a week for that. To put up an online sale, it’s more than a week because I have to take images, and then I load them in and write descriptions although I’ve gotten more and more and more efficient. The killer was I was poking around Etsy and I suddenly found a tab that said: “copy this post” and I’m like “why didn’t I find this years ago?” So like, for a mug, I can just change the word from “owl” to “cow” or whatever, and oh God, that was a time saver. Because there’s all these boxes you have to check: “is this item handmade by you?”, “is it a mug?”, “What category is it in?” So each one I would go through and check all of them off. Once I discovered that tab, that I could just copy another post, and change a few key things, that saved me huge amounts of time.

Once it’s all loaded in I double check everything, cause one time my brother looked at it and said “it this really $1100?“ and I said “no, it’s $110” and what he did was he sorted by price. So I have a whole checklist of things,  I read these notes that I make and it tells me all the things to do because I’m not going to reinvent the wheel every year. Then it sells and then I start packing, sometimes that very day. I have the sale on the weekend and then try to have it all out by the end of the week.

Setting up for an Art Fair is a lot of work too, but you go there, you set up, you sell for two days, you just stick stuff in bags and then you’re done. The packing up and sending of pots is, I told you, I’m all hopped up on dopamine when I’m selling this stuff, but then after that first day, that’s like the big depression time, you know? Like, okay now, I actually have to send these things and make sure they don’t break.

Yes. Ask the question again? because there’s something about…

I like that at in-person events, people can pick up pots and then they know how much something weighs in their hand. If there’s a crack or a flaw I don’t dare sell it online. I do sell seconds on the ArtTour. There’s no way I’m going to try and rip anyone off. Personally, I hardly buy pots online. I will buy them from artists whose work I’ve already seen in person. Other people seemwilling to buy online. My work sells itself in that people like the imagery, they like the narrative images, the colors, the design. So that’s not a problem for me.

My cutsomers don’t seem to mind at all. I’ve never had anyone say “Your piece arrived and it weighs at lot.” I post the measurements, so I’ve not had any complaints.

Just things where I didn’t charge enough for the pots and the shipping.

Just some tricks, like buying Etsy postage. I didn’t do that at first and I should have. Etsy’s gotten very sophisticated with all kinds of support. The copy and paste thing. In some ways it’s not that hard, so I might have done it sooner, maybe.

Well, I don’t like paying the 5% thing, but it’s okay, they do a lot of work for me. I wish someone would come and pack all my stuff for me, but I’m so careful about it, I don’t want it to break and everything’s double boxed. People don’t always send that way anymore. It’s just gotten so much easier.Also, as recently as 2008 I wanted to be able to take credit cards. I still had the knuckle buster! Then they invented Square like two years later and I was like “oh thank God” ‘because I was paying a fee every month, even though I was only selling three months out of the year.

I’ll probably shift over to more than one salea year. There are people who only have online sales, and some people sell out of their website, and they do it all. So I may not be your ideal subject in that I just do it once a year.

I will say that my back room is just filled with boxes, it’s just filled, it’s the milking parlor. If you’re familiar with how those look…

Yes! Come have a look, well, we’ll do it afterwards. It’s filled with boxes, so it’s 100% recycled material and everybody knows give Glynnis your bubble wrap and peanuts and boxes, although not too many boxes, oh my God. That’s free! And I’m helping the environment. I saw some artist post “I use 100% recyclable materials” and I thought “Oh f-you, you’re still buying new stuff.” Oh now I said f*#@ on your recording, twice now!

Oh she said it! That was her!

“Recyclable” she said. And she was all brand new, special cardboard and all brown to show that you could recycle it. But I’m like, no! Don’t even let it go into the landfill. Reuse it. Here’s a funny storythat I love. I use popcorn when I run out of peanuts if I have to. Now they have those plastic puff packets and I usually float my inner box between puff packets. A woman contacted me (my sale’s in November) so it was sent to Chicago, and she said “I didn’t get my package” and I said “The tracking said that it came to your porch.” ( I was quite worried!) Two days later she emails me  saying “I found it on my back porch! They never deliver to me on my back porch. She sent me a picture of the box. Squirrels had broken in and eaten all the popcorn! Completely ripped the box apart and eaten all the popcorn. But she goes “The pots fine!” It had gotten wet and frozen, right, but you can bury my pots in your yard. You know, Greek pottery:3000 years old, it’s just been underground, you can’t do anything to it. My basement flooded in Chicago and people were like “Are your pots okay?” The danger is that the box holding them has collapsed, but the pots were fine.

At the low end, if I have a bad year, it’s …I have to do math.

No, no, I was going to give percentage. I was going to say …let’s see, 1/4th or 1/6th .

How long would you say it’s taken you to grow your virtual sales to this level?

Oh good question. We moved here in 2012.

When did you start your Facebook page?

I don’t know. let’s say 2008, ‘cause that’s when I went full time anyway, up to now. Instagram I think I went on in 2016. The website was 2008. For Instagram my son is the one who told me “You should be on Instagram” and I’d never heard of it; “what is that?” and he gave me tutorials that were mostly him saying “okay, then you do this and then over here you press this and then you do that” and I’d say, “whoa, whoa, whoa, wait, what was the first thing you did?” Then people my age were asking me all the time for tutorials because I’m their age and would go slowly!

I just started a new account a second before you got here called “Old Lady on a Bicycle” because I’m going to start posting bicycle content. It’s to get me on the bike and get me out the door so that I feel, “oh I have to do it, somebody’s watching.” Which is why I do these stories where I post in my stories: “let’s see how many mugs I can carve today.” I’ll throw a board of mugs, which is 12-15 mugs, and then I’ll try to carve them all in one day, which is a lot. So I’m like “count with me!” and I’ll start in the morning and post them as I carve them.

So people sign up for those at the Art Fairs, and you can sign up on my website (my brother added that somewhat recently).

Oh my God. My holiday sale when I was a potter in Chicago (and I’ve been a potter in Chicago since 1989). I’d have these holiday home sales, and people would just come to the house and they became really popular. First I’d send them actual postcards, and then when email started, because it didn’t exist when I started selling! Then I started collecting email addresses.

Sure, let’s say that.

We have, haven’t we? I’m so sorry, it’s the trauma.

Yeah. Not much else. I mean I have such a wide collection of boxes, and once in a while I’ve made a run to the cardboard recycling bins, but it’s no problem getting materials at all.

I do. I used something else once because it was cheaper to go to a gallery.

I’ve had a couple minor things and then I just replace it. It’s because I’m just a maniac when it comes to packing. Otherwise yes, it would be. The double boxing to float it. Because when I was much younger and I was selling to a Gallery in St. Paul from Chicago, I had these big bowls and I put thick bubble wrap around them and I stacked them all carefully but then just in a single box for UPS. Thegallery called me and they said “Everything is broken” and I couldn’t believe it! I tried to make a claim with UPS but they said “It’s not double boxed” and I thought “Oh hell, that will never happen again.” So that was in the 90’s. That was when I learned you can’t just bubble wrap stuff and have it tightly packed. I try to separate everything with cardboard and stuff so that they can not hit each other. This was tightly packed in a small box and it was dumb, it was just naïve. I had no idea. Although I swear, it looked like someone had jumped on the box.

I don’t really get customer complaints. Just that woman losing the box, you can tell that story (the popcorn/squirrel story above).

Oh yeah. Risks? Well I mean the first time I did it I had no idea how it would go. My first post: July 9th, 2015 and it has 49 likes.

Yeah, it says “Just getting used to Instagram, here’s a jar I carved today.” I’ve freaking posted everyday from the beginning!

Not anymore. I post 3-4 times a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday and then a weekend day. There’s a “Mugshot Monday” so every Monday you’ll see a picture of a mug. Then sometimes I’ll get a bee in my bonnet (like Throwback Thursdays, sometimes I’ll do that but not always). If I have an event, then there’s a lot of promoting. After the event I always do a thank you to everyone who came out.

Otherwise the posts are just whatever I’m working on, whatever I’m thinking about. Now that they’ve added stories, like if I look at my older posts (my second post was “Minnesota Morning” which is just the farm), I would never put a non-pottery thing in my feed anymore. I still do lots of fun stuff: sunsets and fireflies and “from the carving table” in my stories. And the stories go to Facebook also and people comment from there, but those are the messages I’m really bad about getting back to. ‘Cause they come in on Messenger and I just won’t use Messenger.

Be on Instagram because it turns me into a zombie! It has harmed me in that I will zone out on the damn Instagram! Sometimes I have to keep the phone in the house when I’m in the studio. The destruction of my focus, and probably losing time to being on Instagram (lowered productivity). That’s the double edged blade that I’m talking about. Really, if I could go back in time it would be nice to not have a phone, but then I wouldn’t have the same business, you know?

I just use the phone.

Yeah, and then I use my computer.

Your product has to be unique, you have to figure out your market, be consistent. Always err on the side of making a sacrifice if there is a problem. I had a long time customer who buys a lot from me. She said “This cup developed a vertical crack.” I’ve seen these before, it happens. Sometimes it’s thermal shock or you set it too hard upside down on your dish drainer, it’s not my fault that it did that. I said “I’ll send you a free mug, I’ll make the same mug again and send it to you free.” This is a long standing customer.

The worse was someone bought something at an art fair and he said “This mysteriously leaks” and he sent me a picture and I said “I’ll send you another one” and I refunded his money and I sent him a free mug. I do not screw around when it comes to customer service, I don’t have bad reviews. Don’t get into some petty squabble, it’s not worth it. It’s not even a lesson I had to learn from experience. Don’t take it personally. Sometimes it’s maddening, but sometimes it’s also better to just walk away.

So the last one, I just want to make sure I addressed it, it was advice to someone else?

Follow up and be responsive. Whatever your product, find the market for that and have good images. My son keeps saying “Oh, if I could do your feed” because you see these feeds that are all beige and white and they have 34,000 followers or whateverbut I can’t, it’s too much time. I have good enough images.

Right. I actually know a potter, I won’t say her name, she’s really successful. I went to a workshop. She says she spends literally 50% of her time on PR. I don’t want to be that. I want to be making my pots. It’s bad enough that I have to pack things or make glaze or fire things.

I don’t make enough money to do that. The person I would hire would be my husband! And for a lot of people that’s why they buy packing materials, because then they’re like, okay, this mug always takes the ten inch box and it’s right here and it goes much faster than me going back there (I’m going to show it to you).

Nope, that’s it I think. About virtual selling and about virtual presence and Instagram, no. I’m rather proud of myself.

Well I’ll meet a young person and I’ll be like “Oh you should follow me” and they’re like “Who are you? Oh! You have 11,000 followers!” There’s a little cachet that comes with that. I might be 62, but you know, I’m on Instagram. Again, it’s a double edged sword, you’re also death scrolling. I try really hard, and sometimes I succeed. Sunday’s are supposed to be device-free days.