How We Built a Pottery Studio to over 900K in Three Years.

What I'd Tell Other Studio Owners

I get asked some version of this question constantly, usually by another studio owner who is somewhere in the thick of it: How did you grow so fast?

The honest answer is not glamorous. It is not a secret algorithm or a viral moment. It is a handful of decisions I made early, often before I had any real proof they would work, that turned out to matter more than almost anything else I did.

I want to walk you through them, because if you are running a pottery or art studio right now, you already know the part nobody warns you about. The craft is the easy part. The business is the hard part.

Year one was a backyard shed

Mud Hut did not start in a commercial space. It started in a shed in my backyard.

Before that shed ever held a single class, I had already created the website, the Instagram and Facebook accounts, and a Google Business and Yelp profile. I was treating the studio as real before it physically had a storefront, because I knew the slowest part of any studio launch is not finding a space. It is awareness. People need time to find you, decide they want what you offer, and actually book.

Year one was entirely classes. Wheel and handbuilding lessons were 100 percent of the revenue. No memberships, no walk-ins, no private events yet. Just classes, run out of that shed, while we built a name and a waitlist.

If you are planning your own launch right now, this is the single biggest lesson I would hand you: do not wait for a commercial space to start building demand. Your marketing timeline should start the day you decide to do this, not the day you sign a lease.

What growth actually looked like

Nine months in, we moved into our first real location, a 2,000-square-foot space. That move is when the business actually diversified. We added studio memberships, walk-in paint-your-own-pottery, and private events all at once, because by then we had the space and the demand to support more than one revenue stream.

We grew faster than I expected. A second unit opened up in our complex, so we expanded into it to grow our membership footprint. Several months after that, a third unit became available, and we expanded again, this time building out a dedicated member studio, a private event studio, and the main class studio as three distinct spaces. We are now at over 6,000 square feet total.

The customer acquisition mix that worked from the start was Instagram and social media for visibility, a Yelp and Google Business presence for discoverability and trust, paid Google ads to capture people actively searching, and then, as we built a track record, real connections within the local community. That last layer compounds in a way ads alone never do.

The mistakes that cost me the most

There are three lessons I wish someone had handed me on day one.

You cannot do it all yourself. The plan was always that Chase would operate the studio, and I would take care of the business side- the marketing, accounting, scheduling, etc. We believed we could do it all. We were wrong; we ended up hiring an instructor within the first month, not because we had extra cash sitting around, but because we physically could not run classes, manage bookings, answer every inquiry, and handle marketing demands. Trying to do it all yourself does not save money. It caps your growth at exactly what one or even two exhausted people can carry.

You cannot under-invest in getting your name out there. I kept advertising spend at roughly 10 to 15 percent of revenue in those early years. That number will sound aggressive to a lot of studio owners who treat marketing as an afterthought. It is not an afterthought. It is the thing that makes everything else possible.

You will underestimate how much space you need. Growth that fast is a good problem to have, but only if your lease and your layout can flex with it. If you are planning your own space, plan for more room than you need, and look for locations where expansion into adjacent units is even possible.

What I would tell you if you are starting now

Build your online presence before your physical space is finished. Awareness takes longer to build than construction does, so do not waste that time.

Hire before you feel ready. If you are the only person running the studio, you are the ceiling on how fast you can grow.

Treat marketing as a real line item, not a leftover. A studio that looks incredible but nobody can find will not survive on word of mouth alone, especially in year one.

Plan for more space than you think you will need, and look for room to expand before you need it.

And do not wait for the “right moment” to start telling people you exist. The right moment is now, even if it is still happening in a backyard shed.

This is the first in a short series I am writing for fellow studio owners on what it actually takes to build and scale a pottery or art studio, from those first classes to multiple income streams to the systems that keep it running without you doing every single thing yourself. If you are building something similar and want to talk through where you are stuck, that is exactly the work I do through pottery studio consulting.

Tricia Fox is the founder of Mud Hut Pottery & Art Studio in Riverside, California, which she grew to nearly $900,000 in annual revenue in under three years. She now consults with fellow studio owners on growth, systems, and building a studio business that works. Learn more at triciafox.org/pottery-studio-consulting.