Jessie Lazar | Episode 1142
Jessie lazar makes functional ceramics for the home and table. Mostly wheel thrown, mostly gas fired, Jessie makes clean precise forms with painterly glazes meant to elevate humble items in your daily routine. After over a decade of making, selling, and teaching ceramics in New York City, Jessie relocated her studio and business to the Catskills in upstate New York. Setting up a new ceramics studio and brick & mortar homegood store in Eldred NY. This quickly expanded beyond Studio Jessie Lazar into Sullivan Public, a 3400 square foot industrial space turned community artspace, hosting local teaching artists, classes, afterschool and community events.
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How would you break down your streams of income energy and percentage wise? So I will name a few “steams” and you can explain the significance of its place in the over all mix.
Lets start with making Pottery…
In significance it is definitely number one. I would say that the making and sales of my pottery is 65% of my income. Or 60%.
How about the teaching end? You do your one off classes. How much does that take for you to put together and what are the percentages?
Oh I didn’t say what energy I put into my making of my pots. I would say because of all the other things that are happening in my business right now it gets 20% of my energy for making the pottery. For teaching, 20% income, 20% effort.
How much time are you putting into the planning and all that?
I feel like the planning is pretty much a one shot deal. I have a really good idea of how to roll these classes out now. I spend a lot of time marketing things but that’s true of everything and then the actual event is a fixed amount of time. There is time spent glazing and firing pieces but that all kind of fits into the flow of my own production. So it doesn’t feel taxing also because I love love it.
How much effort do you put into hosting other people teaching and what does that work out to be your percentage of stream of income?
I’m realizing that I put so much effort into all these things. I don’t put that much effort into hosting because I am lucky to be surrounded by really capable artists that basically do their own work. But the marketing takes time so I don’t now mathematically where I am at now but I put 10% or 8% into the hosting. Although there is always invisible work that I am probably not acknowledging. I am realizing that I am noticing that there is a correlation to how much energy I put in and how much revenue it creates, which is good I guess.
What do you see as a guesstimate at how the cross pollination of bringing in other teachers impacts your percentage and income?
That’s so amorphous and hard to know because that is something that I have no control over. I think it is pivotal. I would say it’s organic and I don’t devote a huge amount of attention to that percentage wise but income wise I think it could be as much as 20% on these big event days. Sales go up and people sign up for things. It is very beneficial to have a space filled with artists or interested craft people that want to consume and deepen their own access to art and making.
What amount of work do you put into retail work and how does that affect your bottom line percentage wise?
I was kind of lumping that in with my work in the original percentage. I would say that my retail store generates equal income from my pottery and all the other things that are in my store. So that’s a really sizeable chunk of my income. I think I said 65% of my money came from my work, I would say that 65% or 79% comes from what I retail and collect sales tax on. People buy a lot of vintage clothing from me.
You said you wanted to be a community hub. What does that do for your business to be a hub that people want to be a part of?
It is really hard to assign any kind of value to a space being a hub. I think that if I want a teacher to come and trust that people are going to fill up their workshop and they are going to share the skill that they have, or for someone to dedicate their Saturday afternoon and drive an hour to come and take a class somewhere and know that you are going to meet somebody new or that you are going to spend your time enriching your creative appetite I think investing in building a space that has that kind of depth of offering and people knowing that they are going to walk in and be inspired, like they bought a really special gift for their partner, that they learned something that they always wanted to learn. I think that’s really essential.
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