BATCH 01
The body and the cone
Every piece is a high-fired stoneware body — not earthenware, not porcelain. We fire to cone 6, about 1220 °C, which vitrifies the clay far enough that a dinner plate rings under a thumbnail and takes a hot roast without sweating. The speckle is iron in the body burning through the glaze: no sprayed pattern, no decal, no print. Because the body is dense at that temperature, the ware is dishwasher and microwave safe as a rule, with the oven limits written on each product page.
BATCH 02
What comes off the shelf
Twelve pieces make the current line: a 26 cm dinner plate, a 20 cm side plate, a 22 cm pasta bowl, a 16 cm breakfast bowl, a 320 ml studio mug with a pulled handle, an 800 ml pouring jug, a 36 × 24 cm oval platter, a covered butter dish, a 900 ml storage jar, a spoon rest, a pair of pinch bowls and a pair of 90 ml espresso cups. Sizes are nominal. Hand-thrown ware is not injection moulded: expect roughly ±3 mm across a 26 cm plate, ±5 mm on the platter, and about 5% on capacity. That is tolerance, not damage.
BATCH 03
Glaze, and what it does under heat
Reactive glazes move in the kiln. The oat glaze breaks cream on a rim and pools darker in the well; the celadon shifts green where the wall thins and grey where the glaze gathers. Pinholes, fine speckling and a faint orange-peel surface are part of a reactive finish, not a coating defect. Two pieces from one batch will show colour drift, a heavier break on one rim, a denser speckle on the next plate. We do not screen for identical twins, because no two survive a firing as twins. We do check every food-contact surface: no chipped glaze, no exposed body, no crazing that reaches through to the clay.
BATCH 04
What we do not do
We do not paste a studio story onto mass-produced catalogue ware. We do not dropship from a warehouse we have never visited, and we do not relabel seconds as firsts — a piece that fails our check is written off, not discounted. Our food-contact glazes are formulated and tested lead-free and cadmium-free to the limits our US and EU buyers ask for, and we keep the batch record for each firing so we can send it on request. We do not stamp the brand across the face of a plate; the underside carries the kiln mark and nothing else.
BATCH 05
How a shape gets approved
A new shape starts as a plaster model, then a three-piece sample set: one thrown, one trimmed, one fired. We use it for a fortnight — stack it, dishwash it twenty times, put a knife across it, run a hot roast onto it from a cold shelf. Only then does it become a batch. The 26 cm dinner plate and the 320 ml mug came through that test unchanged. Shapes that ring, wobble at the foot, or craze through to the body in the test set never reach this site.
BATCH 06
Packing, and how fast we move
An enquiry gets an answer within one working day. Once you confirm and we invoice, we prepare the order in about 3 working days and hand it to a forwarder from Hong Kong. Plates and platters travel in foam cradles inside a double-wall carton; mugs and cups are separated so no handle can reach another piece. Freight is quoted by destination; import duty and clearance are the buyer's unless we have agreed DDP in writing. If a carton arrives damaged, photograph it before you unpack it fully and keep the packaging — that freight is on us.
BATCH 08
If something arrives wrong
Write to us the day it arrives. Breakage in transit is ours to fix: we replace the piece and cover that freight. For everything else there is a 14-day return window from delivery and a 12-month replacement against crazing that reaches through to the body. The returns page sets out exactly what counts as a fault — a piece that leaks, crazes through, or has a chipped food-contact surface — and what is simply the nature of a reactive glaze. Glaze variation, speckling and a few millimetres of size difference inside one batch are not faults.