How other potters do it — Katherine Mahoney Ceramics
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Detail behind section three b and three d

What five other Australian potters are doing, and what's worth taking

We looked at everyone Google puts ahead of you for the searches you should be winning. Most of what they do better is writing, not making.

Who we compared you against

Who
What they are
Visitors from Google, monthly
Winterwares
Solo potter, Fremantle
732
Milly Dent
Ceramicist
327
Sophie Moran
Ceramicist, Melbourne
109
You
Ceramicist, Sydney
4
Jono Smart
Ceramicist, UK
0

Winterwares is the right comparison — one maker, handmade stoneware for the table, selling direct, in a regional Australian city. Exactly your shape of business.

And note Jono Smart at the bottom. Zero visitors from Google — less visible than you. His whole business runs on his mailing list and Instagram. There are two workable models. You currently have neither.

The best idea in the study

She never writes "sold out"

"This product is not in the shop right now but we will make it for you! Allow four weeks to receive it. Making ceramics is a lengthy process and each piece is handmade with care right here in Fremantle. We promise they'll be worth the wait!"

Two things happen at once. The dead end becomes an order, and the four-week wait stops being an inconvenience and becomes evidence that a person made it.

On your site

Around eighteen pieces are marked sold out. The Plates page alone took 159 visits this year and 95% of those people left immediately — there was nothing they could do.

It is a wording change. It costs nothing. It is probably the single most valuable thing in this whole piece of work.

Two more things worth copying

Shipping copy that removes fear instead of defending price

Hers

"We have honed the art of packing and shipping fragile items… If a parcel is lost or damaged we replace it."

Yours

"Shipping costs might seem high however all prices are calculated by the courier service."

She answers the question people are actually asking — will it arrive broken? Yours answers a question about price that they hadn't asked yet. Given that the share of people finishing at your checkout has halved this year, this is worth changing.

One sentence saying why she makes what she makes

Hers runs to three lines about embracing a slower pace and savouring everyday moments. Perfectly good.

Yours is better

"Relish the ritual"

It has nothing underneath it. One paragraph explaining what it means would do more than any amount of new photography.

The visual finding

Everyone else's site looks the same. Yours doesn't have to.

Across Winterwares, Sophie Moran, Milly Dent, Kim Wallace and most of the field, the look is identical: bone, oatmeal, chalk, warm grey. Flat diffuse daylight. Linen or plaster backgrounds. Barely any shadow. Light serif type, enormous whitespace, everything very calm.

It's tasteful and it's coherent. Put six of them side by side and you cannot tell them apart.

What's already working for you

  • Your header photograph. Chalk-white vessels against a deep teal wall, a dark plum, a bone-handled knife, hard light. It reads as a Dutch still life. Nobody else in the set is doing this.
  • Terracotta and deep teal is a real palette — warm, distinctive, and terracotta is literally clay.
  • The Muse Restaurant photographs — salmon plated on dark speckled ware — are the strongest images across any site in this comparison, yours or theirs.

What's undermining it

  • Six or more different backgrounds across the shop grid — teal wall, white render, wooden table, grey linen, pink surface, dark wood. Each photo is good; together they read as a market stall rather than a collection.
  • Bright cut flowers on mottled grey. Craft-fair styling, not gallery styling.
  • Heavy bold sans headings read closer to a tech company than a fifty-two-year practice.
  • Four Sale badges across forty pieces.

The recommendation: don't join the field — own the dark still life

Background
Deep teal, near-black, dark plaster — as your hero already does
Light
Hard, directional, one source. Real shadow.
Props
One piece of fruit, a knife, a fold of linen, food actually in the vessel
Mood
Considered, still, a little serious. A collection, not a stall.

Why this is a judgement rather than a taste:

  1. In a field of near-identical sites, dark and dramatic is instantly recognisable.
  2. It's already yours — the hero and the Muse photographs both do it. This extends a strength rather than inventing one.
  3. Your speckled and chalk glazes read far better against dark than against grey.
  4. It looks like work by someone who judged the Hong Kong Biennale.
  5. It's cheap. One painted board, one window, one repeatable setup. Consistency is the deliverable, not equipment.

And it's measured, not asserted. The /store page — four products, one uniform background — produced a 33% bounce rate against your site's 60%. Consistent backgrounds already outperformed on your own visitors.

For the shop — consistency above all

One background, one light position, one distance, one crop. Every piece. Three to five images each, and one of them must show scale — a hand, food, a table.

For Instagram — the opposite

The wheel, hands, glaze buckets, kiln openings, the failures. Restaurant tables and stockist shelves. That's where warmth and mess belong.

Three other things they do

A blog that borrows other people's audiences

Winterwares runs an "At Home With…" series interviewing local creatives. The result is that they now come up in Google for other businesses' names — a bakery, a design studio — and those businesses' customers land on a ceramics site. Cheap, repeatable, and it builds the relationships that turn into links.

A second income line, and it outranks the shop

Winterwares runs pottery workshops and sells at-home kits. Their workshop pages rank better than their product pages.

"Pottery classes Sydney" is 2,400 searches a month. You taught at Hong Kong Polytechnic and the Hong Kong Museum of Art — you are more qualified to teach than anyone else in this comparison. This is a question about your time and your space, not about the website, so we're raising it rather than recommending it.

Your FAQ writing is better than any of theirs

Winterwares reframes irregularity as character. So do you, more gracefully — the slabs "rather like making pastry", the 1260 degrees, the glazes you design yourself. Theirs is on the pages people read. Yours is behind a support page. More on where that writing should go.

Where this leaves you

Everyone else in this field sells calm. Bone linen, soft light, slow living.

You can sell something none of them can: fifty-two years, an international teaching career, and a genuinely dramatic photographic eye. You shouldn't be the sixth bone-and-oatmeal site.

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