What Making Returns
Where does the value really lie?
Over the past few years I’ve found myself thinking less about pots and more about what making returns.
As a business owner, I spend a lot of time looking at figures, reviewing programmes and thinking about sustainability. Recently that has included revisiting our business model and asking questions about where the value of Sunken Studio really lies.
In the early days we naturally organised what we offered around things people could take home. We designed our own ranges and sold them. As the studio grew, our courses and memberships were often framed in similar ways. After all, an important part of making is creating something that didn’t exist before. Objects matter. They embody time, effort, memory, care and the stories we want to share. They become reminders of experiences and markers of progress. I still believe that.
The finished object matters. It gives shape to the time, attention and skill that went into making it. But I increasingly question whether it’s the best measure of the value people take away.
What making returns
The more I watch people spend time in the studio, the more I realise that the lasting value comes from something harder to measure. It’s the routine of coming each week. The conversations that happen while making. Learning to notice. Solving problems. Paying attention to materials. Developing confidence. Becoming part of something rooted in a real place, shared with other people.
Perhaps that’s the tension we’ve been trying to navigate as a studio. We need to make things. We also need to run a sustainable business. Yet the value we care most about often isn’t the thing that sits on the shelf at the end of a session. It’s the thinking, the relationships and the sense of purpose that emerge through the process of making.
That doesn’t make the object less important. It simply changes where I think the value begins.
Looking ahead
It’s a thought I’m still exploring, but it has already started to influence how we think about the future of the studio. As we enter our tenth year, it’s one of several questions we’ll be reflecting on together over the months ahead.
We’ll be revisiting questions such as:
What are we really making?
Why do people come back?
What role does making play in our lives beyond the objects we produce?
How do specialist spaces continue to matter?
What have we learned that we want to carry into the next decade?
We don’t have all the answers, and that’s part of the point. We’d like to explore these questions together.
Some conversations will happen through blog posts. Others through events, talks, workshops or simply in the studio while making together.
After ten years, it feels like the right time not just to celebrate what we’ve built, but to better understand what we’re building next.
