(upbeat music)
- It's super exciting to me,
that our company is sending 300, 350 pieces out the door,
every day to a lot of the world's best restaurants.
Lots in the US, Canada, South America, in Europe,
we're in Australia, we're in Middle East now.
Occasionally, I'll try to figure out
how many people eat off my plates every day.
Quite a few.
(dramatic music)
We operate almost the same way a kitchen does,
we come in early.
You know, what are we making that day?
We call that our menu.
Start up with the prep, the clay prep.
Make sure you have the right amount of raw materials.
Getting the stages ready.
So there's definitely like a rhythm to every day,
a lot of teamwork and coordination necessary.
And communication makes us feel more connected
to the world of restaurants that we are so interested in.
We run our clay through our pugmill, which de-airs it.
Over time, certain types of rock
under certain conditions of pressure,
and moisture, and heat, they decompose and clay is formed.
Tiny, flat little particles,
and that gives them their plasticity.
The way they stick together with water
is something that humans have used for thousands of years,
doing what we do.
We take the canvas texture off the slab,
'cause if we left it on there,
the back of the plate would have a canvas texture on it.
So now we're gonna lay out our plates.
All of our different shapes are marked on this pastry ring.
When we make 10 1/2 inch dinner plate, we put it there.
When we make a salad plate, there,
so this is our guide for our forming people.
The three kinds of clay
are earthenware, stoneware, and porcelain.
Earthenware is generally still porous,
it's like terracotta pots.
Porcelain is more of a pure form of clay,
and it's similar to stoneware.
It's higher-fired, it's very hard, very low absorption.
We work with mainly stoneware, more of a harder product.
Less porous really does help for dinnerware,
and it gives us a beautiful, durable finished product.
(knife sharpening)
Each mold has a corresponding blade.
This is made of plexiglass, and this is what shapes
the face of the plate.
So we have over 50 shapes that we can make here.
I'll design a plate, then I'll make a drawing.
These are made of plexiglass, so I cut these out,
and I'm constantly kind of reshaping these.
This is a blade that would've made the molds,
'cause you can see the exterior, you can see the foot.
This would make plates.
You can see how I kind of designed the thickness.
Yeah, so, and then it's all adjustable too.
So here's a coffee cup,
like here's a blade that forms the inside of a bowl.
So we make all the molds here,
we make all the templates here, we make all the blades here,
that's what allows us to not only make
a great amount of pieces per day,
but to make a great variety of pieces per day.
(upbeat music)
Now I'm just looking at the gap here,
to get the plate the thickness that I want.
Smooth side down.
(slow instrumental music)
With the restaurants we work for require a consistent,
and a uniform product, because they're running a restaurant.
One of the hardest things that you could ask a potter to do,
is to make hundreds of nice uniform plates.
When they see that they can have a uniform product
with, you know, a nice bit of handmade variation to it,
that's kind of what a lot of them are looking for,
and that's what we do.
I took my first ceramics class in ninth grade.
It's the kilns, the firing, the glazes,
the smell when you walk into a studio,
it just hooked me right away.
There's a bit of a void on my rim,
but if I just give it time,
gradually the clay will move, and compress, and fill that.
See that, now that void is filled.
I see a little bit of air bubbles in the clay.
But even that, just a nice steady pressure,
it won't wanna move when I fire it.
A lot of other processes might leave
a bit of a memory in the clay,
which can kind of come back during the firing
in the form of warpage.
It's important to really take your time with this pressure.
That clay is all really compressed and happy.
(calm instrumental music)
There's something beautiful about a handmade plate,
where each one is gonna be one of a kind.
We leave kind of just the minimal amount of handmade touch,
and that's always enough.
The first really big job
was the NoMad Hotel in New York City,
so this was an order of about 6,000 pieces.
I was pretty much working alone.
I actually outsourced a lot of the work to Ohio.
One piece they couldn't really do well, was the coffee cup.
While they were finishing production,
I was back here stressing out
about how was I gonna make them 400 coffee cups
by the time they opened, which now seems like something
that would be really easy for us.
But that was what led me to the jiggering process,
Which is the process of placing a mold onto a wheel,
then you have an arm with a template attached.
And that's what has really opened up doors for us,
in terms of being able
to do the entire collection ourselves,
the entire thing here.
Let it dry for about an hour to two hours,
then it gets to this stage where it's called leather hard.
It's still wet, but firm and workable.
And we trim the rim of the plate, very important
for durability to have a thick rounded edge,
not a thin edge.
All you're doing here,
is you're making the exterior of the plate look good,
'cause that's gonna be unglazed.
You want this to be pretty, like, flawless.
So after we finished the NoMad,
all I really wanted to do was kind of take a month off,
but their sister restaurant
Eleven Madison Park need new plates,
so that was kind of a one, two punch.
The Eleven Madison Park stuff
we did in our studio here, 100%.
That was a pretty amazing look,
and I think doing that job really helped
the handmade dinnerware movement kinda take hold.
Because Eleven Madison Park was using handmade stoneware,
all the sudden, lots of other restaurants
were really interested in it.
There was kind of a line of restaurateur and chefs,
waiting to work with us and talk to us.
Now we're in about over 250 restaurants.
During the bisque firing, which is the first firing,
that's about a 24 hour process.
The heat is removing all the water
and burning off any remaining organic material
that's in the clay to about 1,800 degrees.
(upbeat music)
(bowl rings)
This is the bisque inventory,
so this is all of our dark clay.
This is all of our toasted clay,
so we could take stacks of bowls outta here,
glaze 'em up, throw 'em in the kiln tonight,
and they'll be ready for the restaurant tomorrow.
(air blows)
Glazing is kind of the most important step,
because if you screw that step up,
there's really no way to save the piece.
Glaze is composed of clay, glass, and flux,
and then some colorants or other minerals to give it color.
And you can vary the proportions of those
to give your glaze more of a matte look,
more of a shiny look.
The key to glazing without having a lot of defects show up,
is having good bisque.
If you have little voids in your clay body,
that could cause pin holes in the glaze.
If you have a dirty piece of bisque,
the glaze might not stick.
It's all about just getting it even,
then I wipe it just to give
a little more crispness to that edge.
You can see how fast it dries.
The second firing, which is up to about 2,200 Fahrenheit,
heat and time are working on the piece
to melt that clay, melt that glaze, fuse it all
into one really strong product.
The maturing temperature
refers to the right amount of heat and time
that a clay body requires for it to melt
and become a durable ceramic product.
Stoneware and porcelain will shrink 12 to 14%,
from when they're wet to when they're a finished plate.
Well we buy clay that is formulated to fire to cone six,
so this is cone five and cone six.
This is before, this is after,
and these measure temperature and time.
So every firing, we have probably at least
a half a dozen of these scattered throughout the kiln
to see just how hot or cool the kiln is.
The glaze firing is about a 14 hour process,
and that is to 2,200 Fahrenheit.
It's going through so much heat, melting,
and vitrifying, and maturing all the minerals
that are in the clay.
This has been fired to 1,800 and had glaze applied.
That glaze is still powdery and loose.
Once this is fired again,
this is what'll come out of the kiln,
will darken down to this.
There is still a fun aspect to opening the kiln every day.
There's our matte green, midnight moss.
This is our barista espresso cup,
which has a perfect curve at the bottom.
This is my biggest plate.
- [Producer] How big is that?
- 13 inch.
My philosophy as a designer,
is I like to let the materials really speak for themselves.
One of the most important things that I think about always,
how does the food look on it?
We're trying to think like a chef, look at their menus,
look at their past experience.
Not only, you know, have we built up
a level of knowledge about what we do,
and about how restaurants operate, and what they need,
we'll also be here in five years or 10 years down the road,
and they'll still be able to get
the same 10 1/2 inch Coupe plate
with dark clay and a certain glaze.
Now the responsibility is more on us
to keep creating a really good product,
something unique, locally made, handmade,
and something they can't get anywhere else.