Etsy compresses your finished glaze in JPEG. Instagram crushes a wood-fired ash trail. WordPress is a 14-step trek for a single glaze recipe.

Etsy 6.5% transaction fee plus payment processing plus offsite ads adds up to 12–15% of every pottery sale before you've paid for clay, kiln electricity, or studio time

The arithmetic of selling functional pottery on Etsy is quietly punishing in ways that don't register until you run the annual numbers. A wheel-thrown stoneware dinnerware set priced at $380 generates an Etsy fee stack that includes listing fees, 6.5% transaction fee, payment processing, and a 15% offsite-ads fee if the sale originated from a promoted listing. On a $380 set without offsite ads, you've paid $38 in fees before clay, glaze materials, kiln electricity, packaging, and the 40 hours of throwing, trimming, bisque firing, glazing, and glaze firing the set demands. With offsite ads that's $93 in platform fees — nearly a quarter of the price gone before you've covered costs. The documentation that makes a dinnerware set worth $380 — the glaze recipe, the cone-temperature curve, the food-safe certification — none of that lives on an Etsy listing in any structured form. VeloCMS gives potters the platform where the documentation is the selling point.

Instagram's compression destroys the surface detail that defines ceramics — the ash-glaze trail of a wood-fired anagama piece, the iron-saturate mottling of a reduction celadon, the texture of a hand-thrown rim — which is the whole point

Photography is the primary way ceramics communities communicate the qualities that make a pot worth owning, and Instagram's aggressive JPEG compression at 1080-pixel resolution is specifically hostile to the visual information ceramics photography contains. The characteristic qualities of a wood-fired piece — ash deposits, flame patterns, surface texture variation from the stoker's decisions — are exactly the kind of subtle, low-contrast detail that JPEG compression destroys. A collector evaluating a $400 wood-fired chawan needs to see the ash-glaze trail and the clay-body texture at a resolution that lets them distinguish an accidental ash deposit from a deliberately placed piece. Instagram's compression makes that distinction invisible. VeloCMS gives ceramicists the format where kiln logs, glaze recipes, and studio photography live permanently under your domain at the resolution the work demands.

Pinterest steals your pattern and drives traffic to scraper sites — and your glaze recipe library, test-tile documentation, and kiln firing log deserve more than a 2-column Pinterest grid that profits someone else

The ceramics community has developed a genuinely rich visual archive on Pinterest — test-tile grids, kiln furniture stacking diagrams, glaze application technique demonstration grids — and Pinterest has built its entire engagement model on capturing that content, presenting it in its own interface, and routing traffic that should belong to the ceramicist's own platform into its own discovery loop. A glaze recipe post that took two weeks of test-tile firing to document gets pinned to a Pinterest board where the recipe detail lives in a caption that Pinterest may or may not show, and the link to the original post generates a small fraction of the traffic it would generate if the post itself appeared in search results. Neither Instagram nor Pinterest has a concept of a glaze library with cone-temperature specification, a kiln firing log with atmosphere notes, or a test-tile gallery with standardized photography. VeloCMS gives ceramicists the format where the expertise is the indexed content — not raw material for someone else's platform.

Functional potter — wheel-thrown production with kiln firing logs, food-safe certification, glaze recipe library, and BYOK Stripe pottery shop at 0% platform fee, all indexed under your own domain

Running a functional pottery practice as a working studio means managing two interlocking operations: production documentation and direct sales. The documentation side — kiln firing logs that trace cone-by-cone temperature curves with atmosphere notes, glaze recipe libraries that record feldspar-kaolin-silica base ratios with colorant additions and test-tile results, clay-body composition records — is the intellectual property of the studio. The sales side — a functional pottery shop with BYOK Stripe at 0% platform fee, wheel-thrown vs slip-cast tagging, food-safe certification documentation, custom-order forms, and a studio sale event calendar — needs infrastructure that understands the difference between a production-run mug and a one-of-a-kind kiln-event piece. VeloCMS gives functional potters the platform where the kiln log, the glaze library, the test-tile gallery, and the pottery shop operate as a single coherent publishing system under your domain.

Sculptural ceramicist — slab-built and hand-built documentation with clay-body composition, atmosphere notes, exhibition provenance, and studio sale system under your own domain

Sculptural ceramics occupies a different publishing territory from functional ware, but the documentation needs are equally specific and equally underserved by existing platforms. A slab-built porcelain vessel that was fired in a soda-firing kiln requires documentation that covers the clay body, the kiln atmosphere, the firing schedule with cone-by-cone witness observations, and the finished surface result. That documentation is the provenance of the piece — the record that establishes its material and process history for exhibition contexts, for gallery submissions, and for collectors who want to understand what they are acquiring. VeloCMS gives sculptural ceramicists the structured documentation format where slab-built bodies, hand-built construction techniques, soda and wood-fired atmosphere records, and exhibition provenance chains become permanent indexed references.

Pottery teacher and ceramics-supply retailer — class booking calendar, material library, supply inventory with Stripe BYOK, and member-only technique guides indexed under your own domain

Pottery teaching and ceramics-supply retail sit at the intersection of education and commerce, and neither dimension is well served by the platforms these businesses have historically defaulted to. A pottery school needs a class booking calendar where students can browse upcoming sessions, check remaining spaces, pay directly via BYOK Stripe without a third-party booking platform taking a 3-5% cut, and receive a PDF material list automatically after booking. The supply catalog and the technique guide library reinforce each other: a blog post documenting an iron-saturate celadon recipe that links directly to the feldspar supplier entry in the supply catalog is more useful than either piece alone. VeloCMS gives pottery teachers and supply retailers the integrated platform where class booking, supply inventory, and technique documentation are a single coherent system.

Functional Potter

You run a production wheel-throwing practice from a home studio or shared kiln space: stoneware mugs, bowls, plates, and fermentation crocks fired to cone 10 in a reduction atmosphere. Your glaze palette is small but precise — a cobalt-oxide blue narrowed to a 0.7% addition in your feldspar-kaolin-silica base after twelve test tiles across three clay bodies, an iron-saturate tenmoku that runs beautifully at cone 10, a celadon that reads grey-green in oxidation and shifts to a warm jade in reduction. That knowledge lives in a notes app, a kiln log notebook, and a spreadsheet of test tiles — none of it indexed, none of it contributing to the public record of your practice that a collector visiting your Etsy shop sees. VeloCMS gives functional potters the format where the kiln log, the glaze library, the test-tile documentation, and the pottery shop are a single coherent system — the intellectual property of the studio, published and indexed under your own domain.

Sculptural Ceramicist

Your practice sits at the intersection of ceramics and fine art: slab-built vessels, coil-built sculptural forms, and the occasional anagama or wood-fired piece where the collaboration between fire, ash, and clay surface produces results you cannot fully predict or control, which is part of the point. You document your work obsessively — clay body composition, construction technique, bisque firing schedule, glaze application method, and the full firing record with atmosphere notes. But that documentation is scattered across a paper kiln log, photographs in a phone gallery, and a Notion database you update when you remember. VeloCMS gives sculptural ceramicists the archive format where the full process documentation — clay-body composition, construction method, atmosphere notes, firing curve, glaze-results photography — lives permanently under your domain.

Pottery Teacher

You teach wheel-throwing and hand-building at a community studio or from your own teaching space: beginner throwing sessions for small groups, intermediate glazing workshops, advanced kiln-loading demonstrations. Your class schedule is currently managed through a Calendly account for booking, a PayPal.me link for payment, a manual email process to send the PDF material list, and a second email when pieces are loaded into the kiln. Students sometimes want to buy a piece you've made for demonstration purposes. Your glaze library — every recipe developed and tested across the clay bodies you stock — lives in a binder in the studio rather than on a website that prospective students can browse before booking. VeloCMS gives pottery teachers the integrated platform where the class booking calendar, the material library, the technique guide archive, and the supply shop are a single system.