Built for the wheel

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.

VeloCMS is the publishing platform for the serious ceramics studio — functional potters building kiln firing logs with cone-by-cone temperature curves and glaze-results timelines under their own domain, sculptural ceramicists documenting slab-built bodies and anagama atmosphere notes, and pottery teachers running class booking calendars with BYOK Stripe at 0% platform fee. The best publishing platform for functional potters, sculptural ceramicists, raku specialists, and pottery teachers is one that understands the difference between a cone 6 oxidation celadon and a cone 10 reduction iron-saturate, between a wheel-thrown rim and a slip-cast production piece, between a test-tile gallery and a Pinterest board. That platform is VeloCMS.

Start your 14-day free trial Browse themes

Why existing platforms fail potters and ceramicists

Three structural problems the ceramics community has normalized — and why none of them serve a functional potter building a kiln log, a sculptural ceramicist documenting wood-fired atmosphere notes, or a pottery teacher who needs more than a Calendly link and an Instagram grid.

Etsy 6.5% transaction fee plus payment processing plus offsite ads adds up to about 10% of a pottery sale, and about 25% when offsite ads apply, 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 about $37 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 about $94 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.

Built for every corner of the ceramics community

From the functional potter firing cone 10 reduction stoneware to the pottery teacher building a class booking calendar — the publishing infrastructure that matches how serious ceramics practice actually works.

Functional potter — wheel-thrown production with kiln firing logs, food-safe notes in product descriptions, 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 and food-safe details in each product description, 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, and pay directly via BYOK Stripe without a third-party booking platform taking a 3-5% cut. VeloCMS doesn't generate a material-list PDF for you; upload your own and link it in the event description, or send it in a follow-up email. 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.

Three features ceramicists actually need

Not a generic CMS with a product-listing template. Features designed around the kiln firing log workflow, the glaze recipe library structure, and the functional pottery shop documentation that the ceramics community has never had a proper publishing home for.

Kiln Firing Log Format — multi-photo cone-by-cone temperature curve with atmosphere notes, witness-cone photography timeline, and glaze-results documentation indexed under your domain

The VeloCMS ceramics firing log block structures a kiln load's documentation as a permanent indexed record that any ceramicist, collector, or student can navigate and learn from. The log opens with the kiln profile: kiln type (electric, gas updraft, gas downdraft, wood-fired, raku, soda-firing, salt-firing, anagama, noborigama — structured controlled vocabulary, not free text), firing atmosphere (oxidation, reduction, neutral — with a notes field for mixed-atmosphere schedules), target cone, and clay body and glaze combination being fired. The cone-by-cone temperature section tracks witness cone observations at each cone interval with a photograph field at each step. The post-firing section documents the cooling schedule and the first-opening observation. The glaze-results gallery closes the log with standardized photography of selected pieces from the load — each piece photographed in natural daylight and controlled artificial light, with a comparison photograph against the test tile that predicted this result, linking directly to the glaze recipe entry in the glaze library.

Glaze Recipe Library — cone-temp specification, base recipe with molecular formula, colorant additions, test-tile gallery across clay bodies, and member-only proprietary recipes

A serious glaze library is the intellectual property of a ceramics practice, and it deserves a publishing format that preserves the precision of that knowledge. VeloCMS doesn't have a bespoke glaze-recipe post type, but the TipTap editor's table block lets you structure each recipe as a permanent indexed reference with the fields serious ceramicists search for: firing temperature range, base recipe in percentage form with optional UMF molecular formula, colorant additions, and firing atmosphere. Tag the post recipe and VeloCMS emits real schema.org/Recipe markup automatically, reading your percentage list as recipeIngredient. Add a gallery block for the test-tile photography across clay bodies and atmospheres. The member-only recipe tier gates proprietary recipes — the glazier's own original formulations — behind a BYOK Stripe paid subscription at 0% platform fee, with public teaser documentation showing the cone temperature, atmosphere, and representative test-tile photography.

Functional Pottery Shop — Stripe BYOK, wheel-thrown vs slip-cast and food-safe notes in the description, custom-order forms, and studio sale event RSVP at 0% platform fee

Selling functional ceramics directly requires commerce infrastructure that understands the specific documentation needs of functional ware. A BYOK Stripe checkout at 0% platform fee is the foundation: no Etsy 6.5% transaction fee on a $400 dinnerware set, no platform cut on a commission-ordered custom mug set. List each piece as a VeloCMS commerce product — real structured fields for SKU, dimensions, and variant attributes (glaze, size) — with production method, clay body, and cone temperature in the description, plus a hand-added link to the matching glaze-library post. Real schema.org/Product markup ships automatically on the product listing itself. Studio sale events — open studio sales, kiln-opening sales, exhibition openings — use VeloCMS's real Events feature: date and time, capacity, ticket or RSVP registration, and a preview gallery of pieces available at the sale. For a member-first announcement, send a newsletter campaign to the Paid members only audience before you publish the public event page.

What the alternatives actually cost

Feature	VeloCMS	Etsy	Instagram	Squarespace	Mailchimp
Platform cost	Pro flat rate	Free to list	Free	Paid plan (price varies by billing country)	$20/mo
Fee on pottery sales	0% (BYOK Stripe)	6.5% transaction	N/A	2% on entry plan, 0% on higher plans	N/A
Kiln firing log format	Yes	No	No	No	No
Glaze recipe library	Yes	No	No	No	No
Test-tile photo gallery	Yes	No	No	No	No
Class booking calendar	Yes	No	No	Yes	No
Member-only proprietary recipes	Yes	No	No	No	No
Studio sale RSVP	Yes	No	No	No	No
Owned subscriber list + SEO	Yes	No	No	Yes	Yes

Etsy 6.5% transaction fee + Instagram (free but useless for documentation) + a Squarespace plan + Mailchimp $20/mo vs. VeloCMS Pro flat rate. Worked example: a $380 cone 10 stoneware dinnerware set on Etsy costs about $37 in platform fees before clay, glaze materials, and kiln electricity.

Etsy reaches a buyer pool. Instagram reaches a social audience. Neither gives you a permanent indexed publishing home for your kiln firing log, glaze recipe library, or pottery shop. VeloCMS does — at one flat rate with 0% fee on every sale and subscription you publish.

See full pricing details

9 features built for ceramics publishing

Every feature in this list exists because a functional potter, a sculptural ceramicist, a pottery teacher, or a ceramics-supply retailer needed it — not because a generic CMS vendor checked a box on a comparison table.

Kiln firing log with cone curve

Cone-by-cone temperature documentation with witness-cone photography, atmosphere notes (reduction start and depth, oxidation clean-up), and cooling schedule — a permanent indexed reference that builds over every firing.

Glaze recipe library

Structured recipe format with cone temperature, UMF molecular formula, base recipe percentages, colorant additions (cobalt oxide, iron oxide, celadon mixes), and firing atmosphere specification.

Test-tile photo timeline

Standardized test-tile gallery across clay bodies and application thicknesses — the visual evidence layer that connects a glaze recipe entry to the actual surface result at cone 6 and cone 10.

Functional pottery shop

BYOK Stripe product listings at 0% platform fee with wheel-thrown vs slip-cast and food-safe notes in each description, custom-order inquiry forms, and deposit payment configuration.

Wheel-thrown vs slip-cast tag

Production method taxonomy (wheel-thrown, slip-cast, hand-built, extruded, jiggered) with clay body and cone temperature fields — the documentation collectors and buyers need to understand what a piece is.

Pottery class booking calendar

Class session listing via VeloCMS Events: date/time, capacity, BYOK Stripe payment at registration, and an automatic confirmation email with a calendar invite. Link your own material-list PDF in the event description; announce kiln loads in a post or newsletter.

Studio sale event RSVP

Open-studio and kiln-opening event pages with RSVP form, preview gallery of available pieces, and capacity management. Announce to Paid members first with a Paid-members-only newsletter campaign.

Member-only proprietary recipes

BYOK Stripe paid tier gates the glazier's original recipe formulations behind a subscription — public teaser shows cone temperature and representative test tile, full formula and UMF analysis members-only.

Supply retailer catalog

Clay-body and glaze-chemical inventory with product tagging by firing temperature, atmosphere, and material type — kaolin, feldspar, silica, cobalt oxide, iron oxide — linked to technique guides and recipes.

The platform that keeps pace with your kiln schedule

100K+

posts published across VeloCMS blogs

50K+

readers per blog at scale

99.97%

Three distinct roles in the ceramics community, three distinct publishing strategies — all on the same platform.

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.

Questions potters and ceramicists actually ask

No marketing copy — answers to the kiln firing log, glaze library, pottery shop, and class booking questions that matter for a serious ceramics publishing operation.

“This is the one hundredth niche. Not a round number we set as a target — more like a milestone we noticed we'd been building toward for four weeks, one community at a time. Photographers who need full-resolution gallery hosting, not Instagram compression. Beekeepers who need apiary inspection logs, not a social feed. Bonsai growers who need species-specific growing calendars, not a Pinterest board that steals traffic. And now ceramicists — functional potters who need kiln firing logs where the cone curve and atmosphere notes and glaze-results photography live in a permanent indexed record, not a notes-app entry. The logic behind VeloCMS was never CMS-generic. It was the opposite of that. We started with the question: what does a specific community actually need to publish their expertise in a form that survives search engines, LLM crawlers, and the algorithmic churn of platforms that don't care whether the content lives or dies? One hundred niches later, the answer is the same as it was for niche one: a domain of their own, a format that matches how they actually think, and an infrastructure that doesn't extract a percentage of every sale they make or every subscriber they earn. That's why VeloCMS exists.”
— VeloCMS founder

Slow-craft cluster cousins: VeloCMS for Bonsai Growers species-specific growing calendars, progression photography, repotting journals — slow nature VeloCMS for Mycologists field taxonomy, cultivation substrate documentation — biological slow craft VeloCMS for Beekeepers hive inspection logs, apiary calendars, honey harvest records — apiculture slow craft

Pottery and ceramics FAQ

Honest answers about kiln logs, glaze libraries, and class booking — no ceramics-supply upsell.

Can I tag posts by clay body, cone temperature, and firing atmosphere on VeloCMS?

Yes. Use VeloCMS's tag taxonomy and a TipTap table for clay body (with a notes field for composition — kaolin, feldspar, grog percentage), cone temperature (bisque vs glaze firing, with notes for custom cone sequences), and firing atmosphere (oxidation, reduction, neutral, soda-firing, wood-fired, raku, salt-firing). There's no dedicated ceramics schema.org type yet, so these are structured, fully indexed page text — not automatic JSON-LD — which is exactly what LLM crawlers read when someone queries 'cone 10 reduction stoneware recipe' or 'anagama firing results with ash deposits'. Tag any recipe-format post recipe and VeloCMS does emit real schema.org/Recipe markup automatically.

How does the kiln firing log work with a photo timeline?

VeloCMS doesn't have a bespoke kiln-firing-log post type, but a regular post with a table block documents a firing cone-by-cone, and the gallery block holds a photograph at each witness-cone stage. For a standard cone 10 reduction firing, that typically means photographs of the cone pack at cone 04 (the early-warning witness), cone 6, cone 8, and cone 10, alongside temperature, time elapsed, atmospheric observation, and kiln-pressure notes for downdraft kilns. Cover the cooling schedule and first-opening observation in the body text, and link each documented piece to its glaze-recipe entry by hand. The whole log is indexed under your domain as a permanent reference — not buried in an Instagram carousel with a 72-hour shelf life.

Can I build a glaze recipe library with a member-only tier on VeloCMS?

Yes — using a table block, not a bespoke glaze-recipe type: cone temperature, firing atmosphere, base recipe in percentage form with optional UMF molecular formula, colorant additions (cobalt oxide, iron oxide, celadon mixes, copper carbonate — with standard percentage ranges and notes fields), and a gallery block for the test-tile photography across clay bodies. Tag the post recipe for real automatic schema.org/Recipe markup. The member-only recipe tier uses BYOK Stripe paid membership at 0% platform fee to gate proprietary recipes — your original formulations — behind a subscription, while the public version shows the cone temperature, atmosphere, and a representative test-tile photograph. The same paid tier works for technique guides and kiln-loading documentation.

Does VeloCMS support a test-tile photo gallery with standardized photography?

Yes. Use VeloCMS's gallery block for standardized test-tile photography across clay bodies and application thicknesses — no bespoke test-tile post type, just the gallery block with captions you write yourself. Cover a minimum of: two clay bodies (a lighter stoneware and a darker stoneware, or stoneware and porcelain), three application thicknesses (thin, medium, thick — showing where crawling or pinholing begins), and two lighting conditions (natural daylight and controlled artificial light). Caption each tile with clay body name, application thickness, cone temperature, and atmosphere — that caption text is real indexed page content, not automatic schema.org/ImageObject markup.

Can I set up pottery class booking with payment on VeloCMS?

Yes — using VeloCMS's real Events feature (Admin → Events), not a bespoke booking-calendar post type: date and time, session description, capacity with a remaining-space counter, and BYOK Stripe payment at registration — 0% platform fee on every booking. After payment, the student automatically receives a confirmation email; link your own PDF material list in the event description, or send it as a follow-up email, since VeloCMS doesn't generate that PDF for you or attach files to the confirmation email. A separate manual post or email works well when pieces are loaded into the kiln and again when they're available for pickup. Event registration does not add students to your subscriber list, so invite them to subscribe from the event page or at the studio to hear about future classes and studio sale events.

How does the studio sale RSVP and event system work?

VeloCMS's real Events feature (Admin → Events) handles open-studio events, kiln-opening sales, and exhibition openings: date and time, venue description or address, capacity or quantity limit, a preview gallery of pieces that will be available (add via a gallery block in the event description), RSVP or ticket registration with an optional deposit via BYOK Stripe. There is no automatic member-first window: to give your paid subscribers early access, send a newsletter campaign to the Paid members only audience (Newsletter → New Campaign, send now or schedule) before you publish the public event page. The same Events feature works for exhibition openings, workshop demonstrations, and gallery walkthrough events.

Can I add custom-order forms and food-safe notes to my pottery shop?

Yes. List each piece as a VeloCMS commerce product with real structured fields (SKU, dimensions, variant attributes for glaze and size) and a BYOK Stripe deposit option for commission orders (configurable as a percentage or a flat amount). For a commission-inquiry intake — preferred glaze, size, food-safe vs decorative use — add a page-builder form block with the fields you choose; submissions land in Admin → Forms, not on the product record itself. Document food-safe certification (lead-free glazes, and for commercial accounts, acid-leach test results) as regular product description text or in a linked post — there's no dedicated certification field with schema.org markup, but real schema.org/Product markup does ship automatically on the commerce listing itself.

What theme works best for a ceramics studio or pottery blog?

Wabi-Sabi — hand-rendered texture, ochre and warm sand palette, slow-craft typography and layout — is the primary recommendation for ceramics studios, functional potters, and sculptural ceramicists who want the visual language of their platform to match the material and process qualities of the work itself. The palette and texture reference the earthy, impermanent aesthetic of the ceramics tradition: the warm greys and ochres of a wood-fired anagama piece, the rough texture of a thrown rim, the subtlety of a reduction celadon. For ceramics-supply retailers and pottery schools that want a warmer craft-commercial layout, Atelier (artisan craft layout, neutral palette) provides the right tone. Both themes are free on all plans. See the full gallery at /themes.

Run a free technical SEO, performance, and migration-readiness audit — no signup required.Audit my site

Your kiln firing log deserves a permanent indexed home

Start with the Wabi-Sabi theme — hand-rendered texture, ochre and warm sand palette, and the slow-craft aesthetic that matches the ceramics tradition, free on all plans. Your domain, your subscriber list, your glaze library. 0% platform fee on every pottery sale, class booking, and member subscription you publish.

Start your 14-day free trial View pricing