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For Starters is the essential weekly briefing for the next generation of small business owners. Inspiration and ideas, every Friday – for free. It’s curated by Danny Giacopelli, formerly of Monocle and Courier magazines.
Hey, starter! Read on for…
Inspiration ➠ Board games & bistros
Advice ➠ At Danny D’s Mud Shop
Ideas ➠ Calisthenics communities
Resources ➠ Sustainable suppliers
Town Hall ➠ Subscriber shoutouts
➠ Get inspired
Very inviting | Credit
1. A big window. Couple Silvana (from Madrid) and Jack (from the UK) moved to Segovia, Spain after ten years in London and, in 2023, opened up a gorgeous cafe called Paloma’s. The sort of place you want to eat delicious food, linger over a coffee with friends, and enjoy yourself. Two weeks ago they expanded, opening up a new site called Paloma's Plaza, and… well, just look at that big window. Glass can be inspiring!
2. Reinvention. Speaking of windows, for many, many years I’d walk past a certain abandoned shopfront in a high foot-traffic area of Shoreditch, east London, peering through the glass and wondering why no-one ever opened something cool there. Truly baffling. Until a few weeks ago. I’m so, so happy to see some enterprising starters take on this Bethnal Green Road spot and turn it into Clara’s, a neighbourhood deli, wine bar and bistro. Best of luck, team!
3. Let’s play. And the brand and packaging design studio The Young Jerks also runs a company called Weast Coast, which makes ‘heirloom quality tabletop games with a focus on immersive illustration and clever strategy.’ Pretty cool side hustle. They’re teasing a new game called Fruit Boss: “Pick up the dry cleaning, pack your lunch. The boss is expecting you.”
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➠ Starter wisdom
What happens when you move your business out of your garage, open up a shop, hire a team, and grow, grow, grow? It suddenly gets real, really quick, which comes with a whole lot of opportunities and challenges.
Daniel Dooreck is the owner of Danny D’s Mud Shop, a Los Angeles-based pottery business. A former sommelier who worked for hospitality companies like Hoxton Hotel and République, Daniel started making pottery for fun on the side. After finding success selling his work on Instagram, he quit his job in 2022 and set up a ceramics studio in his garage. The LA Times wrote about him not too long after.
I first met Daniel around then too, while working on a Courier story, and we’ve kept in touch. In the years since, he, along with his partner Peyton, have grown Danny D’s Mud Shop into something special—opening up a brick and mortar store, selling his wares to thousands of customers, and growing to 173K Instagram followers (he’d hate me for pointing that out—you’ll soon find out why…).
→ I stopped by the Mud Shop last week for a fun conversation with Daniel about what growth really looks like, warts and all. Enjoy.
Mr Mud Shop | All photos by me
💬 Hey Daniel, we met a few years ago when you were working out of your garage. What’s the biggest difference in your day-to-day from then to now? You’ve got this gorgeous shop now.
There was a real beauty in working from the garage and knowing that I could go downstairs to work, then come back to eat lunch or work out. It was a free-flowing situation. Now we’ve gotta sell almost $20,000 in ceramics to break even each month. That’s a lot of product! We sell $30 to $100 cups. Our custom vases cost about a grand, but we only sell one or two of those a month.
💬 Seems like it’s going really well!
It’s challenging in this economy to sell luxury, quirky, ceramic goods. But we’re lucky to have had opportunities to build relationships with really amazing brands and partners. That’s why wholesale is so important, because it gives us the channel to do that. The good ones will support us and hopefully order once or twice a year. If you get 30 of those, you’ve got a great business. We’re not far from that.
💬 So wholesale, overall, is worth it?
I’m really happy with it. With wholesale, however, you don’t see the end consumer. You don’t know how the store owner talked about your business. You don’t know if they really translated the quality and your story to the customer, and justified why a vase might cost $650.
💬 Whereas when someone walks in the door at your shop, you’ll play that sales role.
Yeah – our store is basically an amazing billboard on a nice street next to busy restaurants. That’s brought a lot of foot traffic and business. New people all the time are seeing what we’re doing. It’s also brought a lot of effort to sell the work. The trick is identifying, for the people that do come in, if they’re really engaging with what we’re doing. Foot traffic can be bad, too, because some people can waste our time or be rude. That’s a hard truth and a little blunt…
💬 Meaning they’ll distract you or just not make a purchase?
I’d rather have less foot traffic but nice people who care about what we’re doing come in. We’re all back here working hard.
💬 Going from direct-to-consumer to wholesale, or from wholesale to direct-to-consumer, is always a giant decision for a business owner, right?
Sure. The way I see it, if direct-to-consumer covers our costs, wholesale is our profit. Or if wholesale covers our costs, direct-to-consumer is our profit. Pick one, I guess.
The amount of great relationships I’ve built through wholesale is invaluable. It just feels good when you build healthy business relationships. Like you’re actually running a business, versus just making pottery. We’re talking to big buyers. One day I want to sell to Liberty, Selfridges and Mr. Porter in London.
💬 Danny D in Liberty would be cool.
But you can’t have it all at once. If Liberty ordered tomorrow, that would be amazing, but then I’d have to hire another person and sell $25,000 of pottery per month instead of $20,000!
💬 One battle after another. What other challenges have you faced as you grow?
It’s all about where to save money. We don’t have big paydays. In this game, it’s about consistency – every day, bring in X amount of dollars. We have very fixed costs. Our electricity bill, which is significant. Clay material costs, which are quite low actually as we recycle our clay and we’re pretty efficient with it. Our rent, which is way more than what it used to be in the garage, which was, in theory, nothing.
I love the space I’ve built, but it comes with a lot of struggle and energy expenditure, you know? Peyton and I run everything together now and our workdays are harder and more intense. I’ve been saying this since day one, but we’re still trying to figure out the balance.
💬 What are the challenges of building a team?
While Peyton and I could just be hermits here and stress less because we know we’re going to sell something, we need a good team if we want to actually grow and take on big orders and fulfill them in a timely manner. At one point we had six people working here, which was probably too much. We don’t have a big enough space. There are so many challenges at play – everything from how expensive your team lunches are, to navigating the physical space, to bottlenecks. For us, it’s also do we have enough work for them to do? Our work is slow and we celebrate that, but if I have four people working at this table, there needs to be a shitload of stuff on the shelf to process and kilns to run.
💬 What about the mental effort to keep everything on track? Is it exhausting?
I haven’t taken a day off in a really long time. This year has been tough, navigating really long pushes, traveling too much, working too hard and too long, and not taking enough time for us. I love it 90% of the time. There’s always a grind part – opportunities that don’t feel quite right, but which you say yes to because they’re a good buffer paycheck. The way small businesses run, you have big pushes and you have to show up for them. Between Peyton and I, we have to be ready for those moments. If we get a big wholesale order, we’ll say Let’s just work and get it done.
💬 What would propel the business to the next level? More sales on smaller items? More custom pieces? Marketing experiments or brand collabs?
We’re shipping some big orders right now. But if I didn’t have those orders, things would be a lot slower as it’s a few weeks before Thanksgiving and no one wants to buy stuff besides steaks or turkey. I started offering free shipping on all orders, with no minimum order amount. I raised my prices $2-3 a unit to accommodate that shift, but I don’t think people really mind. I think I’ll start seeing the benefits of this during the Christmas season when people are actually ready to spend.
I also talked to the team about the idea of doing paid ads, but ultimately I don’t think it’s for us. I’d rather keep our costs as low as possible. If we get 10 amazing clients a year, that’s going to keep us pretty busy. We don’t need to make a ton of money all the time. We’re good. I’m happy.
💬 A lot of creative entrepreneurs start out doing one thing, then gradually expand into other areas. You can end up in a place you didn’t expect at the beginning of the journey. Like… you could do a TV show about ceramics. I’d watch it.
That sounds romantic, but I’m a simple man. I really don’t feel the need. I’m not chasing a TV deal.
I just want to be really proud of what we’re making and nurture the people that give a shit. We’re gathering that group of people. It’s a slow thing. We’ve only been doing this a few years. Everyone always wants things to be so immediate. Everyone wants to go viral or get that sponsorship. But I think there’s going to be a big shift towards thinking more about how to actually just be yourself.
At the end of the day, we’re making products for people to use, hang in their home, enjoy and see everyday. Fuck my phone, Instagram, social media likes – it’s all just numbers. I don’t care about that. What makes me happier is someone coming into the store and saying “I had such a great time chatting with you, thanks for showing me around,” then buys a cup on the way out. That’s what drives us. Or when someone replies to my email newsletter! I’m so adamant on building my newsletter…
💬 Yeah, you write from the heart. Tell us more about the newsletter.
I’m trying so hard to write well and build some sort of ecosystem. I try to send it every week. The goal is to be consistent. People always reply, too, which I love. If I could get off Instagram, which as a platform has become more demented than ever, and build an ecosystem through writing newsletters and making some thoughtful videos, that’s really where it’s at. I wish I could have 30,000 newsletter subscribers and they all buy three times a year!
💬 I think building that owned community is also key to staying around for 10, 20 years. It’s not about trends or algorithms. It’s having a vision and values and delivering every day. It’s a compounding thing.
I love that sentiment because that’s really what we’re trying to do. My pottery doesn’t chase trends. I see cowboy pottery online – we’re certainly not the first to do it. We do what we do, we do what we know how to do, and we make the product that we want to make. And people either fuck with that or they leave.
💬 Have you ever thought about not growing – like, actively downsizing? Is that… crazy?
We’re having a record year, by a lot. We’ve got our store, our clients, and great business relationships. But while we’ve seen a lot of success, I don’t know if our profit’s that much bigger, to be honest. So I always play around with the idea of fully retracting and being comfortable saying no more often. Just keeping the business at a point where it’s nice and profitable and sustainable. I swear, I’ll bring it all back into my garage again if I have to. I’m not scared to do that. I really will!
💬 Plan B if the shit hits the fan.
If we had to cut fat quickly, I’d put the business through the distiller and go back to my second bedroom and make pottery there. I don’t mind. I don’t need all these things. I don’t know where I’d put all of it now! But I’m not scared to do that. I try to be very honest with myself.
There are also a lot of things that we just haven’t figured out yet. For instance, I still throw every single piece in here. The volume is tremendous. I’m proud of that but also it’s super unsustainable. If I break my arm, I don’t know what we’d do. Something would have to give. So not all the efficiencies are there yet. We’re just grinding. Every dollar matters. Every hour matters. There’s a lot of money on that table in front of you, but that’s hours and hours and hours of work…
💬 And yet, I can’t help but think that for every customer who buys one of your vases or cups, it could unlock some door or opportunity. Someone might come into your client’s house, see a vase and say, “Hey, where’d you get that?”
If I learned anything over the years – and I haven’t learned that much – it’s that you never know where your next paycheck will come from. And you never know who’s watching.
💬 You quit your job to start your own thing. How do you prevent this business from becoming just another boring 9-to-5 you one day wanna quit?
I don’t know. I’m the most unemployable person ever. I wouldn’t know how to make a living anywhere else. Every day I wake up, eat medium-hot food out of my shitty toaster oven, rush to work, and I don’t get to see sunsets in my house anymore. But then… I think about what we’re building and I realize there’s no job and really nothing else I’d rather be doing. ☼
→ Visit Danny D’s Mud Shop at 4855 Fountain Ave, Los Angeles, CA, USA
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➠ Good idea!
1. Calisthenics crews → They’re the new run clubs, apparently.
2. Cute disaster prep → The world might be ending but, thanks to some businesses, at least you can look adorable in your doomsday bunker.
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➠ Toolbox
🛠️ Resources
Waste Not, a searchable site of sustainable suppliers to help businesses reduce their impact. Made by Michelle Mattar.
📚️ Reads
This Gen Z-er is trying to build the next Aesop out of India. The Nod
On the exhaustion of belief and the slow work of making something real. Amanda Greeley
Laid Off: And Launching an Indie Magazine. Laid Off
🧠 Findings
$310,000 → What entrepreneur and musician Jason Lee Beckwith paid recently for Salto de Castro, an abandoned village in northwestern Spain, complete with 44 houses, a bar, a church, and a school. The idea is to turn the place into a resort. Remember, you can just do things.
🙃 Fun
A new documentary about an old-school Italian espresso bar in Melbourne.
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➠ Town Hall
Subscriber and friend of For Starters, Chris O’Leary, recently talked to It’s Nice That about the latest edition of his incredible publication FatBoy Zine.
Have a read here. 🎉
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