Our story: from Kenya with love
The Simple Idea: Mugs that make you feel good
Our American friends love sipping their daily brew from a beautiful hand-made mug.
Our Kenyan friends craft soulful pottery, and would love to earn a decent living making them for the world.
Could we kickstart a business that makes mugs that we feel good about, from Kenya with love? With help from friends and family, we decided we could!
Our Story: From Kenya to the USA with love
Ian Randall and Hamish Wilson work together on big social and environmental issues with their consulting teams in Kenya, UK, and the USA. After their last team retreat, Ian returned from Kenya with a mug that fast became his favourite. He noticed handmade pottery in his US home town was much more expensive, so he called Hamish in Kenya to explore if a new Kenyan pottery business might successfully design and produce tableware for the US market.
By good fortune, Hamish was friends with keen Nairobi-based hobby potter, Kyan Mahzouf, who in turn was friends with many professional Kenyan potters including the talented, young craftsman Odhiambo Elisha Douglas.
Together, we realised we had the skills, networks, and entrepreneurship to launch a business crafting Kenyan mugs for Americans. The idea of Hippo Pottery became a driving passion.
The Feels: What feels so good?
We knew we could make mugs that feel good in our hands. But we also wanted to make mugs that feel good to the world.
Good jobs: The pottery must generate living incomes and ensure safe and happy work for Kenyan artisans doing what they love.
Lower emissions: Kenya has 90% renewable electricity from geothermal and solar power. The kiln is the most significant factor in climate emissions for pottery. Even with freight, the mug will have lower emissions than a mug made in the USA, where only 20% of electricity is renewable.
Nature: We're borrowing the clay from Mother Nature, and we can’t yet avoid all emissions. She deserves some payback, so for each mug sold we committed to donate $1 to support African wildlife.
The Plan: Start small, design for scale and learn together
We dream of a vibrant Kenyan pottery business, producing beautiful tableware, and distributing it all over the world. Our budgeting shows a viable business if we can set up a small pottery studio in Nairobi, sea freight a pallet of pottery each month, build an online brand with Americans, and then fulfil orders from a distribution centre in the USA.
We wanted to test that hippothesis by starting small with single pallet load of mugs designed for export to the US market. This kickstarter campaign secured us enough backers to move ahead with confidence: they had ordered our first 300 mugs. Since then we've been learning a lot. We've sourced clay from Mount Kenya, glaze trucked overland from South Africa, and a kiln to rent. We've trialled designs, and then thrown, dried, bisque fired, sanded, glazed, and refired our first gorgeous mugs. We've sourced boxes and navigated the complexities of sending freight to the USA. At last, our online store has inventory imminent and we are ready for customers to place orders.
Thank you so much to all the kind people who backed our kickstarter campaign!