Before The Clay Hole
My First Little Studio
Before this building there was a three-car garage, one table and a group of people who would not go home. Here is where The Clay Hole actually came from, and the part of it I still miss.
By Dan Pearce, founder of The Clay Hole in Draper, Utah.
The first Clay Hole had a garage door.
Three cars wide. I ran a pottery studio out of it for almost four years, with one big table and eight people crammed around it, twice a week, every week, with their elbows in each other’s clay.
I did not know what I was building. I thought I was teaching a class.
I was not teaching a class. Not for long.
Here is what that table turned into.
More games than pottery. More alcohol than pottery, if I am being honest, and I am. We were thick as thieves, the kind of group that stops being a class without anybody voting on it.
Some nights people stayed until two in the morning and never touched clay, because we were all having too much fun to ruin it by making something.
I am told that is not a business model.
It was not. It was a table full of people who liked each other, and I happened to own the table.
Some nights people stayed until two in the morning and never touched clay.
One of those classes went almost an entire year without a single person quitting.
Not one. I did not think that was unusual. I thought that was just what happened when you put people at a table.
I know better now.
Then the list started.
I was not keeping it on purpose. People kept asking if there was room, I kept saying no, and at some point I started writing their names down so I would stop feeling like a jerk about it.
By the time we opened the doors here, there were more than 250 people on it.
Two hundred and fifty people. Waiting for a spot at a table in my garage.
I would love to call that a business insight. It was a number that made me laugh and then made me stop laughing. Who waits for a garage? Nobody. They were waiting for the table, and it took me a while to work out that a table was something you could build a bigger version of.
So I did. It is nearly 10,000 square feet now, with a front door.
The list is how I knew there was a real market for this. I did not need a spreadsheet. I had names.
But here is the part I did not plan on.
It is not the same. Some people walk in here expecting it to be.
In the garage I never once felt like I was on the outside, because there was no outside. There was a table, and I was at it. I wrote a whole post about what it is like to stand outside your own building, and every word of it comes from the difference between those two places.
Here I have employees. I have people who expect a professional experience, and they are right to, because they are paying for one. I cannot stay up until two in the morning playing games while somebody’s bowl dries out on a board. I would be a bad owner. I would be an even worse boss.
So I keep things more professional now. It is the right call.
It is also not free.
I do miss that little studio sometimes.
I am not going to wrap those two feelings up into one tidy one for you, because I have not managed it myself.
I miss the garage. I love this place. Both of those are true on the same day.
And damn, do I love what we have built here. That list from my garage is the reason it exists.
I read that list as a compliment.
It was a dare.
Dan Pearce
Founder of The Clay Hole
About the author
Dan Pearce
Founder of The Clay Hole · Draper, Utah
Dan Pearce is an author, artist, and the founder of The Clay Hole in Draper, Utah. Before pottery, he spent a decade as one of the most-read bloggers in the world. His blog, Single Dad Laughing, ranked #2 among personal blogs worldwide and drew more than a billion reads before he retired it in 2020. He has published six books, including the memoir The All-Important, Well-Fed, Giant White Man, and built an audience of more than three million followers. He has also worked professionally as an animal artist, illustrator, body painter, and poker player. Not in that order, and yes, all of those are real.
In 2022 he launched Dan Pearce Ceramics, known for one-of-a-kind pieces he has never once duplicated, and every sale went toward building The Clay Hole: 10,000 square feet, more than a million dollars invested, and a community of hundreds of members built from the ground up to put people first. Of everything he has made in twenty-five years of chasing creative work, he considers the community the best of it.