Custom orders for cafés and restaurants: what to expect
From the first sample to the delivery of 200 cups: how we work with cafés, restaurants and hotels on custom tableware.
Why a handmade mug costs ₹850
Clay, glaze, a dozen pairs of hands and two kiln firings: the real cost of our speckled stoneware mug.
Our speckled stoneware mug costs ₹850. A machine-made ceramic mug can be bought for ₹200. People rarely ask us about the price directly, but we think it is worth explaining where the money goes.
Materials are the smallest part. Each mug uses about 600 g of wet stoneware clay, which costs us around ₹45 including transport from the supplier near Chennai. The glaze materials come to about ₹20. Packaging, the paper, coir and double-walled carton, adds ₹55.
Labour is the largest part. A potter throws about 25 mugs in a morning. Each one is then trimmed the next day, has a handle pulled and attached, is smoothed, dried for a week, fired once at 900°C, glazed by dipping, cleaned at the base and fired again at 1,260°C. Twelve separate handlings in all, by four potters, come to about ₹270 per mug once wages are divided across a day’s work.
The kiln itself costs more than people expect. Each glaze firing uses about 90 units of electricity and the gas for our second kiln, and the kilns need new elements and shelves every year. That is roughly ₹70 per mug. Around one in ten pieces does not survive the process or becomes a second, which adds a further ₹50 to the cost of each first. After rent for the White Town studio, payment fees, GST and our margin, the price reaches ₹850. You are paying, in the end, for about three weeks of attention to a single mug.
