Nicholas Mosse looks to craft further success after embracing the online market

Nicholas Mosse, the well-respected potter, is aiming to significantly grow the online side of his 48-year-old eponymous business based in Bennettsbridge in Co Kilkenny, after staging a remarkable recovery since the pandemic.

The company has grown over that time to 70 employees, who Mosse describes as “absolutely fantastic”, and had a turnover of €4.5 million last year.

The veteran craftsman is now looking to build on that success by drumming up more business at a slew of events over the next number of years, as well as by growing the company’s e-commerce arm.

The first of those events is this week’s Enterprise Ireland Showcase Ireland trade fair, running from Sunday to Tuesday at the Royal Dublin Society (RDS) in Ballsbridge, Dublin. Mosse said he’s excited to set up a stand and show off his updated wares.

We were ready to close our doors during Covid – we had no customers, we had no staff, we had no money to run our shop

“We have so many customers that we deal with in an ongoing way... we don’t have to do any hard selling because they know the products, they know that we bring out new stuff to complement the old stuff,” he said.

The pandemic was a dark time for Mosse, however, and like many other businesses, his trade suffered heavily.

“We were ready to close our doors during Covid. We had no customers, we had no staff, we had no money to run our shop,” he said, explaining the impetus behind the e-shop.

The shop at the mill, and the e-shop, both sell their evolving range of spongeware pottery – whereby patterns are placed on the clay with sponges – and a more recent range of textiles, from napkins and tablecloths to cushion covers.

About a quarter of the company’s sales now come through the website and Mosse aims to grow the online side of the business by a further 15 per cent to 20 per cent over the next two years.

All the products bear designs crafted by Mosse’s wife, Susan, who also runs the financial side of the business. “Susan is very good at that,” says Mosse. “She sort of makes a design that works on two dimensions as well as three.”

Nicholas Mosse returned to Ireland following training in the UK and receiving a scholarship to learn the trade in Japan with a desire to start his own pottery business.

A small loan from the bank helped to kickstart his ambition and he started the business in abandoned agricultural buildings in 1976.

“We ran out of money in six months,” he said with a laugh, but Mosse dug himself out of his financial hole by taking up a part-time job in teaching.

This entrepreneurial spirit kept the business afloat in the years that followed, and as it grew in sales and employees, it weathered storm after storm, including a major fire in the main mill building in 1980 and wildly fluctuating clay costs in the early 2000s.

What the future holds

As for further down the road, he says he’s not sure what the future holds for Nicholas Mosse – the person or the company – but at 73, he has no retirement planned yet. “I have no intention of giving up. I have no intention of dying,” he said, laughing.

While Mosse has seen a lot of success over the years, he’s also not afraid to point out missteps along the way.

“We tried everything and we were sort of shameless,” he said, referencing his brief period selling glassware from the Czech Republic, his stint selling furniture and a spell operating a restaurant business.

But through it all, Mosse says what has kept him motivated all these years is his love for the craft.

“We try to make sure that everyone knows that we make everything here, we make our own clay, our own electricity, we train all our own staff, and we make everything by hand and it’s what we would like to leave behind us in this life – our legacy.”