Claymates
Hi, Connie Matisse here. I'm one of East Fork's co-founders and Alex's wife. I wore a lot of hats at the company, shaping how it looked, felt, and acted in the world and serving as its CMO and CEO, before passing the baton and following a call down a different path.
As we welcome a new color to our Core Collection, the team asked me to recount how these eight colors—Longleaf, Heron, Blue Ridge, Black Mountain, Panna Cotta, Amaro, Eggshell and Morel—came to be.
Alex and I met in 2009 when he was 25 and I was 24. He'd just bought the land — now home to Township10 — where he planned to build his pottery. (“Pottery” is the word those in our ceramic lineage use both for the forms we make and the place where it is made). Six months later, while hunting ginseng on the mountain, we ran through a short list of names for the pottery and landed on East Fork. (And thank goodness — there were a few real duds.)
In those early years I waited tables in Asheville, slaughtered chickens at the farm up the road, read aloud to Alex while he threw, kept us fed, and schlepped glaze buckets to and fro. Then around 2011, I kept doing all of that but also got a smartphone and started following Alex around the workshop like a documentary golden retriever.
From 2010 through 2015 we made pots in a Southeastern folk vernacular, heavily decorated in floral motif with kaolin-based slip squeezed out of a Clairol hair dye applicator, and fired to cone 12 in a 26-foot-long, 6-foot-tall wood kiln that we got going three or four times a year. When that thing was cooking at around 2,300 degrees we blasted 100 pounds of salt into it through the stoke holes with leaf blowers. That’ll singe off your eyelashes and meld your skinny jeans to your thigh skin just once before you learn a lesson.
It took Alex about three months of throwing pots six days a week, eight or nine hours a day to fill the kiln, then about a month of cutting and stacking wood, four days to load it, three days to fire it, one day to cool it, a day to unload, a day to angle grind and dremel all the sharp bits off, two days for me to prep food for two hundred people, and Alex to bush hog the field, and one to throw a party for everyone to come shop.
The pots that came out of that kiln were colored tobacco and umber, wheat and walnut, molasses and loam. In other words: brown-ish.
Firing in a wood kiln is potent but squirrely magic; much trust must be handed over to Brother Fire. You can guess and hope but can’t be sure what the pots are going to look like. Eventually we got itchy for more control. We wanted to make complete sets of dinnerware and get more pots into more kitchens. And so we bought a gas kiln in the winter of 2014, which opened a door to a whole new world of color.
Image: Alex closing the Blaauw in one of its inaugural firings, with baby Vita
Those early days of glaze experimentation were a lot of fun. Kyle—who still works at East Fork as our data engineer—had recently joined the team. They'd studied chemistry at Warren Wilson College, and when it came time to formulate glazes for our new kiln and clay body, they took up the mantle as Mad Scientist. I'd bring Kyle paint swatches from the hardware store, Kyle would mix up line blends, and we'd walk the test tiles back and forth between sunlight and shade, fluorescents and candles, saying hmmm and huummm.
Sometimes a color that worked beautifully on mugs would streak, clump, or pit on plates. Some colors came out dazzling in three kiln loads, then looked like slop in the fourth one. Pottery’s got a million and one variables, from temperature, cooling speed, kiln placement, airflow, provenance and particle size of your raw materials, thickness of application, how the glaze and clay body get along, and the state of your soul when you dip the pots into the bucket. There was a lot to learn. Still is.
Image: A collection of test tiles from early line blends. Indigo and Thistle—two of the six colors we opened our Asheville store with—were pulled from these tests.
Eggshell, Soapstone, and Morel
We opened our first store on November 26, 2016 on Lexington Avenue in Asheville, just shy of a year after we’d started making this new line of work in the gas kiln. The shelves on opening day were stacked with Eggshell, Morel, Soapstone, Thistle, Indigo, a smattering of a black we called Onyx, a blaze orange we called Ember, and Mugs, incense burners, and Bitty Bowls with an unglazed surface we called Mars.
Image: Pots from the first two months of firing in the gas kiln, and the earliest iterations of glazes that would morph into Eggshell, Soapstone, and Morel, plus Mars. It was a favorite, but too prone to breakage to stick around.
This was so early in our journey that everything felt like throwing spaghetti at the wall. The colors felt equal parts what we were excited to sell and what we could reliably get out of the kiln. Some days Morel would look like a fresh pot of lentil du puy—complete with little red flecks. And others it would look like a canvas safari tent. Soapstone was especially wishy-washy—as varied from bowl to bowl as pebbles on the seashore. Eggshell was our steadiest, but I liked that the name Eggshell gave us breathing room in case it started to move around: a White Leghorn makes a different color egg than an Ameraucana.
Right away, Eggshell and Soapstone rose to the top as bestsellers. It made sense, but I was grumpy about it. I wanted an excuse to make mounds of bright orange pottery (my favorite color), and for the neutrals, I was biased toward Morel. That year, I got my first taste of having to consider sell-through rates and the aesthetic preferences of others. It was a hard adjustment! And one I pushed back against. I figured there was a balance to be found in confidently making the things that were most pleasing to us and being open to the creative input of the people we were selling to. Keeping that tension served us well as we grew.
Image: Early iterations of Eggshell, Soapstone, Morel, Thistle, and a nameless creamy yellow that we only sold to Katie Button and Felix Meana at Curate. You can see how much greener Morel leaned then, and the whispers toward Panna Cotta.
We didn’t have a “Core Collection” yet and hadn’t built out any sort of scalable or dependable cadence for swapping colors in and out. Alex, John, Kyle, Cade, and Max were throwing every pot on the shelves on the wheel at this point, and online purchases were mostly made to order. But as we started to grow our wedding registry business, the need for rhyme, reason, nomenclature, and scaffolding arose.
Couples who registered for pottery in January would find by December that the color they registered for had dramatically changed or disappeared; that wasn’t going to work. And so our early iteration of a core palette was shaped in large part by the desires of those first newlyweds who chose to start their life together with East Fork in their kitchens.
In the Fall of 2017 we made a palette of three colors—Wine Dark Sea, In The Pines, and Harvest Moon—and began delineating “Seasonals” from our “Core” collection.
First Generation Blue Ridge
Image: Indigo was beautiful but it always felt like an oversaturated outlier with the core palette that was forming. In February 2017 we started playing around with blue line blends and starting inching toward Blue Ridge. Later that year, Blue Ridge was part of the gang.
From 2016 to 2018, every day felt like juggling cats and wine glasses with one foot balanced on a beach ball. I had a toddler and an infant. The production team was making pots in the workshop in Madison County and driving them into town every weekend. We worked out of the living room of the farmhouse, in the back of the shop on Lexington, while nursing a baby on an exercise ball, and eventually, from a basement “office” under Vinnie’s Pizza on Merrimion that smelled like the grease trap.
In November 2017, we started demo on the factory on Short McDowell—one of two main buildings in Biltmore Village where East Fork still operates—and began the way too fast and painful and confusing and exciting and grief-stricken move from the little workshop in the holler that we built with our own two hands over the course of eight years.
It blows my mind the quality of work we got done with such a small crew working so ragtag.
In that melee, we phased out Indigo and replaced it with Blue Ridge, which played better with the quieter colors on the shelves and had a luscious texture, soft to the touch. We entertained the idea of pulling a blue out altogether, but blue people are blue people: they are people who need a blue! And though I wasn’t one of them, I wanted to make them happy. This ode to the mountains that surrounded us felt right.
Blue Ridge would take a hiatus in 2020 but come back in full force in 2023.
A Detour Through Utah
Image: Testing contenders for Spring Seasonals in 2018. This was our first really intentional launch of a seasonal collection—complete with a “campaign” styled and shot by Tropico Photo and hired models that weren’t our neighbors. It felt big! When Spring turned to Summer we weren’t ready to say goodbye to Utah, so we incorporated it into our Core Collection and relaunched in that Fall.
In fall 2017, Morel had to take an untimely sabbatical. A change in the supply of our Iron Chromate made the glaze super volatile. That made room for those three new colors I mentioned, and got us refining our delineation between Cores and Seasonals and making contingency plans for when things went awry. There was still so much push/pull between what we wanted and what was possible.
In Spring of 2018 we fleshed out what we’d been experimenting with in Fall of 2017—a seasonal colorstory complete with bespoke objects made for us by fellow craftspeople who worked in other mediums.
There was a red rock color we called Utah. It was beloved by many, and really matched the aesthetic of the moment, when everyone was wearing clogs and linen tunics and moodboarding pictures of the Southwestern sunset. Utah was a problem child, though. We had trouble with the viscosity. It’d thin out a lot on the pots and then show too much of the clay body underneath. It’d make rings around the inside of the Mugs, and customers thought we’d sent them used ones with coffee stains in them.
The Glaze Team spent months trying to get it to behave but eventually we had to cut our losses and move on. I’m glad we did, because it made way for Amaro, which I have on my dinner plates at home. Amaro felt like those same red rocks at dusk, but under a sky just dark enough for Venus to show her sparkle on the horizon.
Images: By 2018 Eggshells, Soapstone, Morel, and Blue Ridge had staked their claim on the shelves and made up the bulk of our pottery sales. Here, Taro and Utah joined as Spring Seasonals. Utah stuck around on and off in our Core for a few more years before being replaced by Amaro.
Panna Cotta & Amaro
The defining story for us in 2018 through 2020 was that our demand greatly outpaced our supply. Our audience and their appetites for dinnerware were growing fast. We’d invested big time in machines and space and staff, but you can’t just buy a bunch of pottery equipment and start using it to its fullest capacity overnight. And so we had to grow our audience to match our future making capacity.
Those were scrappy years, where we leaned way too hard on Adaptive Tenacity, one of our stated core values at the time. Keeping our Core small—just Eggshell, Morel, Soapstone, and Utah—made it easier to keep SKUs on the shelf, and Out of Stocks at bay. Around January/February of 2020 things stabilized. The shelves started filling up. We got a little taste of what it might be like to move out of a scarcity mindset. We started drawing up plans for a Core Collection of 8 colors. And then…dun, dun, dun: the Pandemic.
Shit was crazy! It was really important to Alex and John and I to keep our staff paid through shutdown, so it was right back to the juggling act, leaning on the trust of our customers to sell pots we hadn’t made yet, and coming up with ways to keep everyone engaged when we didn’t have anything to sell.
Through hell or high water, we were determined to launch Panna Cotta and Amaro. These were the colors I longed to have on my own shelves. It was a joy to mix and match them with our existing colors and past seasonals. They took the palette in a brand new direction, and were an easy bridge between seemingly discordant seasonals.
We started showing them off to our customers when we still had no idea how long the shutdown would last, or how long it might take to build up a viable inventory. Our customer’s willingness to wait, and the trust they had in us to figure things out was so affirming.
When at last they launched in September, 2020, they were immediately beloved.
Blue Ridge & Black Mountain
Welcoming Blue Ridge back to the Core Collection alongside Black Mountain was one of my favorite color moments in our company’s history. I was so proud of how it came together. That summer, I heard the wind whisper that my time had come to walk down a different path. I knew when I was storyboarding it that this was the last campaign I’d have the reins on, and it mattered to me that it was really beautiful.
Our creative team stuffed 75 lbs of pottery into backpacks and hiked through the meadow at Flat Laurel Creek—the place I hiked just two days before giving birth to my first baby and the first place I took my girls backpacking when they were old enough to carry their own gear. My dear friend MT—a certified feral person—ran barefoot through the river and rolled in the tall grass.
After 13 years living in Western North Carolina, this was the year where it had at last wriggled deep inside my marrow. The South, these mountains, was my home. I belonged to it. My roots were all tied up with the roots of the Mountain Laurel, the Tulip Poplar, the Broad Leafed-Magnolia.
Heron
Maybe it’s because I grew up in sunny Southern California and now live in a bright green deciduous forest, but grey has never done much for me. Alex and John had always been Soapstone devotees but anytime it gave us trouble, I tried to take the opportunity to nudge it out the door. I knew people loved it, but I always thought it took up precious real estate that something else deserved more.
When it started pinholing and streaking and giving us hell in 2020, and when shutdown greatly impeded our production capacity, I was glad for it to be gone and wasn’t in a hurry to find a replacement. After I left in 2022, the grey-lovers in the group got to work. This was the first Core color that was developed without my input.
Alex and I were exploring what it felt like to not talk about East Fork at home (amazing), so when he brought home a sample just before launch, it was a delightful surprise. I think it’s so beautiful. And more importantly, the people running the show now in East Fork’s creative department love it dearly.
What a blessing it's been to watch others steer this ship with grace and style all their own.
Longleaf
At long last, green. The Core's been hungry for it since the start. We've made some beautiful greens over the years — In the Pines, Fiddlehead, Celery, Lamb's Ear — and considered bringing several of them into our Core, but always ran up against production capacity. I'm so happy that Longleaf is joining the family.
Alex and I would have called it Fangorn if it wasn’t copyright infringement. Fangorn was the last standing holdout of the ancient forest of Tolkien’s Middle-earth. The forest was once so vast that, as Elrond recalled at the Council of Rivendell, a squirrel could go from tree to tree from what is now the Shire all the way to Dunland west of Isengard. The forest was ravaged, first by Melkor and then by Sauron, until only that small, dark, stubborn corner remained.
The story of North Carolina's Longleaf Pine forests is resonant. The Longleaf Pine once blanketed 92 million acres across 1,200 miles of the American Southeast, and a significant heart of it was here in our state. The tar and resin harvested from these trees was so central to North Carolina's economy that we got the nickname "Tar Heel." That extractive industry was built almost entirely on the forced labor of enslaved Africans and members of the Lumbee Nation.
Today, 97% of the original forest is gone. But slowly, slowly, it's coming back — the gopher tortoise returning to its burrow, the red-cockaded woodpecker carving its home once more into living bark, hundreds of rare plant species reclaiming the understory. A forest, stewarded by lovers of trees, inching its way back to wholeness. We thought that deserved a place on the table.
