The past six years

A short four months later, it's clear how well the resolution from the previous blog post has gone - it's been busy!

Before anything else, I thought I'd introduce myself. I'm James, and for the last five years I've been taking care of RJC, a line of decorative plates that has been passed down through my family.

My role has been minimal, focused simply on offering a nod to the labour of love RJC has represented over the past three decades. While there has been little in way of "growing the business", I'm proud of what has been accomplished to keep it ticking by these past few years and, first and foremost, I'm incredibly proud of the charming business that my gran created, that my dad brought further life to, and that continues to portray the history of the areas in which I grew up.

Looking back, the last six years seem to have gone by in an instant.

RJC's most recent chapter began in 2019, when my next-door neighbour Kyle and I decided to have a crack at taking photos of the plates that my Dad had been storing for nearly as long I can remember. Seeing the designs laid out at local village fair stalls were some of my earliest childhood memories and I imagine both my dad and I felt it was an injustice that so many were gathering dust since the family stopped attending these events.

Conveniently, Kyle was studying photography at the time, and his mum owned a lot of nice equipment owing to her own photography business. We arranged a day to go through all of the stock and photograph each design, and, despite our very loose plan, this came together pretty successfully. Thanks Kyle.

By 2020, my dad had offered to let me continue looking after RJC indefinitely and 18-year-old me was delighted to have this entity to play with.

In truth, not much happened for a good while whilst I prepared for my A-levels. I was also set back by a very avoidable digital media handling error (maybe to discuss in a later post). Eventually, though, the opportunity was presented to me to bulk-order what remained of the original firings at Edwards and Lockett, and it was this that led me to take some ownership of the project and subsequently create the first RJC site.

This site was a £6-a-month WordPress experiment (built using LocalWP and hosted with Bluehost), but it did a fine job of creating a home for the business that had otherwise been near unreachable for the past 15 or so years. Skillshare was hugely helpful. 

Orders trickled in via phone and email and I got a taste of logistics and fulfilment (making extensive use of my mum, to whom I'm continually grateful), as well as learning what to avoid when sending ceramic through the post.

Frankly, I would love to have stuck with this WordPress site. I've found that independently learning the ins and outs of a new skill is a reliably life-enhancing use of time, but it was decided early on in this case to sacrifice the opportunity in favour of the convenience and time savings of an all-in-one website platform. I'd certainly make this decision differently given the choice today; the building of that first website was one of the most enjoyable parts of this journey, and I'd have loved to delve deeper into the open-source plugins, layouts and integrations available with WordPress. 

Alas, eventually that little test evolved into the Shopify site that this post is being published on today. In all fairness, it does do a great job of making life simple.

In the time between the first website and the present day, there came and went marketing experiments, test orders of new products, a whole other website, and a return to village fairs, much driven by my uncle Steve*. Plenty of this will be delved into in future posts - for the moment, I don't want to ramble. 

That's where things stand now. Products have been selling slowly but steadily. It's far from lucrative, but in my eyes, certainly worth maintaining a nice webstore for.

A quick disclaimer: undoubtedly, this is the less interesting portion of RJC's history, and I'll be sharing more about the design and production processes and early days of the business in upcoming articles. I may come back and revise this post slightly to be able to better link between future posts that may be relevant to sections of this article.

I'll leave it there for the moment though, here's to the next post taking less time to appear than this one.

*Steve has a background in marketing and has been super helpful over the last few years. You can buy one of the new Chertsey plates that he's been managing as part of a trial run here - he'd no doubt appreciate your support!