SANITY STUDIOS NEEDS YOUR HELP

Aim

We'd like to get back on track so we can open up more social spaces for local people.

HELLO 

You probably already know about us if you're on our crowdfunding page, but if you don't, we're potters that play with mud in a cave.

Im a chatty chatty girl so you can read our full story below but…

TLDR:

I worked really hard to open the studio then the lockdown happened a week later and we could only open for 3 months out of 18.

I tried to end my life, then our customers started being really supportive so we came back instead of giving up. We're having cash flow issues because of rescheduled workshops from pre-lockdown. 

We want to build the studio back to where it should have been without the pandemic. Oh, and we're nice.

THE FULL STORY 

HOW WE GOT GOING.

We're a team of three, Mac (me), Julia, and Moose and we're a little family of pottery lovers. We're the absolute cuties at the top. 

I set up the studio in 2019 after my employer dismissed me for being disabled. 

(Sounds insane but I won a discrimination tribunal so now I can categorically say that's why I lost my career in finance so that's nice I suppose.)

Initially I turned my airing cupboard into a pottery studio, then commandeered the bedroom to make more room for pottery, started sleeping in the kitchen, and then sold pottery on the streets until I had enough money to open a proper studio.

Look at me hauling an entire pottery studio through the centre of Bath without a proper trailer because I didn't have a car or any money.    

After dragging the trailer around town for a year, I asked a fella who used to rent me boats if I could turn his cave into a studio. When we took the space the walls where covered in plastic, there was no electricity, and we didn't even have a door. 

I spent all of my spare time for months, converting the cave from a hole in the ground, into our studio. We excitedly moved into our shiny new studio.

LOCKDOWN CAME

Then the first national lockdown was announced less than a week later. 

It was devastating. I had a glimmer of hope when the government announced the small business support package, but then we were too small to deserve support.  

As it had just been Mac for the last 2 years, and Julia had only just come on board, we didn't qualify for any government support whatsoever. We had no income for 4 months.

Our landlord is amazingly kind, and let us know as soon as the lockdown was announced that he wouldn't expect rent if we weren't able to open. 

We were going to make it through. My health took a nose dive but ultimately I still had hope that we would come back. Then we did. 

WE CAME BACK

We opened for three months in 2020, we started taking bookings immediately and within a couple of weeks, were starting to get fully booked almost a month in advance. We were hosting between 15 and 20 workshops a week and LOVING IT. 

Oh boy did we realise that we were onto a winner!

I put some pictures of our happy customers below… 

THEN LOCKDOWN CAME BACK

We were almost fully booked for the rest of November, all of December, and half of January. We issued re-book vouchers, with no expiry date, to make sure everyone could come back in the future. 

The studio received no financial aid.

BUT, we qualified for furlough! FAB! 

Apart from we couldn't do work for the studio and claim furlough. 

It left us completely trapped, we could try and sell enough pottery to ensure we could pay ourselves enough, but the risk was too high and we chose to prioritise our staff having a guaranteed income, rather than possibly struggling all month and still have us not be able to pay them. 

I tried really hard to make sure that I kept my spirits up, to convince myself that this wasn't the end of everything I'd worked towards for years but it really felt like it was. We rented the studio out to another woman to have private access over lockdown to make sure we had enough to keep at least some of the bills paid. 

We kept being told we could open next month, so we got ready to open next month, and then we couldn’t. Many people ended up having their workshops re-scheduled again and again.  We'd been told that we would be able to re-open from January, so sold loads of Christmas Gift Cards. 

Then lockdown was extended. We weren’t going to be opening for a long time. 

THEN THE CR*P STARTED.

We began being bombarded with emails complaining that we where closed, and threatening to take us to court because we wouldn't illegally run there service, and didn't have any money to offer refunds.

Personally, I had a disability discrimination tribunal, in which I had to represent myself against my ex employer. I won, I got him to admit in court that he fired me because he found out I was depressed and was awarded £15k.

I used the money the clear the personal debt I'd acquired due to the discrimination, I caught up on my mortgage so I could keep my home, and I treated myself to a couple of things I'd wanted for years.

My long term relationship completely broke down, I came out, he moved out, and in with his new girlfriend and I ate lots of bagels. 

I still felt like we could get through it, I was still trying really hard to hold on. 

Then we got a negative review on Facebook. 

They said that they'd had a great time in the studio, that the workshop was amazing, but that they wouldn't recommend because they couldn’t collect their pottery during the middle of a lockdown. Despite being aware we weren’t able to work and pay ourselves, we were told we where bad people, with awful customer service, because she couldn’t get her way. 

I couldn’t handle being consistently held responsible and punished for something that was completely out of my control, and completely ruining my life. It was the straw that broke the camels back, and my resilience. 

I took an overdose of Quetiapine. Usually I have a stash of pills but fortunately I couldn’t find them all so just took enough to go into a nice little two day coma. Lovely.

When I woke up, I shut everything down. We replaced our website with a statement, and posted to our socials, saying we'd had enough, and explaining what had happened. Pottery wasn’t worth losing my life over. 

THEN YOU ALL CAME

Hundreds of people started emailing us letting us know how much they love us, our studio and what we're trying to achieve.  

People posted art through our letter box, dropped cakes off at the door and started coming for chats through our windows.

Everything slowly but surely started feeling a little bit easier.

Instead of wanting to shut the studio down and run away, I desperately wanted our studio to be full of people again. To help the people who connected with our story, and stop them from feeling as alone as I had. 

It was a really rough ride getting the courage together to re-open the studio. Julia started checking up on me each day, she took on all the horrible emails we’d been dealing with so I could start feeling better and we would sit and read through the amazing messages people had sent us at the end of a hard day to help us keep going.

We ended up being closed for a further 7 months. The studio made about £1500. I got paid £1000 a month, £200 more than my mortgage payment. 

Here's a picture of us trying not to cry about how lovely our customers have been. 

I’d saved £5k from my discrimination tribunal so that we could make sure we were able to re-open, pay Julia and get through the first month without the stress of running on empty. 

We got fully booked so quickly last year, we knew we’d get booked up again in no time. We wanted to make sure that the people who had paid months ago, and been patiently waiting for us to be able to re-open, were able to come in first. 

We only accepted voucher bookings for the first two weeks of re-opening. Then we started advertising for new bookings to come in along side the re-bookings. Without new money starting to come in, we would only be able to survive about a month. 

We started getting booked up, but because we’d prioritised voucher bookings, over 80% of our booking slots where taken up by covid re-books. 

It means that we’ve got almost 7 weeks worth of workshops, but can only make 20% of our usual turnover.   

Thats 70 hours work a week for me, 20 hours work a week for Julia, and I won’t be able to pay myself for months. 

On top of this, Bath's covid rates have gone through the roof, and so a HUGE amount of our workshops are being cancelled, and rescheduled last minute. 

Over the last 2 weekends, 8 have been cancelled last minute due to covid, Julia ended up having to self isolate for ten days, and we had a close call and had to shut for a week. 

Its been amazing to re-open. I’ve spent evenings in the studio soaking up gratitude and joy from being able to have pulled through the last 18 months. I've been hugging my plants, and trying to hug my walls. 

To have been able to go through all the above and still be able to come back when so many people haven’t been able to do the same is something I’m so grateful for… but we’re not out the woods yet, actually the woods are still feeling pretty thick and heavy. 

WHAT WE WANT TO CARRY ON

When I was running the studio from my home, and in the short few months we were running from our cave, I’d been doing lots of little things to help our local community. 

I don’t usually tell people about these things because there’s never seemed to be any point in doing so, but we need your help now, so here’s a little list of the things we’ve done through the studio in the last 3 years. 

• We offered one to one mental health support for a woman struggling with anxieties so strong that they couldn't leave their house. We walked them from their car to our space, week by week, until they felt ready start tackling the world again.
• We've done this now with seven women. 
• We took in a schizophrenic homeless addict because he wasn’t receiving any aid locally, and I couldn’t bare walking past him everyday. He lived in my house for 6 months until we were able to get him into a half way house with good therapies. We gave him paid work for 6 months to help keep him busy while he tried to deal with his addictions. 
• We worked with the local parks department to try and bring more families to their plant sales to get more money for the local parks. 
• We volunteered to teach children and adults for free in our local park to fundraise for the gardens. 
• We provided the stage, sound system, megaphones and police liaison for the Bath BLM protest last year. We did the same for the reflection demo this year. 
• We’ve opened mental wellbeing weekly sessions for women, and queer women, and are launching one for women of colour. We're going to make sure that the spaces we desperately need in this city exist. 
• We’ve planted a ‘bee forest’ next to the Weir. It used to be a dumping ground of litter, I’ve been going into the stingy nettles, scooping out the trash, and replacing it with seeds. 18 months later and its a flower patch. 
• We put out little pottery presents around town during lockdown to try and keep people cheerful on their lockdown walks.

Our pottery workshops are only a really small part of Sanity Studios, they’re insanely fun for us and the participants, and we love them but we host them to allow us to do things like the above. 

We have done lots of other things as well that I can’t remember off the top of my head right now, but basically we’ve been helping this city for years so we believe it’s okay to ask for help now.

WHAT WE’RE DOING IN THE FUTURE

We have so few spaces for women, people of colour, queer folk, disabled folk, or anyone that doesn’t fit the ideal of a Bath resident and I’m really tired of seeing the people I love struggle to live in the city because of how unwelcoming it can feel.

I know that there are hundreds of people in this city that feel the same way as I do, because I meet you all the time. You’ve been coming into my studio and having heart to hearts with me, reaching out on social media, sending letters and supporting us by coming to our workshops. 

We plan on opening open mic nights, meditation nights, watch a master potter nights, basically fun things to do in the city centre that don’t involve drinking and eating as the main entertainment, for local people, not just for tourists. 

When we hit our crowdfunding target, we need to pay our landlord back for the rent we missed, we need to buy clay, we need to get our kiln serviced, we need to pay mine and Julias wages. We want to be able to take over another tunnel, and turn it into a Sanity Sanctuary for local women to use as an arty, fun safe space to socialise or just be in. That was the plan before 2020 and if it hadn’t been for this pesky pandemic, we’d have achieved it by now. 

I’d really like to build the studio into a collective, where I teach workshops to help keep the lights on, but we provide space for 5 underprivileged women, who may not otherwise feel welcome in art spaces, so that they can continue their craft. 

I want to continue building Sanity Studios into a community space that aids local women, while giving everyone the opportunity to play with some clay. So please help us!

OTHER PEOPLES WORDS.

ELLA

Sanity studios is a great pottery studio run by the most amazing people. Mac, the owner, is extremely friendly and welcoming and ensures your time in the studio is as comfortable as can be. Every time I am in the studio I am able to relax knowing that I am in a safe and friendly environment. It is reassuring to know that at sanity studios no form of hate is tolerated, enabling me to fully unwind. I have thoroughly enjoyed my time spent potting at sanity studios! As someone who often overthinks and gets stressed out when creating things,  I really appreciated Mac's there's no such thing as a bad pot / all pots are beautiful outlook. This allowed me to carry out the pottery with no internal or external pressures and I was able to create a unique pot which I love so much, despite its imperfections. 

Sanity Studios is such a precious pottery studio and I cannot wait to return! Please consider supporting the studio so others can experience how amazing it really is!!

ELVIRA

Thank you SO much for inviting me along, that was one of the nicest moments I’ve had in a while, the vibe around all of you is so amazing and clean. It reminded me who I am and that means so so much, thank you x 100000000

VICTORIA 

Sanity studios was a fantastic little find! I haven't come across anything else that compares, or offers a social space to meet other women in the same way. I attended one of the mental wellbeing sanity socials, and Mac fostered a super relaxed and enjoyable environment to meet people and make pottery.

EMAIL [email protected] IF YOU WANT TO ADD YOUR OWN.

This project closed unsuccessfully on 23rd August 2021