From 2009 until about 2016 we made everything on a potter's wheel in a quiet valley just north of Asheville, North Carolina. As we grew, we began to experiment with some industrial processes and before long we were spending more time managing our growing team and the old potter's wheels stopped turning.

In 2018, when we were bursting out of the small workshops, we moved into a factory in Asheville, North Carolina and continued to invest in modern equipment and processes.  When we settled into our new factory and had a moment to breathe, our first apprentice, Cade Holloman, pulled out an old wheel, plugged it in and started making pots under the name of Small Batch Studio, which we renamed East Fork Workshop a few years later.

Today the pots are made by another early East Fork contributor, Mike Ball, working in much the same way John and I did in our own apprenticeships, learning the forms through thousands of repetitions, albeit with a little less direct supervision than we had making work elbow-to-elbow with our teachers. Sara Melosh now handles the glazing and glaze development and in a not-so-distant future there will be a few more wheels turning, and a steady stream of pots moving out into the world to sit side by side with their machine-made counterparts, so as not to forget East Fork’s unusual origin.