ST PAUL, Minnesota — Not only do many hands make light work, many hands make each mug at Deneen Pottery one of a kind.
"Everything tastes better out of a mug made by hand," said Niles Deneen, owner and president of Deneen Pottery.
Niles' parents, Peter and Mary Deneen, started the family business out of their two-car garage. Deneen Pottery was established in 1972 with their first studio and showroom in the Lowertown neighborhood of St. Paul.
"It was really fun to be around a lot of creative thinkers... but then the movie 'Ghost' came out and then,' What do your parents do?' 'My parents are potters.' 'What do you mean, potters?' 'Oh, like 'Ghost.'' 'Yeah, like 'Ghost.' That's it.' Yeah, that's my mom and dad," Deneen said, laughing.
In the early years, Deneen's parents had two different retail stores and a line of dinnerware.
"They were making lots of products in the hopes to sell them later. That doesn't work really well if you don't have the customers to buy them, which is sort of one of the reasons why they went bankrupt in the late '80s," Deneen shared. "Now every mug that we make is for a specific customer."
Deneen fully took over the family business in 2020. The company is based in St. Paul's Midway Creative Enterprise Zone with about 90 employees. Each mug the company creates is hand-thrown.
"Doing hand-throwing at this scale is crazy," Deneen said. "Typically, any mug that you're going to purchase out there on a shelf in a big-box store or even small-box stores, they're mass produced by machines through slip casting or other bigger, sort of massive corporate structures. So by keeping our focus on hand-throwing and hand-making mugs... I don't think anyone would really want to go into it. Just the labor costs of producing are so high but the level of quality and craftsmanship is unparalleled."
Cliff Price, lead potter at Deneen Pottery, has been with the company for 13 years.
Asked what he likes about the job, Price said, "I think just being able to work with clay this many years."
According to Price, there are 16 full-time potters. On average, potters make 200-300 mugs per day. Price's record is 380; however, the all-time record for one of their potters is around 500.
Deneen said they produce about 2,900 mugs per day, and each mug is touched by 24 pairs of hands.
After a mug is hand-thrown, its handle and medallion are applied. It then sits for 24 hours before fans dry it for another 24 hours. Mugs then get a bisque firing before they are glazed. The glaze gets sanded off the medallion and bottom of the mug before it is then put into what Deneen describes as "basically a big oven."
"In 2017 when we had the chance to put solar on, we did it. So now we can say that our kilns are powered by the sun," Deneen said.
Companies are able to personalize each medallion with their own logo.
"We do start at 96 pieces so you can have lots of smaller companies and then we can scale up to handle customers like Disney," Deneen said.
Deneen Pottery's clients include everyone from The Original Pancake House to local high schools and museums. They work closely with national parks and state parks, as well.
"Every day when you go to your cupboard, you remember that experience that you had when you first found it and you get to revisit that," Deneen said. "Experiences and connection. I think those two things really just drive my happiness with what we're doing."