Business Spotlight: Firehouse Pottery and Art Studio

Owner: Amie Van Damme Garner

Founded: 1996

Address: 4150 S. Lone Pine, Springfield, MO 65804

Phone: (417) 881-8381

Fax: (417) 885-3952

Web site: www.firehousepottery.com

E-mail: amie@firehousepottery.com

Services/Products: Paint-your-own-pottery studio

Employees: 5

Hours: 10 a.m.–8 p.m. Monday through Saturday and noon–5 p.m. Sunday

Amie Van Damme Garner is molding her new venture into a fulfilling communitywide business plan.

Garner purchased Firehouse Pottery and Art Studio LLC in April and has since made big changes and additions to the 11-year-old Galloway Village business. However, the core business – paint-it-yourself pottery where customers take an unglazed piece, called a “bisque,” to paint and glaze before it goes into the kiln – remains untouched.

Bisque business

Firehouse Pottery began in 1996 when Susan Rowe, a graphic designer for Springfield-based advertising firm Noble, brought to Springfield her experiences with paint-your-own pottery studios in other towns.

“I quit at Noble first and tried to do the freelance thing,” Rowe recalls. “Firehouse was more creative, and I could do whatever I enjoyed. What I enjoyed most was working with other people, like kids making long-lasting gifts and pieces of art.”

The idea stuck, but a decade later, Rowe was itching for a change. Garner came to the rescue.

Garner already had been working with Firehouse Pottery with her own artistic sideline, Charmed by Beads, next door to Rowe’s shop. She would occasionally use the Firehouse studio to work in fused glass. Garner wanted to expand and told Rowe that if Rowe was ever ready to sell the business, she would like to buy it.

“It was the perfect fit,” Rowe says. “We knew each other for a year before the sale. It sort of just fell in our laps. She was ready to make it bigger, and I was ready to move in a new direction in my own life. I didn’t have to find a buyer and didn’t have to work at selling the business.”

Small-business aid

Garner recruited the help of the U.S. Small Business Administration to substantiate her idea.

“I used the Score program,” Garner says of the nonprofit that works with SBA to promote entrepreneurship. “They have executives in the community who act as mentors. I used that service in order to evaluate the business and evaluate feasibility. They kind of helped me negotiate the process.”

Garner took out an $88,000 SBA loan through Liberty Bank to cover a small part of the purchase, for which she declined to disclose the total price.

She immediately expanded the business, adding staff with artistic and educational backgrounds, opening on weekends, and developing a mobile classroom component. In addition to painting, Garner added classes in hand-building original work from clay, Japanese Raku pottery, glass-fusing, jewelry-making, ceramic beads and mosaics.

Firehouse Pottery now has workspaces, tables and chairs for 50 as well as 100 styles of bisque for painting.

From the outside, Firehouse Pottery looks like a small house, but inside it opens up, with two main rooms and exposed beams.

It is bright and colorful, with 20 shelves of bisque in one room and the workspaces in another. A sense of the studio’s life comes from a giant chalkboard calendar covering one wall and listing upcoming classes, activities and events.

Firehouse’s business is about 50 percent regular classes, 20 percent parties, 15 percent off-site and 15 percent walk-ins.

Pieces range from $2 to $40, plus a $6-an-hour studio fee, and classes generally cost $10, plus materials.

Helping hands

The studio is now reaching out to the community.

“She’s taking on a lot more to get out there and do that,” says Rowe, who now lives in Atlanta. “I think it’s going to take off. She’s doing everything right.”

Jeanne Najafi, a franchise owner of Little Sunshine’s Playhouse and Preschool, says Firehouse Pottery’s work with schools is almost a public service.

For $7 per child per week through its Pottery To Go program, Firehouse Pottery brings an art activity right into the classroom.

“The kids really love it,” Najafi says. “There is a minimal charge per child who paints it right here. Firehouse brings it back, usually in a week. The parents love it, too.”

Najafi does the activity with her preschoolers once a month and enjoys going to Firehouse with her daughter. Najafi discovered the studio during a child’s birthday party there, and that’s when she saw Garner’s skill with children.

“Her staff was very helpful,” Najafi says. “Amie is almost like an angel. She can talk to a kid and explain stuff to a kid and make you think, ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’ She is very good at making the kids feel creative.”

Garner thinks her time as an educator – an eighth-grade English teacher in Branson until four years ago – comes into play there. When the studio is full of busy kids and adults, her experience as a teacher comes in handy.

“You know how to manage large numbers of people in chaotic situations,” Garner says of her classroom skills. “There has never been a situation in here that I didn’t think I could handle because of my experience teaching. You learn how to plan ahead. You learn how to keep track of things.”

Going forward, Garner is thinking big.

“We want to open another location,” Garner says. “We haven’t decided a hundred percent, but what we would like to do is open on the west side. Also, we’re going to franchise. We’ve been talking to an attorney, and there is only one other company nationwide that franchises the pottery studios, so that’s what we want to do.”