Bethan Morgan on trading at Crafty Fox Market’s Sample and Seconds Sale, the strange grief of parting with your own imperfect work, and what fifteen years of London craft markets have taught her
I did the Crafty Fox Sample and Seconds Sale at the National Theatre this past Sunday, my seconds table properly cleared out by half past three, every slightly wonky mug and off-centre glaze test sold to someone who genuinely wanted it, and then I stood in the loading bay afterward packing down my trestle and had a proper, unexpected cry about it, which is a strange thing to admit but this is my diary and apparently that’s what I’m admitting.
What A Seconds Sale Actually Involves
You bring the pieces that didn’t quite make the cut for full retail, the mugs with the handle slightly off-true, the bowls where the glaze pooled a bit heavier on one side than intended, and you sell them properly cheap because they’re genuinely imperfect rather than because they’re bad, and Crafty Fox have been running these specifically for makers like me for years now, part of the same market network that’s been at the heart of London’s craft scene for a full fifteen years running.
Why Selling These Particular Pieces Actually Undid Me
The full-price pieces feel like professional transactions, someone buying competent work I’m proud to have made. The seconds table feels different, more personal somehow, because these are the pieces with my actual visible mistakes on them, the evidence of a bad Tuesday in the studio or a kiln that ran hotter than I’d calibrated for, and watching someone genuinely delight in taking one home anyway felt like watching someone forgive me for something I hadn’t even asked forgiveness for.
What This Reveals About Fifteen Years Of Doing This
I’ve been trading at London markets in some form since I was twenty-three, genuinely a different person entirely, working out of a shared studio in Peckham with three other potters who’ve all since moved on to other things, other cities, other lives. Crafty Fox itself has been running exactly as long, since 2010, and there’s something genuinely grounding about a market organisation that’s outlasted three separate studio spaces of my own, several genuine crises of professional confidence, one full pandemic shutdown, and more bad Tuesdays in the kiln than I could count.
What The Actual Trading Landscape Looks Like Right Now
London Craft Week just wrapped its twelfth edition back in May, over a hundred and fifty venues across the city, proper institutional recognition for the kind of work I do in a shared studio with a space heater that doesn’t quite reach the far corner. There’s a genuine density of markets right now, honestly more than I can physically trade at even if I wanted to, SoLo Craft Fair’s new Canada Water spot, the N4 Makers Market up in Stoke Newington, Leadenhall’s autumn calendar just announced. It’s a good problem, choosing which markets to actually commit weekends to, but it is still a genuine logistical puzzle every single month.
Why I Actually Think The Seconds Sale Specifically Matters
Full retail markets ask you to present your best self, professionally, competently, and there’s real value in that discipline. But the seconds sale asks something more honest of you as a maker, it asks you to stand behind a table of your own visible errors and let strangers evaluate them directly, at a price that acknowledges the imperfection without pretending it isn’t there. I think that’s actually good practice for me beyond the ceramics too, honestly, standing behind the wonky, imperfect version of things rather than only ever presenting the polished one.
What Happened In That Loading Bay, Specifically
I was folding my trestle table down, alone, everyone else already packed and gone, and I just started crying, not dramatically, just quietly, thinking about how many hands those imperfect mugs would end up in, how many kitchens, how many mornings someone would reach for the slightly-off-centre one specifically because they remembered choosing it on purpose at a market at the National Theatre on a Sunday in August. That’s the whole job, really, when you strip away the actual craft technique. You’re making small objects that end up mattering more to strangers than you’ll ever get to witness directly.
What I’m Actually Doing Differently Going Forward
I’m doing another seconds sale next month, deliberately, not just as inventory management but because I think I need the specific honesty that table requires of me more regularly than I’ve been allowing myself. Full retail is good for the business. The seconds table, apparently, is good for something else in me that I hadn’t fully named until I was standing alone in a loading bay on a Sunday, crying about mugs.
What I’d Say To Any Newer Maker Reading This
Do a seconds table before you think you’re ready for one. It felt, my first year trading, like admitting failure, putting my visible mistakes out at a discount for strangers to pick over. Fifteen years later I understand it as something closer to the opposite, a genuine act of trust in the work and in the people who show up to buy it. Nobody at that National Theatre table on Sunday was disappointed in what they took home. They were choosing something specific and imperfect and real, and honestly, that’s not a bad description of most things worth having in your kitchen, or in your life generally.