Pagburnayan Factory

This is located at the corner of Liberation Boulevard and Gomez St. My DH and I visited the Pagburnayan factory but it was raining so hard that day that it kind of dampened the tour. We have not met the owner of the pottery Mr. Fidel Go but his staff were very accomodating and friendly. They gave us a tour inside the factory and walked us through the process of making the clay jars and it was really very interesting. When I was young, we used to have some clay pots in the house that were used for cooking rice. We also had a clay stove and we used some firewood that we gathered in the forest to cook our food. I also remember my late mom using a clay jar whenever she makes "tapuey", an Igorot wine that is used for special occassions. The tapuey is red rice that is cooked and fermented in clay jars until it becomes wine. I never really gave any thought on how these things were made until we visited the pottery in Vigan. Now, I have a better appreciation of these things that I used to take for granted. 

  

HOW TO SELL YOUR OWN POTTERYWanting to sell pottery on the side? How to start? We, along with Fidel Go, advise you to chart the following for a successful crack at the trendy and gritty business of pots.

1. Where to begin? We advise you to ship some test items to friends to see how they hold up. Perfect your product first before shipping a real order. Have good looking boxes and packing materials even at craft shows. Look for a good supplier for boxes and packing materials. Look at the post office website and see if their free boxes will work for you. Also, download their software and use a debit card to print postage. Start by arranging the pickups online.

2. Do you need a legal business name? Yes and no. Your real name can be your business name. If you pick a business name, you will have to get a bank account with that name, because people will want to write checks. It doesn’t cost anything. If you register with BIR, just ask for a tax ID number. When processing requests, we recommend Paypal to process your credit card orders. They have a debit card you can use, so you can buy postage as soon as the customer pays.

3. Where can you feature your pots and jars? You can set up a booth at home thew way it would look at a presentation in a craft fair. If you want to take it to another level, take a picture of it and send it to organizers of fairs. Join trade fairs, for this is a perfect avenue to gain clients. Get the names of shows from newspapers or websites. Use their search tool to find craft fairs. Remember the craft fairs will start advertising for crafter about 2 months in advance.

4. Other marketing strategies? Some start with a freebie site, like geocities.com. When profits start coming in, upgrade to a paid site. You can pick a template and then just plug your content in.

( Source: Agribusinessweek.com)