If you've followed along here at Wabi Scotia Pottery, you know my days are pretty full. I make and sell my work, I teach classes, I run this website and shop, and I'm a mom to two girls here in Nova Scotia. So I want to share something a little different today: a project I've been quietly working on for the past year and a half, and one I'm really excited about.
It started with a question my students kept asking
"Do you rent out your kiln?"
I heard it a lot. And for a couple of years, I kept saying no. I wanted to help, I really did. But I already had my hands full. Renting out my kiln sounded like a pile of extra emails, scheduling, payments and logistics, and I just didn't have room for more admin in my week.
Building the thing I needed
My husband, Chris, does software development in his own business, mostly building tools to save himself time. One evening we started talking about what it would take to make kiln rentals simple enough that I could actually say yes.
That conversation turned into Kiln It, a kiln booking app we built together, first just for my own studio.
The biggest decision we made was to rent by the shelf (or the full kiln), not by the piece. Renters book a shelf, see a diagram of the space, and look at photos of a real loaded bisque shelf and glaze shelf so they know exactly what they're working with. They plan their own load and drop their pieces on their shelf. I load it into the kiln. If something doesn't fit, it goes back unfired, or they book another shelf next time. That's it.
Why that works so well for a studio like mine
I looked at a lot of pottery studio software along the way. Most of it is built around a ticket for every single piece, tracked through bisque, glaze and pickup. That makes sense for big studios and paint-your-own-pottery cafés with hundreds of walk-in pieces. But for a small studio like mine, it would have meant logging every mug and bowl on my phone and turning a simple 20 to 30 minute kiln load into something that takes two or three times as long. Plus a monthly subscription, busy month or not.
Firing by the shelf puts the planning in the renter's hands and keeps my part quick. No tickets to lose, no one squeezing in an extra mug, no paperwork piling up.
What it's meant for my business
In my busy months, kiln rentals brought in an extra $300 to $500. Some months, I made nothing at all, because that's just how it goes. But over that first year, the money I set aside covered a full month of my summer expenses. So when August came and the girls were home from school, I could step back from the wheel and just be with them. That flexibility meant more to me than I expected.
It's also why we chose not to charge kiln owners a monthly fee. I lived through those quiet months, and I didn't want anyone paying for software in a month their kiln sat empty. Instead, renters pay a small booking fee, so we only get paid when kiln owners get paid.
Why I'm sharing it with you
Full disclosure: Kiln It is our family's little business, so of course I'm biased! But I'm sharing it because it genuinely changed how I run my studio, and I think it could help a lot of you too. Especially if you're a potter with a home kiln that sits empty between your own firings, or a small studio running a few classes with some kiln downtime to fill.
We're beta testing right now and taking our time to get it right before launching, starting in Canada and then the USA. We're a small family in a small community, and it would mean the world to us if other potters and studios found it useful.
If you'd like to be one of the first to try it, you can join the waitlist at kilnitrentals.com. And if you have questions, or you've been on the fence about renting out your own kiln, send me a message. I'd love to chat.
Happy firing,
Amy
