Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, by Kate Lindsay and Nick Catucci.
I once put a pottery video on TikTok and it got only 600 views so I privated it out of shame. —Kate
I have a soft spot for ceramic artists on TikTok because, as a casual ceramic artist myself, it was the first thing that actually convinced me to start using the app. “It’s more than just dancing,” a rep for TikTok explained to a skeptical me at VidCon in 2019. “Whatever your hobbies are, TikTok has a video for that.”
As it turns out, TikTok has hundreds of thousands of videos for that. The #ceramics and #pottery hashtags have billions of views, and fall under the larger umbrella of Small Business TikTok that I wrote about last year. TikTok has been a game changer for emerging artists, allowing countless people to go full time with a passion they would not have had the audience for five years ago. Sarah Luepker, a ceramicist and TikTok creator from Chicago, is one of those artists.
I first came across Sarah thanks to one of her many viral pottery videos. There’s the one where she made a 30-pound pot (16 million views), or attempted a 40-pound pot (4 million views), or showed everyone how clay is repurposed (a process called “pugging,” that received over one million views). They have earned her over 400,000 followers—but I was curious how much this success was affecting her career as an artist. The short answer? A lot. The long answer is in this interview for paid subscribers, where Sarah and I talk about the growing pains of going viral as a small business, balancing creativity with the algorithm, and how TikTok can better serve its small business creators.
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