After I started making ceramic dinnerware for my own home, the question that kept coming up was "Can I buy any of your pieces?" That's why I teamed up with a local group of potters down the street from my house to make Barkley. We make each piece by hand, but benefit from teamwork and certain design choices to keep costs down:

1. The logo underneath each piece is stamped on with ink instead of pressed into the clay. This has a lower rate of breakage so fewer pieces are destroyed before sale.

2. The ceramics are "jollied", which helps increase output while still maintaining the beauty of hand-made ceramics: slight variations and imperfections like fingerprints or sponge marks.

3. The number of pieces is limited and there are only a couple glaze colors available.

This is a fun experiment to see whether Barkley can stand alone in this unserviced middle ground between high-end ceramics and mass-produced commodities.