Meet Victor Nevarez, Founder of Barkley

My main gig is posting cooking videos under the moniker "Internet Shaquille", but I didn't want my merch to be something disposable, like a dropshipped t-shirt. Barkley was started to bring dinnerware options to the unserviced middle ground between high-end pottery and mass-produced commodities.

The team makes each piece by hand, but certain design choices allow us to keep costs down. For example, the Barkley 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. Barkley 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.

Some Common Questions:

Can I pick up my order in Tempe?

In-person pickup isn't available at our studio. The space is full of blazing hot kilns, particulate matter, and towers of fragile plates, so it's not set up for any customer-facing operations. The good news is that orders shipped within Arizona are significantly cheaper and faster to ship!

Do you only ship to the U.S.?

Technically speaking, we do ship internationally. That being said, the shipping prices for pottery are so astronomically high that international orders are rare, aside from lightweight items like aprons.

When will my favorite item come back in stock?

Each piece of ceramic dinnerware has to be formed out of clay, dried, trimmed, fired in the kiln, glazed, dried again, then fired one last time. The long process means that certain items can be sold out for 6-8 weeks at a time. I personally monitor the inventory to make sure the ceramics never take longer than 2 months to restock.