Online ceramics store carefully manages its growth

When Cindi Anderson tired of her job as a Silicon Valley engineer in 1999, she joined with Glen Miller to create BigCeramicStore.com to sell ceramic supplies online.

"Like most of our customers, I did it in high school and wanted to get back into it," says Anderson, 44. "But there was nobody online."

Miller, 47, also had grown tired of working in the technology sector, so he quit his job and began building the site to sell kilns, clays, glazes and associated supplies which turned out to be much more work than he thought.

"It was 1999, the Internet was hot, and it seemed like something we could do," he says. "We didn't know it was going to take like 10,000 hours to build the site."

Adds Miller: "It's kind of like having kids: You don't know how much work it's going to be ahead of time or you might think twice about it.

It's been good, but it's been a grueling process."

BigCeramicStore.com started in 2,000 square feet in Fremont, Calif., but Anderson and Miller moved the company to Reno in 2005 to escape California's high business taxes. So far the move has been a success the company has enjoyed steady growth since its inception, and has increased sales roughly 20 percent the past three years but recruiting staff members who understands the basics of the ceramics business has proved a challenge.

"If we had any idea it would be this difficult we would have re-thought it," Anderson says.

BigCeramicStore employs three people but is short two employees and is looking to hire. The company has run with seven at its peak. BigCeramicStore is in 6,000 square feet at 881 E. Glendale Avenue in Sparks, but Anderson and Miller recently purchased 10,600 square feet in the Vista Business Park.

"Space is always a problem when you are growing," Anderson says. "When we came here we said, 'We will never use 6,000.' To some degree I think you fill whatever you have."

Most of the warehouse space is taken up by a large inventory of kilns, pottery wheels, shaping tools and a vast assortment of glazes the company stocks more than 5,000 products from 70 suppliers. It sells mostly to hobbyists and schools.

Most of its sales are delivered within the United States, and exports

account for only small fraction of the company's business.

Miller says most of the manufacturers in the ceramics world prefer to ship goods to distributors and concentrate on manufacturing and development. That provides opportunities for customer-oriented companies such as BigCeramicStore.

As the company grew from its humble roots Anderson says cash burn in the beginning was about $200 a month it slowly brought responsibilities such as shipping and warehousing in-house.

"We didn't shoot to the sky, so we didn't have to freak out and get investors and hire a whole bunch of people," she says. "It's always been nice steady growth we could manage. We were profitable from Day 1 because we didn't go any further than our cash flow could support. All the money that has ever gone into growing the business has come out of the business."

To help shuffle daily responsibilities off their schedules the couple six months ago hired general manager Kevin Roalson. Communicating their years of accumulated product knowledge to their employees also has proved a major hurdle.

"It is a complex business in the sense that there are a lot of details," Anderson says. "You could just not worry about the details, but that is the difference between making money and not making money.

Finding somebody, especially as a general manager, who can get all those details, learn the product, do marketing it's pretty hard, but

Kevin is perfect. We found a really good person; now we just need to get staffed."