The Mad Potter is not your average craft store. Then again, Meredith McCord ’92 is not your average entrepreneur. Just 23 when she left her job in real estate development to seek a more satisfying career, it took her only a year to find her niche.
Call it serendipity, but Meredith’s quest coincided with a trip to a friend’s bridal shower in Atlanta – and an introduction to the paint-your-own pottery concept. She was immediately intrigued, and she spent the next few months visiting more than 40 studios across the country to find out how the business worked and why it sometimes didn’t. She opened her first store in Houston, her hometown, with the help of private equity partners, since, as she puts it, “The bank wouldn’t take my cat as collateral.” That was nine years ago, and today Meredith owns and operates five Mad Potter locations in and around the state.
Typically, customers of a paint-your-own pottery shop choose a shape to paint – anything from a dinner plate to a seasonal decoration – and create their own masterpiece with the studio’s supplies and advice from the staff. The painted pottery is “fired” in a kiln at the store and available for pickup a week later.
While The Mad Potter follows the same basic concept, Meredith’s vision is bigger and bolder than the norm. She offers customers more than 400 shapes and sizes of pottery, a wide variety of themed events, and a few unusual extras. The space itself is also larger than the typical craft store, with facilities that can accommodate parties of up to 90 painters. The Mad Potter has been featured multiple times in the Houston Business Journal and in the Houston Chronicle, and Meredith has been interviewed by every local television station.
Just checking out the website or the monthly calendar of events for each of the five locations can be overwhelming. Although most in-store events are geared to children’s and adults’ birthday parties, corporations and local law firms use The Mad Potter for brainstorming sessions or team-building workshops, and, of course, bridal showers are always popular. Meredith, who takes a proactive approach to customer service, offers interesting twists on the standard craft store menu, including “Diva Night,” “Mom’s Night Out,” “Women and Wine” tastings, and a range of incentives and coupons. While food must be ordered in, The Mad Potter provides beer and wine for its grown-up patrons. Meredith estimates that about 40 percent of her business is parties, with the remainder coming from individuals. During spring break, her stores are waiting list only.
How much time, then, does she have to paint pots? For this art minor and human organizations major, not much. “With multiple locations, I’ve had to design a system (for managing). My role now is to oversee this system and perfect it, checking in on employees, visiting with customers, and marketing the concept to larger companies. That’s a big part of what I do currently.”
In many ways, this career path makes perfect sense. Growing up dyslexic, Meredith used art as a communications tool. At the same time, she was always interested in business and loves to sell. This unique combination finds its nexus in The Mad Potter. “I love what I do,” Meredith says. “I went to the hospital recently and footprinted a customer’s baby, only 24 hours old. I’ve hosted parties where four generations of the same family gathered to paint pottery. There’s a joy you get in being part of people’s lives.”
Meredith’s own life is inextricably linked to Lawrenceville: Together with her dad, Rick McCord ’63, she is co-president of the Lawrenceville Club of Houston, and her siblings, uncles and a cousin are Lawrentians as well. For Meredith, her Lawrenceville education was critical to her success, and she cites the Harkness discussions, low teacher/student ratio, and emphasis on writing as “making all the difference” in her preparation for “the real world.”
She approaches that world with missionary zeal – literally. As busy as The Mad Potter keeps her, Meredith makes a point of setting aside time for another calling. She has been traveling to Russia for the past eight years on a mission to work with school-age orphans in St. Petersburg. Last summer, she toured South Africa and Zambia, where she visited more than 13 different agencies that work with children orphaned by HIV. She plans to return this year to establish deeper roots with one or two of these organizations. She is grateful for a lifestyle that allows her to pursue these activities.
“My greatest advice to anyone is to find what you love and balance your life,” says Meredith. “Even though I’ll never get rich with The Mad Potter, God has blessed me with a very rich life. My company is not my entire life, but it provides for my life.”