We interview the family behind the brand that is Ground To Kitchen, the talented makers of your favourite handmade mugs.
They live in a beautiful cottage nestled in the mountains of the Sunshine Coast Hinterland and create stunning pottery for everyday use in the home. We had a chat with them to find out more about who they and their creative dreams.
Q. Tell us about the humans behind the brand?
Our names are Elliot and Lisa. We are a married couple with a little son named Oliver. We are both very passionate about creating hand made and home made goods with natural ingredients. Elliot’s main focus is pottery. He works full time for a pottery company in Noosa and in his spare time makes pottery for our little business.
Elliot enjoys making tableware and vases and things that create a purpose in the home to be regularly used and enjoyed.
Lisa worked for many years as a florist and has a love for arranging Australian dried flowers as well as making natural soaps. Soon we will be introducing her pieces to Ground to Kitchen and you will be able to purchase her dried flowers and soaps along with Elliot’s pottery.
We also both share a love for gardening and cooking and love growing flowers and eatable produce.
Q. Why did you choose to get into pottery?
The love of pottery began while holidaying in Japan. Elliot spent hours wandering around the old streets full of pottery stores and loved the traditional forms and glazes they used and the uniqueness to their tableware. He decided this could be something he could try his hand at when coming home. Within days of returning home Elliot was walking down the main street of Maleny and there in a op shop window was a pottery wheel. Elliot bought the wheel and began teaching himself from YouTube videos and the rest as they say, is history!
Q. What's the Big Dream for Ground To Kitchen? Anything to look out for in the future?
Currently all our sales are made via Instagram and word of mouth. Our dream is to expand our business to having an online store and possibly a little shop front. We also hope to grow and produce enough of our own home grown goods and honey from our bee hive to use for the business. We would love to make home made eatable goodies and sell jars of our honey as well as introducing honey in our soaps. We love the idea of having a sustainable, general store that sells our home made and home grown goods. We also talk about one day opening up our own cafe / food venue where we could not only sell our pottery and flowers etc but use our pottery to serve our food off and cook with the produce grown in our own garden.
Q. What is life really like living in the mountains? Best & Worst parts?
We love life in Maleny. We both enjoy the slower pace lifestyle and the open spaces. We also really love being apart of the small community and the general vibe and spirit the town gives. Little Oliver loves waving to the cows and horses on his morning walks and it was important to us to bring him up in the country where it is a little less busy and less “commercial”.
Q. If someone gave you $2mil to spend on your business tomorrow, what would you do?
We would definitely start up a food business where we would serve our meals on our own pottery and use as much of the produce we grow as possible in our meals. Anything we can’t grow we would try to buy local and seasonal. To own a local, sustainable, seasonal food venue where we could sell our home made pottery and other goodies and cook for others would be a dream.
Q. Something we love to ask everyone - If you could travel anywhere in the world and take anyone with you, where would you go, who would you take and why?
We would definitely do the Europe trip we were previously booked in to do when covid broke out and forced us to cancel our trip one week prior to leaving. We both love Italian food and we were heading to Italy to eat as much pizza and pasta as possible and learn to cook in Tuscany. We were also booked in to visit the country side of England and has plans to visit as many English potters we could find while traveling around. Hopefully one day soon we can re book and make the trip happen.
We hope you enjoyed getting to know more about the humans behind our beautiful products!
To Check out more of Ground To Kitchen's creations, you can follow them on Insta @ground_to_kitchen or check out their mugs online here!
Until Next Time...
Kate
