‘I don’t have a good filter’: East Fork’s Connie Matisse on scaling a brand while staying true to its roots

A lot of changes have happened at Asheville, North Carolina-based East Fork Pottery over the last year.

For one, its CMO and co-founder Connie Matisse became the brand’s CEO earlier this year. Her husband Alex had been chief executive since its launch in 2009, but the two decided that Alex would begin focusing on more longterm plans and Connie would become the day-to-day top leader. What’s more, the ceramics company grew during the pandemic -- and became profitable. “We are coming up on 11 months of consistent profitability, which is huge for us,” Matisse said on this week’s episode of the Modern Retail Podcast.

But economics are only part of the equation for East Fork. Indeed, the brand has been trying to make its name known while remaining both transparent and true to the company’s core values. On the website, East Fork lists its values as compassion, equity, sincerity, accountability and adaptive tenacity. Much of that work involves making sure East Fork’s workplace is equitable, which has been a years-long process for Matisse. The company has had to rethink how it finds talent, for example; it was about “recognizing that our recruiting and hiring practices were not working as far as like fostering a truly inclusive and equitable culture,” said Matisse. Another part is telegraphing a transparent brand in an honest way.

For Matisse, East Fork’s voice and ethos is an extension of her very being. “I don’t have a good filter, I’m getting better,” she said. “But that kind of lended itself quite easily to being really transparent, because it seems like the only thing to do.”

East Fork began as a boutique pottery outfit and grew into a national brand. That came with a lot of growing pains. For one, it meant figuring out how to scale up production while not losing its identity. It also meant creating a business plan for a brand that began very organically.

All this put together makes for a stressful -- but exciting -- time for Matisse. “I’ve been working on my staffing plan for [the next] one and three years,” she said. “I need to hire like 12 people in the next six months -- actually, completely overhaul, restructure, create a sales and marketing and like build a whole new company in a year. So I’m a little freaked out right now.”