The nearly 50-year-old Hill Potters Guild has launched a cheeky campaign intended to introduce pottery—and one of Richmond Hill’s longstanding arts organizations—to a younger audience.Excerpt: Richmond Hill’s Hill
By Staff Writer
A Richmond Hill pottery group has found an unusual way to get people talking about one of the world’s oldest crafts: opening an OnlyFans account.
The Hill Potters Guild has launched a campaign called “Ceramics Are Sexy,” using playful videos and advertising inspired partly by the famous pottery scene in the 1990 movie Ghost. The campaign was developed with Toronto creative agency Blackjet and is intended to challenge the idea that pottery is an old-fashioned or overly serious hobby.
OnlyFans is widely associated with adult material, but the subscription platform can also be used by artists, fitness instructors, musicians and other creators. The guild says its campaign is not about posting explicit content. Instead, it uses tasteful humour and pottery-related wordplay to introduce viewers to the physical, tactile experience of working with clay.
Kathy Verbeek-Chawrun of the Hill Potters Guild acknowledged that the proposal initially raised some eyebrows among members. But after seeing the concept, she said the group considered it clever, tasteful and a fun way to talk about pottery.
“The biggest surprise has been how quickly people got the joke,” she told Auburn Lane. “They come for the OnlyFans, but they stay to learn about ceramics.”
The campaign includes tutorial-style and behind-the-scenes material emphasizing the hands-on nature of pottery. Guild representatives say working with clay offers people an opportunity to step away from phones and computers, concentrate on a physical task and create something tangible.
That message may appear slightly ironic coming through a platform such as OnlyFans, but the contrast is part of the campaign: use an attention-grabbing digital idea to encourage people to spend more time making things in the real world.
The publicity has already taken the guild well beyond its usual local audience, earning coverage from several Toronto and Canadian culture and advertising publications.
The Hill Potters Guild has been teaching ceramics, holding exhibitions and participating in Richmond Hill community events for nearly five decades. It operates from Burr House at 530 Carrville Road and regularly holds classes, demonstrations and pottery sales.
Its spring sale earlier this year featured work by 30 local potters, including functional kitchenware, decorative pieces and ceramic art.
For longstanding community organizations, attracting younger members can be difficult. Traditional advertising may reach people already interested in the arts but struggle to introduce the organization to residents who have never considered taking a pottery class.
The OnlyFans campaign is certainly unconventional, and not everyone will appreciate the joke. But it has succeeded at something many local arts groups find difficult: making people stop, look and ask what the organization actually does.
The real test will be whether online attention translates into new students, members, visitors and customers for Richmond Hill’s local artists. For now, however, the Hill Potters Guild has demonstrated that an organization approaching its 50th anniversary can still surprise people—and that even an ancient craft can find a very modern marketing strategy.