Pottery porn is the tag several of Eric Landon over 700,000 followers on the social platform Instagram puts on his work. The reason is mainly due to his proprietary film clips that show his golden-brown, muscular arms and supple hands shaping soft clay into organic, elegant shapes. So, the pottery porn from Copenhagen is in fact not porn at all.
Eric Landon from Copenhagen pottery design studio has amassed a huge following online supposedly due to his beautiful videos of the making process and wonderful shapes that he gets in the result. Tortus Copenhagen was founded by twin-brothers: Eric and Justin Landons. They combined their previous experiences, networks and passions and created a beast of a project, Tortus Copenhagen (2012).
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Pottery Porn from Copenhagen.
In 2016 his Instagram was covered by the NY Times Magazine: “Eric Landon […] has won serious accolades, including the 2015 Danish Design Award for Craftsman of the Year, for his work: simple, organic shapes glazed in appealingly muted pastels. And, in an age of fetishistic obsession with objects that are handcrafted, the 40-year-old Milwaukee native has harnessed the power of social media to do better than simply make the claim: He’ll show you exactly how it’s done, in mesmerizing Instagram videos that have earned him nearly 600,000 followers. Think “Ghost” without Demi Moore or the Righteous Brothers soundtrack”.
More than 7000 Instagram followers
Today @tortus has 766k followers and an average of 10k likes on posts. On their website Tortus describe itself as a design studio “with the love of making and passion for materials. So, like the noble creature from which we derive our name, we move at our own humble pace. By Tortus, we are dedicated to the modern adaptation of traditional and time-tested making methods with the goal of creating vessels of a timeless quality and beauty. Our production is based on a seamless dialogue between design and hand-work drives an ever-evolving production of ceramics rich in form, color and texture, making each encounter with our objects something unique”.
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Eric Landon of Tortus Copenhagen studied graphic design at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and moved to Copenhagen in 1999, where he graduated from the Royal Danish school of Design (2007). He has been awarded with a number of grants, international exhibition selections, and other awards for the quality of his work.
He decided to bring art to a more broad audience and has indeed succeeded and has revealed how sharing online has increased profits and allowed for more creativity.
Understanding both art and economy
Both a master potter and designer, Eric is focused on a constant refinement of both form and technique. For him, the one cannot evolve naturally without the other. His love for wheel thrown pottery started already at age 16 and has evolved into a way of life, his vocation. For Eric, shaping objects by hand is not a look back at the past. He firmly believes that hand-crafting objects of a timeless value is a way forward.
In an interview for the CEO Magazine, Eric Landon said, “I’ve actually been using my economics degree the entire time; being creative is just one part of what I do. I also have to understand the market, I have to understand pricing, understand things like scarcity and opening up your market to access the world market instead of thinking just locally. By doing that, we were able to create an exclusive brand pretty quickly — by concentrating on maybe one or two retailers in most major cities in Europe and in Asia.”
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World-wide distribution
Within a couple of years of launching, Tortus had built up its distribution in about 18 countries. Primarily it was wholesaling to retailers in its early years, but as a small company producing handmade objects that take considerable time (hence the tortus name), Eric explains it was difficult to turn a big profit. Eric considered that while retailers are great, they are essentially the middle man. So, in 2014 the brothers decided to focus on creating a more direct line of communication with their end consumers. They tried to see if they could get more direct sales and that’s when they created their social accounts. The rest is history.
Pottery Porn from Copenhagen, written by Tor Kjolberg