Estimated reading time: 7 minutes

** Update on Dec 11, 2025: **

Reached out to my man AKS in Kathmandu. He states that “a couple of guys are doing something similar” around his part of town. Next step is to understand what exactly they’re doing, and see if there’s potential for collaboration.

AKS is interested in understanding and learning slip-casting, we’ll see where this goes when I’m in Nepal in Jan/Feb.

Couple of additional thoughts:

• If we needed to, how might we scale up the painting process for the pottery goods? If we created 2d masks for spray painting (in wood/metal, using cricut, or laser cutters), we could potentially really speed up mass production of relatively complex casts.
• How do they make those greek wedding plates? Might need it if we want breakable-pottery to use as celebration material!
  • Turns out they use porous clay, thin material, very thin glazes, low-temperature firing
  • Rapid cooling can introduce micro-cracks, which is good if you want your pottery broken!

** Original idea written on Dec 5, 2025, originally described on Nov 25, 2025:**

There is a channel called Pottery by Kent on YouTube, where Kent uses 3D printed forms to create concrete casts, to then slip cast pottery. He mostly creates slip casts bowls and cups.

3D printed forms to create concrete molds feels like a useful idea. We could iterate on new designs really, really fast. For the same 3D printed mold, you can create 10 or 20 concrete casts over several days, so there’s no need for ‘mass production’. Since each concrete mold can cast hundreds of final pottery products, a small volume of 3d prints can help mass produce pottery.

A challenge with innovating in mass‑produced pottery is creating new concrete molds and turning them into mass product. The cost of a new mold is high enough that you need to sell hundreds or thousands of your final product to justify the initial mold investment.

In Kathmandu the molds are currently made of carved wood. The design and iteration takes a long time, and that’s for the simpler designs, more complex designs with overhangs and angles takes forever.

My idea is for somebody (my friend AKS?) to learn slip casting pottery and use 3D printed support to create concrete molds. After he creates a couple of concrete molds, my goal is for him to go to other pottery makers. Industrial-scale cheap sellers or small‑volume pricey ones, go to them all, and understand the market for quick-turnaround pottery molds.

The turnaround time between an idea and the creation of even the most complex concrete mold could go from weeks to a day or two. The distance from an idea to a final glazed pottery product could be as close as three, four, or five days.

It does not have to just involve casting traditional pottery goods like flowerpots or decorative vases either. You could create a 3D positive of a scenery, for example, with people interacting or temples or mountains, and so forth, then create a negative from the concrete and then create a final part in clay. So, instead of making just bowls and pots, we could make pottery tablets of scenery or people that are in high fidelity.

Perhaps the scans from museums and temples could be turned into mass-produced clay-cast items that every house in Kathmandu could showcase. Or custom ones too!

This also allows us to create, for example, 3D printed bust of Mount Everest or various mountain ranges, turning that into a pottery item. Connecting water pumps to it, and so forth, and you would have a pottery diorama of water flowing down the mountains into the valleys and the plains. Basically, we could have Nepal’s geography, and temples, and national events and people represented as slip cast pottery, fully fired. It may or may not need to be glazed; that is beyond conversation at this point.

The other interesting option could be interesting innovations in existing traditional items. For example, when I was younger, people used to drink water from surahi, which is a long water pot that has a long space to help evaporate water. If we could rapidly iterate on surahi designs and karuwa designs, and so forth, we would decrease the necessary turnaround time. First, we could rapidly experiment with better designs, and second, iterate through designs that sell more, or get more press. Because the design iteration process is so rapid, cost per experiment would be low, and the final product of every experiment would be a lot cheaper. Besides, we’d still have the cement molds for old designs, so we could make pottery on order for hundreds of designs!

The idea would not be for us to do all the experimentation, etc., but for us to be the final endpoint that creates the molds, so other people can experiment and iterate, and so forth. We could start by showing people the possibilities of rapid iteration and experimentation, but the goal is not to make that the final product. For example, it would be pretty cool to have a flower pot that looks like Pashupatinath Temple, or looks like Bhaktapur or Swayambhu, or the Royal Palace, or Nepali buildings.

We could also create dioramas and geographical features. Another potential market could be 3d scanning people, and creating pottery versions of real people! ike they used to do family photos at photo concern! They could then get a painter or painters to paint the clay bust, so it would be quite a realistic representation of somebody in clay. It could also be a clay mask to give to people, which would be pretty cool. A a clay mask version of yourself or giving it as a gift to your family and friends.

It’s unclear if there’s a market for custom clay masks/casts in Kathmandu, and creating extremely custom, single‑build busts would probably not be super cheap. But that would probably be the cheapest way to achieve anything of this sort, particularly if we are able to perfect this process.

Maybe it could be a thing couples/families do for their weddings? Would couples be interested in creating scans as a couple, and handing them out as gifts? Or maybe families want to create a clay-versions of themselves?

Another idea: how about creating a market for mass-produced lifelike busts of politicians to be thrown and broken during protests, like they do in Greek weddings? Could be an interesting form of public protest, a creative one. Idea is to take from putla dahan, or burning of effigies of leaders, to destroying a pottery busts politicians and unpopular public figures…

How much does it cost to create corporate-branded pottery with intricate designs in Kathmandu right now? Could there be a market there?

Must talk to friend AKS in Kathmandu about this.

Question: How much sales can we gain with good marketing? Is it all a pie in the sky idea, or is there a legitimate latent market that can be unleashed with proper marketing?