Maker Profile: Wandering Bud
Each piece is handmade with love:
meet Wandering Bud, a Kansas City ceramicist bringing creativity to a budding cannabis market.
Photo by Lauren Pusateri
We sat down with owner and founder of Wandering Bud, Riley Brain, to chat about creativity, cannabis, and community. Read on to learn more about the trials and triumphs of this small but mighty local business.
Photo by Lauren Pusateri
When did you get your start in ceramics?
If you want to go way back, I had a wonderful relationship with my middle school art teacher. I was 100% “teacher’s pet” and can remember handbuilding a little shoe out of clay in 7th grade, which I had a blast with. I think her investment in me as a person and as an artist/student helped build my confidence during a time in life that can be extremely awkward.
I ended up pursuing music education in college, and I only came back to really learn ceramics after becoming disillusioned with education as a career in 2016.
Where do you get inspiration for new designs and patterns?
Interior design is my biggest inspiration. Wallpaper, furniture shapes, textiles… I could spend hours scrolling home decor Instagram accounts and would love to re-paint and re-decorate my entire home every year if money and time were infinite resources. I think incorporating interior design principles and trends into pieces for Wandering Bud helps me channel that interest in a productive way.
Photo by Alyssa Broadus
When did you know it was time to grow your team, and what was that process like?
Growing our team is always a decision I agonize over for months before pulling the trigger on hiring. I take being an employer very seriously and want to provide the most supportive work environment I can, which takes money. So for me, I knew it was time to hire my first employee (hi, Molly!) when I was working crazy hours to get “everything” done, but “everything” wasn’t even scratching the surface on the demand. Staring at a sold out website with an inbox full of “when will this be restocked?” questions gave me the confidence to know I could pay someone consistently to help me make more product.
We are lucky in that we’ve always had so. many. incredibly qualified people apply for open positions, just by advertising the opening through Instagram. I’m talking 50+ applicants per position. We end each round of hiring wishing we could hire 5 applicants.
As we continue to add employees (we’re a team of five now!), our payroll costs obviously increase, which is by far and away our biggest business expense. Covering costs as we grow has been my biggest pain point; I am not a numbers or money person, but it’s been important for me to grow into that skillset. My role has transitioned through the years from solo maker to running the business. As someone who has no formal education in business, it’s been a steep learning curve. But I do really enjoy learning new things and while there have been many tears shed over our growing pains, I feel so proud of Wandering Bud and look forward to solving the many more problems that will arise in the future.
Photo by Giano Hurtado
When did you decide to make the jump into producing products for cannabis usage?
On a trip to Portland, OR in the Summer of 2016, I spent a week wandering the city, taking in the vegan food and the yoga studios and of course, the dispensaries.
At the time, Missouri was very much still in cannabis prohibition mode and spoke about the plant in hushed voices and behind closed doors. Oregon had just legalized cannabis for recreational use. I noticed the Portland dispensary shelves were full of the same novelty-aesthetic glass spoon pipes we had at head shops in KC. I had spent years shoving those pipes into drawers to hide them from “adults” in my life and was surprised to see there hadn’t been any innovation in pipe design in a state where cannabis was legal.
This realization aligned with the start of the 2016 school year, which hit me with a wave of dread. I didn’t want to teach; I wanted to make pretty pipes. So, I found a secondhand kiln on Craigslist, set it up in my basement, and taught myself to make ceramic pipes after school and on weekends.
Photo by Alyssa Broadus
We know you've faced immense challenges, like many small business owners, over the past couple of years- but one obstacle in particular has been the social media censorship of cannabis adjacent products. Can you share that experience?
When I first started Wandering Bud in 2016, it was challenging. Etsy deactivated my very first pipe listing and threatened to close my shop. But the sentiment in this budding industry was “if you’re here this early, keep pushing. It’s only going to get easier to operate in cannabis as time passes and tech regulations ease, and you will have been first to market.”
More than five years later, it’s harder than ever for us to exist on social media.
I’ve poured most of my social media efforts into Instagram, and it paid off for a long time. I remember the moment I hit 10k followers - I was running our booth at Boulevardia in 2019. A new customer walked up and we both watched that number tick over from 9,999 to 10k with big smiles.
By 4/20 last year, we had around 30k followers and were selling out of our products in drops we would advertise to our followers in advance. We were seeing 5-10k Instagram stories views per day, had dm’s and comments flying in so quickly I couldn’t keep up, and our website payment processor even thought we were experiencing fraud on 4/20 because we had never seen so many orders in a single day.
Skip forward to September of last year, and our Instagram reach had been slashed to 5-10% of where it had been in April. This was a direct result of Instagram rolling out a “sensitive content filter” and defaulting the filter to “limit” sensitive content (which I guess we qualify as?) on everyone’s profile. Instagram’s terms of service are very vague, and colleagues have seen their profiles completely shut down without recourse and for no stated reason.
When you build a business using one social media platform as the backbone of your marketing efforts, growing and hiring and planning for the future based on previous consistency from that platform, it feels like the wind has been knocked out of you when that gets taken away. Maybe this is a shame on me for not foreseeing this - I had a “don’t fix what’s not broken” approach to our marketing a year ago. But now Instagram is broken, so we are focusing on building our email list and diversifying. It’s been a really difficult time, but we’re learning so much, and I can see we will be much better off this year.
But sheesh, traditional marketing is expensive!
Photo by Lauren Pusateri
What’s your favorite part of running Wandering Bud full time?
I love the variety in my days and weeks. Every day feels like a choose-your-own-adventure. One day I may be setting up a mini-photoshoot in my bathroom (it has the best light for product photos), another day I may be designing a new product, or brainstorming with our team, or meeting with a potential stockist. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of boring business stuff in there too, but I don’t feel at all like I’m on a hamster wheel, which feels so good after leaving teaching.
What has pleasantly surprised you this past year? What are you most proud of?
Q4 of last year was the most challenging period I’ve experienced with Wandering Bud. Honestly, I’m just pleasantly surprised that I (and we) have made it through. And that we have developed big plans and goals in January that we are beginning to implement now.
I am 100% most proud of how our team has reacted to these challenges. They support me as I support them. When I came to them with some structural changes in how we do things, they embraced the plan with enthusiasm. They are just so down to make the changes we need to make to ensure Wandering Bud is successful and sees another 5 years. I don’t know how I got so lucky to have such an incredible group of women working with me.
Any words of advice for folks looking to make the leap from hobby/side gig to full time biz?
First, and I don’t mean to discourage anyone, but a hobby does not need to be a full time business. Monetizing a hobby to the point that you are reliant on that income can take the joy away from that practice. Suddenly this fun, creative thing you did now needs to be efficient and done even when you aren’t feeling creative.
That said, if you enjoy constantly learning new things and navigating murky challenges, then I’d say go for it! I don’t really subscribe to hustle culture; however, working nearly every evening and weekend on Wandering Bud while I was teaching is what allowed me to grow it to the point I felt comfortable leaving my stable teaching salary. Creating a new job out of nothing takes a lot of hard work. Balancing the paycheck-producing-job with necessary rest with growing a side hustle is really, really hard. But you can do it! Drink water, eat well, sleep, and move your body. You’ll be glad you did.
