How a Leeds ceramics studio turned a 94-name waiting list into full courses

Kiln Row Ceramics runs out of a converted joinery workshop off Kirkstall Road in Leeds. Twelve wheels, four eight-week evening courses a term, 48 places, and in September 2024 a waiting list of 94 names that Bethan Crowe kept in a folder in her inbox. That term she ran the Tuesday beginners course with nine people on twelve wheels.

Where the studio started

Bethan trained as a ceramicist, spent six years selling at markets, and opened Kiln Row in 2021 with a bank loan and twelve secondhand wheels. Courses cost £245 for eight weeks including clay and firing, which makes each empty wheel a £245 hole in a term.

The studio was never short of interest. A single Instagram post about the autumn intake would bring 30 or 40 messages, and Bethan copied every name into a folder marked "waiting". By the third year that folder held 94 people.

Adult craft teaching has had an unusually good decade in Britain. The Crafts Council has spent years tracking the growth of the UK craft market and the appetite for learning making skills, and any city-centre studio owner will say the same thing from experience: getting people to want a place is not the hard part.

What it did not hold was anything useful about them.

• No record of which evening anyone actually wanted, so a Tuesday opening was offered to people who could only do Thursdays.
• No record of when a name went on the list, so a 2022 enquiry looked identical to a 2024 one.
• No record of the last contact, which meant re-asking people who had already said no.
• Taster evenings advertised as "drop in any Wednesday from 6", with nobody expected by name.
• Mid-course drop-outs handled by a message to the general studio group, usually a week or two after the wheel went quiet.

The September 2024 Tuesday course was the point it stopped being tolerable. Nine students, three empty wheels, £735 of the term gone, and a folder of 94 people who had at some point asked to be there.

What was actually wrong

Bethan spent an evening working through the list by hand and found three separate problems wearing one coat.

The first was decay. She started working through all 94 by hand one evening and gave up somewhere in the seventies. Of the people who did reply, a large share had already done a course elsewhere, several had moved out of Leeds, and a handful of the rest could no longer do the evening they had originally asked about. The list was not 94 people, and she had been treating the number as an asset for two years.

The second was the taster evenings. Across the autumn term Kiln Row offered 24 taster slots and 11 went unused, because "drop in any Wednesday" is not a commitment in either direction. Each unused slot had cost a real wheel on a real evening.

The third was speed. When a student dropped out in week three of a course, the average gap before somebody else took the wheel was 24 days, by which point the course had four weeks left and nobody wants to join a course four weeks in. In practice a week-three drop-out meant the wheel was dead for the term.

"I told people for two years that we were oversubscribed, and I believed it," Bethan says. "Then I counted, and what I actually had was 94 names, three empty wheels on a Tuesday, and no way of getting from one to the other."

"I had 94 names and three empty wheels, and no way of getting from one to the other."

What Kiln Row set up in Bitir

Bethan moved the whole intake process across in January 2025. The structure follows the approach in our guide to waiting lists and trial session management.

1. The waiting list is its own private group. Each enquiry is a member record holding the evenings they can do, the date they joined the list, the level they want and the date of the last contact.
2. Re-confirmation is a poll with a deadline, every eight weeks. One question, three answers: still looking, found something else, or changed which evening I want. Anyone who ignores two consecutive polls comes off.
3. Taster evenings are named slots. A specific Wednesday, a specific 90 minutes, six places, with a joining note about aprons, timings and where to park behind the building.
4. A reminder goes the day before, with an easy out. One tap to cancel, which releases the slot to the next person on the list that evening.
5. An offer of a place carries 72 hours. The message says what happens if they do not reply, and that they keep their position on the list either way.
6. Each running course is a private group. Week-by-week technique notes, glaze firing dates, photos of finished work, and a check-in that quietly shows who has stopped turning up before they formally drop out.

The first re-confirmation poll went out in February 2025 to all 94 names. Thirty-one said they were still looking, 19 said they had found something else, and 44 never answered and came off the list after a second ask a fortnight later.

The decision Bethan argued about with her studio assistant was culling the list. Cutting 94 names to 31 felt like destroying the studio's best evidence of demand, and it took two terms before she stopped flinching at the number. Her position now is blunt: a name that has not answered two questions in four months is not demand, it is a memory of demand, and keeping it in the list is what made the list too slow to use.

What changed in the numbers

Bethan compared the spring term of 2026 against the autumn term of 2024, using the same occupancy measure both times.

The occupancy figure is the one that pays the rent. Across four courses a term, 78% to 97% is roughly nine extra places filled per term, which at £245 is about £2,200 a term the studio was previously leaving on the wheel.

The refill time is the one Bethan finds most satisfying, because it required no marketing at all. A cancellation on a Sunday night now goes out as an offer on Sunday night, with a Wednesday deadline, to somebody who confirmed six weeks ago that they wanted exactly that evening. Two days is mostly the time it takes the new student to buy an apron.

The rebooking number came from somewhere she did not expect. Each course group stayed active after the eight weeks ended, so students who had made a mug together were still posting photos of what they made at home. When the next intake opened, Bethan announced it in those groups first. Twelve of the 21 rebookings last term came from a course group rather than the waiting list, which matches what our guide to group retention describes: the cheapest new member is the one who never really left.

What Bethan does in Bitir

• A waiting-list group with one member record per enquiry, holding preferred evenings, level and last contact date.
• Polls with deadlines for the eight-weekly re-confirmation and for taster evening sign-ups.
• Dated sessions for taster slots, with a joining note and an automatic reminder the day before.
• A private group per course, running from week one and left open afterwards.
• Attendance each week, which flags the student who has missed two sessions before they disappear.
• Photo sharing inside the course group, where work stays visible to the eight people who were there rather than to the internet.

What she would tell another studio

• Count your list before you trust it. One evening of asking will tell you what fraction is real, and it will be lower than you think.
• Ask which evening, not whether they are interested. Interest without a slot cannot be matched to a cancellation.
• Never advertise a taster as "drop in". Name the date, name the person, send the reminder.
• Put a deadline in the offer. Politeness without a deadline is how a wheel stays empty for three weeks.
• Keep the course group open after the course ends. It is the best intake channel the studio has and it costs nothing.

"The list got shorter and the studio got fuller. Those two things turned out to be the same decision."

What's next

Bethan is adding a Saturday morning parent-and-child session aimed at the people who keep asking for weekday evenings that do not exist, and she wants a studio-assistant role that can take attendance and mark taster attendance without seeing enquiry contact details. She is also considering a short four-week block between terms, mainly as a route in for the 14 people on the current list who have been waiting longest.

Related reading: how oversubscribed clubs manage waiting lists and trial sessions, and how to run a holiday club that fills.