As the holidays approach, think long and hard about your gifts—they might just launch a new career.
In 2017, Jerome and Benedicte Leclere were living in Brooklyn, both working in advertising. To decompress from their heady, computer-heavy work, the couple—high school sweethearts from France—had dabbled in multiple art forms and tactile crafts over the years, including woodworking and carving, knitting, macrame, sewing, and even Bonsai cultivation. So that year for Christmas, Jerome decided to gift Benedict a two-hour introductory pottery class. “It blew my mind,” Benedicte says of that first experience. “I got obsessed right away.”
Four years later, the couple is living in Saugerties; they have a child and a thriving, backordered ceramics business, L’Impatience, which employs them both; and their mugs have been featured on Food52—twice.
“It was hard to imagine back then that it would become our life,” Jerome says of that fateful Christmas present. The introductory workshop gave way to regular classes and then paid studio time. Eventually Jerome and some friends teamed up to buy the fanatical Benedicte her own wheel. She set up a tiny studio in one corner of their apartment.
That’s when Jerome tried his hand at throwing for the first time. “I didn’t think I would like it, personally,” he says. “But it’s funny—it ticks all the boxes. We are both pretty creative and have always liked hands-on crafts.” Benedicte taught him everything she was learning in class each week. “It became a real obsession for the both of us,” she says.
Controlling the Variables
As the couple continued cultivating their skills, they began looking for a home upstate, ultimately landing on a house in Saugerties. After closing in October 2018, the idea for a weekend home turned into a full-time relocation with a plan to continue doing freelance advertising work.
Moving upstate catapulted the Lecleres’ craft to the next level. In Brooklyn, they were creating pieces in their apartment and schlepping them to the ceramic studio in an Uber to be fired—a process that could take anywhere from two to three weeks, and over which they had no control. “We didn’t have access to the kilns,” Benedicte recalls. “We weren’t able to really see what was happening. It was very limiting.”
Having their own studio and getting a kiln, the Lecleres were able to control all the production variables and reintegrate the feedback loop. “There is so much that can affect the piece in the final stages—how much glaze, where you are going to put it in the kiln, how long you’re going to fire it,” Benedicte says. “In the city, we didn’t know if that piece turned out like that because it wasn’t laid properly on the shelf or because it was too high up. Being able to do all those tests ourselves really helped us change and improve a lot.”
Colorfast
Rather than working with common red clay and using glazes to add high-gloss color, the Lecleres opt for white stoneware clay, which they tint directly using ceramic stains. This means each batch of clay is colored and hand-mixed before throwing—a labor-intensive process that results in solid color throughout, lending the pieces a sort of artistic integrity that appeals to the couple. “We like the idea that the whole piece is one color,” Benedicte says. “If you pick it up it isn’t a different color underneath. If you break it, it isn’t revealing something.”
Fired at a whopping 2,232 degrees Fahrenheit, the stoneware undergoes a process called vitrification, in which it becomes fully solid. “It becomes so dense that it doesn’t leak water,” Jerome explains. Since the high-temperature process yields water-tight vessels, the Lecleres are not tied to all-over glaze as a waterproofing measure. Instead, they have developed a distinctive style, leaving the exterior of their mugs, jugs, and vases unglazed and the interior glazed (for food safety). “We love that contrast between the shiny, glossy effect of the interior and the outside of the piece which has a rougher feel.”
The L’Impatience line includes a candleholder, bud vases and bouquet vases, planters, dinner and dessert plates, bowls, aroma burners, mugs, colanders, and pitchers. The product selection is separated into collections by colorway. L’Impure is a classic white stoneware, L’ingenu is a soft coral color, and L’insolence is a greyish forest green. Embrace imperfections (and save some money) with the L’imparfait collection, which features pieces with small cracks, burn marks, minor aesthetic blemishes, or a mismatched color.
“The fun thing about ceramics is that there is no limit to what you can create,” Benedicte says. “There are a lot of chemical reactions and it is going to depend so much on what clay, what glaze. But the possibilities are endless and the learning process is endless. No one can say they know everything. It’s really exciting.”
Kismet Stroll
In April 2019, the week Benedicte was due, the baby was showing no signs of coming. So the couple decided to get out of the house and walk around to get things moving. Across the river in Hudson, they popped into Flowerkraut, a flower and houseplant boutique, and ended up buying a bouquet. Like any good florist, shopkeeper Amanda Bruns asked the couple if they had a vase at home. “We said, ‘actually, we make vases,’” Benedicte says, recalling the serendipitous conversation that led to the couple’s first-ever wholesale order. “We told her, ‘we’re going to have this baby, and then we’ll get started on your order,’” she says with a laugh.
Bruns’s order was the confidence boost the Lecleres needed. After finding daycare, the couple began calling around to shops throughout the Hudson Valley and got on the wholesale maker marketplace Faire, which connected them with small shopkeepers across the country. And lo, in a few short months they had more orders than they could fulfill. “We had to stop all our other work,” Benedicte says.
They were just hitting a stride when COVID threw a wrench in their wholesale plans. But after a scary, screeching halt, suddenly, in April, retail interest skyrocketed. “I guess as people were staying home and not spending as much money on restaurants, they decided they wanted to look at nice things,” Benedicte says. “The interest got pretty big and pretty overwhelming. It was too much for us to handle. We didn’t have enough stock to sell to direct to consumers.”
In June, they started leasing a 1,200-square-foot space in Midtown Kingston, a tenfold space upgrade from their home studio. Still, in just six months, they’ve already outgrown it and they’re still playing catch up on orders. In January, they’ll trade up for a 3,500-square-foot space in the Fuller Building. The Lecleres also just hired their first two employees, amateur ceramicists who are helping with prep and order packing while they hone their wheel skills. “It’s always very scary to getting bigger, but at the same time, it was just so frustrating to see that orders were coming in but we couldn’t make them because we didn’t have enough hands and time,” Benedicte says. “Having some employees allows us to have more time on the wheel. Soon we’ll be done catching up and able to plan ahead.”
Right now, they are planning for their open studio holiday market this weekend, December 11 and 12, where they’ll be joined by ceramicists Lail Design and Suga Pottery, with coffee from Black Dot Cafe in Stone Ridge and flowers from Flowerkraut. “It’s a market of really good friends and the occasion to share our space,” Benedicte says—a last hurrah before the move across Broadway.
The market will take place Saturday, December 11, 10am-5pm; and Sunday 11am-4pm at the L’Impatience Studio at 534 Broadway, Kingston.
