About Hive Porcelain
In Hive Design, We work with many brides who delight in using their wedding monograms beyond their invitations. Stationery, notepads, etched glass, and embroidered linens are lovely product extensions that resonate with our customers. Personalized porcelain was a natural next step, but there was not a wholesale resource available. Hive Porcelain was created out of desire to provide affordable food and dishwasher safe porcelain using classic and custom monograms. Our wholesale program was designed to fill a niche not currently being served. As we grow in our vision and product development, our gold-etched products have moved Hive porcelain beyond any current products in the marketplace.
For marketing, the words above suffice to distill Hive Porcelain’s story into a neat paragraph, but our story is neither neat or simply contained in a paragraph. Throughout my adult life, I loved being a wife, mother, and beekeeper. Following the end of my marriage, and with my children’s leaving home, there was a rip in my soul that I could not repair on my own. I was loved, deeply loved, by this community and endlessly entertained by my bees. As I healed, I was inspired by the opportunity to recreate myself as a stationer with the retirement and blessing of Gaston County’s sixty-five year stationery tradition, Torrence Stationer.
It was exciting to rebrand as Hive Design and move to the Main Avenue of Gastonia’s revitalizing downtown. It was scary too, but as a graphic designer with over thirty years experience, it felt like the right move. My soul began to heal, and I felt the warm embrace of this community as they showed up in loving support of the Hive. My vision of building a hive of creativity had come to life. I was..I am happy!
My given name is Merryman, so happiness is pretty much my default emotion. There are days of pure joy in the Hive even as we endlessly strategize to improve and scale the business. On the other hand, so many frustrating details combined with a natural shift in the stationery industry have shown us, the stationery may be only serving as an entrée to a greater vision.
It is exciting to be a part of a revitalizing community, yet the truth of why we need revitalization is found in the human stories, those of the people living on our streets, in our shelters, and inhabiting the rooms of recovery. These folks have rips in their souls, too. Some have wandered into the Hive and found their way to a meal, a path to recovery, an education, or a job. In 2018, Hive Design formed the Healing Hive Foundation. A percentage of each sale goes to the Healing Hive, yet the clarity around exactly how to best use these found greater definition during the the summer of 2019.
The little patch of the planet we live on is a land where the people were born to work with their hands in creation ~ like me. There are plenty of places that can create exquisite invitations, but fewer places that can harness creativity to change lives. Porcelain allows me to combine my love of typography, create a beautiful product, and give form to a business model that illuminates this life with much greater purpose. My vision for the Healing Hive Foundation is for women in recovery to learn to cast the porcelain we personalize in the Hive. One day, they will make the vessels we, as women, use to serve and nourish our families. This speaks to my soul. I love the idea of weaving prayer, intention, and movement into our days, as well. I recently shared this vision with a friend from Jerusalem. He challenged me that I was missing the most important gift of this vision…When porcelain is fired, it emerges purified from the flame. This does complete my vision…to create the beautiful objects we, as women, use to serve our families, and in doing so, we are born anew in the Hive.
