On The Pot: A Pottery Playhouse

We are Julie & Robin Cates, and we opened On the Pot June 15, 2002.  We are two sisters raised in Salina.  Mom & Dad owned Jim's Country Style Chicken for 30 years before selling it to our good friends Pat and Trish Weems in 2009.  Luckily, we learned how to be small business owners during our formative years.  Robin spent several quality years at Kansas State University and earned her degree in Organizational Managment & Leadership.  She worked for Eddie Bauer Clothing Stores for about 100 years and decided to leave Eddie for more creative ventures.  Julie, who loves graduating from colleges (it's the outfit...so fun!), earned a B.S in Kinesiology from Kansas State and a M.S. in Sports Administration from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign.  She coached wheelchair sports at the U of I and went on to be the director of the wheelchair sports program at the Roosevelt Institute in Warm Springs, GA.  After two years in rural Georgia, she was ready to head back to the Mid-West and her family.  While On the Pot began as a five year plan in January 2002, God had other plans and accelerated it to a five month plan.  Woo Hoo!  It has been a fun ride and we hope to keep on going for a very long time! We have been so lucky to have super awesome customers and incredible staff, and that makes every day even better around here!

We are very involved in our industry. We write curriculum books that other studios use to teach our classes in their stores, and we teach business and technique classes at our annual national convention. We also have a super fun event in our studio every year called the Kansas Mini Convention. Studio owners from all over the country come to Salina once a year to take classes.