My shop, Cupsicum, sends porcelain all over the world: Canada, the USA, Britain, Denmark, Australia, New Zealand, Turkey and more. As things stand, my customers live in 42 countries.
Among them are lovers of beautiful vintage tableware, but also wedding agencies, groups who stage travelling tea parties, and even the BBC — who were filming a television series set in the 1920s and needed fashion magazines to build an authentic setting.
Which is why I love it when customers send me photographs of the things they have bought, in use as they were meant to be. And I love it even more when they tell me the stories.
There is a wonderful customer of mine, French by origin, living in British Columbia, who told me about her family and about building a porcelain collection for the generations to come. She gathers three generations of her family around one table and lays it in the English style; she says her small granddaughter looks forward every day to the family coming together, which happens once every three months.
I am also always hunting for rare things, both on my own account and to order.
I once found, and sent to South Korea, a missing tea duo of extraordinary rarity by Georg Heufel, late eighteenth century — hand-painted, from the famous Dresden porcelain. It has now settled for good in the careful hands of a private collector.
There are a great many vintage lovers in Russia now, too. A customer wrote recently in a review: "What a pleasure that purchase was! Thank you so very much!"
And another of my customers used one of the vintage-style cards I include with every order as the model for a piece of embroidery.
Stories like these do more than motivate and inspire. They have become the point of the work.