During the course of making countless ashtrays and playing around with just as many glazes, Seth started making a gloopy glaze out of melted globs of glass. As he put it, “I thought it looked cool and was texturally really unique.” When he tried to buy it he realized what he made wasn’t a thing anyone else was actually making. Which not only inspired him to learn how to make it at scale, but to keep playing around with it. It was when he started posting pictures of the Gloop, and saw the reaction to the Gloop, that he decided Houseplant should try and produce a Gloopy Ashtray based on his designs and glaze. Which leads pretty naturally right into our next section…

It’s one thing to make a glaze at home and apply it to a single piece, it’s another to create hundreds of almost identical pieces to sell online through your housegoods company. Knowing that he needed help to build the Gloopy beyond what he could do at home, he reached out to Curt Hammerly at Hammerly Ceramics. Together, they figured out the process, while Seth continued to explore what was possible with Gloopy colors and textures and designs.

When it comes to art, there’s an old saying that goes, and we’re paraphrasing here: “imperfection is perfection.” It’s a mantra Seth and Curt embraced when continuing to develop the Gloopy process. They started by making a prototype based on Seth’s original ashtrays and used that to create the base or body of the ashtray that they could then use to test with different colorways and finishes. It was apparent pretty quickly that brighter, poppier colors were going to work well to give the Gloopy part of the glaze a really nice contrast. The more it stands out from the base ashtray, the more dramatic the gloopy effect. As they started to work through the actual Gloopy part of things they realized that every piece would need to have the Gloop applied right in front of the kiln and then be fired immediately. Otherwise it could slide right off the piece. This process is not only more time and labor intensive than other pieces, but part of why every single Gloopy is a one-of-a-kind piece. The glaze has to be added by hand, and it’s a human hand that makes each one perfectly imperfect.