Matkarma

The brief.

Indian potters lose a quarter to a third of every batch to breakage, and none of it goes anywhere. I designed a service that turns that loss back into income, without asking the potter to do anything new.

My part

Everything: cluster visits, interviews, the service model, costing, and the field officer’s app.

Setting

Pottery clusters in Hyderabad and Pune. Potters, roadside sellers, and the buyers who never find them.

Status

Service designed and costed. Field app prototyped. Marketplace screens are next.

The loss, in three numbers

Every broken pot raises three questions

• Who collects it?
• What is it worth?
• Who will buy it?

Today nobody answers any of them, so the pile grows behind the kiln.

Secondary research: four chances to break.

Before the clusters, I traced a pot’s life from wheel to market. It can crack at every stage, and each stage hands the loss to someone.

1. ShapedAt the wheelAn air pocket or an off-centre wall shows up later as a crack.
2. DriedIn the yardUneven sun and wind crack pots before they see any fire.
3. FiredIn the kilnOpen kilns heat unevenly. One bad firing erases a week of work.
4. MovedOn the cartEvery load to market loses a few more. The seller absorbs that.

What desk research told me

• Fired clay never becomes clay again. Above 550–600°C it loses its chemically bound water for good. Shards can become grog, aggregate or craft stock, but not new pots.
• Most breakage starts in the kiln. Traditional open kilns are documented as producing weak ware and heavy breakage, which better kiln design reduces (Govind et al., 2022).
• Pottery has no organising layer. Milk has dairy cooperatives and handloom has federations. Pottery has nothing that pools scattered loss into something worth collecting.
• Ground fired clay has a future. It behaves pozzolanically and is studied as a partial cement replacement. It’s the most promising route and the least proven.

Field research: where the wheel turns.

Two weeks in pottery clusters in Hyderabad and Pune. I wanted the workflow under my fingernails, not a checklist of pain points.

1. Contextual inquiryWorkshops, kilns, drying yards and markets, 2 weeks
2. Interviews12 potters and 6 sellers, long-form
3. On the wheelThrowing pots myself, to feel where they fail
4. Stakeholder mapBuyers, hubs, CSR, the material’s afterlife

Three things I saw

• Storage is a burden, not just a cost. Sharp piles build up in already cramped workshops. They’re a hazard, and a quiet reminder of lost work.
• There is no word for sorting. Broken pieces are just rubbish. No one has a way to describe shards, because there has never been a reason to.
• The digital divide is real. Most potters don’t own a smartphone. Those who do use it for calls and voice notes.

Two people, one loss.

The potter absorbs breakage at the kiln. The seller absorbs it again on the cart. Neither has a word for the pile, and neither has ever been offered anything for it.

The problem: nobody is counting it.

This isn’t a pricing problem or a marketing problem. It’s an infrastructure problem, and its costs compound.

1. MaterialClay, glaze and fuel

   Paid for once, then lost for good. Fired clay can’t be reworked.

2. LabourHours, days, a kiln cycle

   Time at the wheel, days of drying, a full firing. None of it comes back.

3. PrideGood work becomes rubbish

   The most cited frustration wasn’t money. It was watching finished work get thrown out.

The gaps I was actually solving

Why prevention comes first

Deliberately unquantified. I didn’t collect verified output or price figures, so I won’t put a rupee number on it. The ordering holds without one.

What I took from it.

Four questions inside it

1. ValueGet value out of breakage

   without putting new work, new tools or a smartphone in the artisan’s hands?

2. PriceGive shards a grade and a price

   when neither the material nor the trade has ever had a way to describe them?

3. DemandReach the buyers who already want this

   at a volume that makes collecting worth doing in the first place?

4. PreventionBreak fewer pots to begin with

   because a pot that survives sells by the piece, and a shard only ever sells by the kilo?

The move: take the smartphone out of the artisan’s hands, and put the system on the two people who were always going to hold one, the field officer and the buyer.

Assumptions I designed for

Ideation: three problems, three versions.

The model went through three versions. Every idea below was tried on paper or in a spreadsheet, and most were dropped for a reason.

How the model changed

1. v1 · A cooperativeHub-and-spoke, modelled on dairy co-ops. 50 potters, three sales channels.
2. v2 · A pilotOne cluster, one field officer, one conversion point. Prevention first.
3. v3 · Demand-ledA CSR anchor buyer sets the volume. Collection follows it.

The service: one route, one rate card.

A field officer runs a weekly route through the cluster, advises on what caused the breakage, then weighs, grades and pays for what broke anyway, in front of the potter.

Service blueprint. The line isn’t the usual line of visibility. It marks who has to operate software, and who doesn’t.

From cracked pot to sale

1. 01A pot breaksIn drying, firing or transport. Now it has somewhere to go.Potter
2. 02Weekly pickupThe officer arrives on a fixed route and weighs the pile.Field officer
3. 03Paid on the spotCash in hand and a printed slip. Logged on the phone.Field officer
4. 04Hub intakeSorted by grade and colour, cleaned and stocked.Hub
5. 05Converted locallyMosaic artisans and grog makers within ~50 km.Hub
6. 06BoughtBy the piece, by the kilo, or as a CSR programme.Buyer

Three doors, the potter picks

Where it goes: demand is the scarce input.

Fired clay can’t become clay again, so recycling is off the table. But stakeholder mapping turned up six routes where the damage doesn’t matter, or is wanted.

• Film and set designProps read better weathered. A chipped rim is a feature.
• Cafés and interiorsShard walls, planters and counters, bought for texture.
• Mosaic and craftArtisans turn shards into surfaces that sell by the piece.
• Workshops and studiosClasses need cheap, forgiving material in bulk.
• Farm boundary markersFound in the field, not in a report. Durable and local.
• Ground clay additiveA partial cement replacement. Promising, least proven.

Three channels, one inventory

Sells by the piece

RetailFinished mosaic work and craft kits. Best margin, smallest volume.

Sells by the kilo

BulkGraded shards for landscapers, set designers and fit-outs. Moves tonnes, pays little.

Buys the programme

CSROne company commits to a livelihoods programme and a volume up front.Load-bearing

Costing it broke my first model

Sizing the pilot

1. 01Prevention before collection.

   A pot that never breaks sells whole at its piece price. A broken one can only ever sell by weight. So the officer advises on kilns, drying and packing first.

2. 02Convert within ~50 km.

   Shards are dense and cheap. Freight is the binding constraint, so conversion stays local.

3. 03One anchor buyer before fifty potters.

   Every potter I met had more breakage than they knew what to do with. The pilot’s job is to land a buyer, then size collection to it.

Try it: pay for a week’s breakage.

Before the screens, here’s the field officer’s flow working. Weigh, grade, turn the phone to the potter, pay. The slip prints below.

The field officer’s tool.

Keeping the potter off software puts the whole digital surface on one role. The brief for that tool is a place, not a feature list.

One transaction, five screens, no menu

The turn-around screen

• 12.5 kg × ₹8 = ₹100

Weight, rate and total at the same size, facing the potter, before Pay can be reached. Trust is the reason a week of breakage gets handed to a stranger on a motorbike. It has to be earned in front of them, every visit.

Where it could fall apart.

A cooperative fails on operations, not on the idea. These are the places I expected it to break, and what’s designed in.

• 01Why would a potter trust us?Middlemen have a long history here.

  Designed in: Cash on the spot, a public rate card, and a slip every time.

• 02Quality disputes“That pile was worth more.” Both directions.

  Designed in: Three plain grades, a photo on intake, and the screen turned to the potter.

• 03No signal on the routePayments can’t wait for a network.

  Designed in: Offline by default. Payments queue and sync in range.

• 04Sharp, heavy logisticsShards cut hands and are costly to move.

  Designed in: Standard intake bins, gloves, and conversion within ~50 km.

• 05Seasonal cash flowDemand is festival-driven. Lean months hurt.

  Designed in: Advances against future pickups, modelled on dairy co-op credit.

• 06Festival surgesDiwali and weddings spike breakage.

  Designed in: Hub overflow storage, and year-round retail to smooth supply.

• 07Bypass riskWhy not buy straight from the potter?

  Designed in: The value is grading and volume. One potter can’t fill a bulk order.

• 08Remote pottersVillages with no hub nearby.

  Designed in: Dense clusters first. Fortnightly routes later.

What I learned.

1. 01

   Subtraction is a design move.

   The strongest decision was removing the screen from the person the project was for. The service got better.

2. 02

   Cost the model before scaling it.

   I spent weeks making collection scale before the numbers showed collection was never the constraint.

3. 03

   Watch what the phone is for.

   Two days of seeing a phone used only for calls changed the brief from a selling app to a logistics service.

What I’d test next

1. Run one route for a month and see whether potters keep setting shards aside.
2. Hold one real anchor-buyer conversation before collecting a single kilo.
3. Test the turn-around screen at noon, in a yard, with slip on my hands.

Jo toota, wo bhi kaam aaye.Let what broke also be of use.

Research, photos, the service model, costing, screens and design decisions are my own. Illustrations were generated from my field notes.