Why I Created Sunflower Sundry
For a long time, I thought I had to pick one thing.
Pick the thing you're good at. Pick the thing that pays the bills. Pick the thing that fits neatly on a business card. I tried to do that for years, and every time I picked, I left something behind that mattered to me just as much as the thing I kept.
I make pottery and jewelry by hand, wheel-thrown and slab-built, shaped a piece at a time in my own space. I'm also a certified professional life coach, and I work with people on consulting projects that have nothing to do with clay at all. On paper, those three things don't look related. For a while, I believed that meant I needed three separate businesses, three separate identities, three separate versions of myself to show up depending on who I was talking to.
So that's what I did. I had a version of myself for the coaching calls, buttoned up and credentialed and careful with her language. I had a different version for the consulting work, sharper and more clinical, someone who led with frameworks instead of feelings. And I had a quieter version who existed mostly alone in the studio, hands covered in clay dust, who I didn't talk about much in the other two rooms because she didn't seem to belong there. I kept them separate on purpose. I thought that was professionalism. I thought that was what it meant to be taken seriously in more than one field at once, to make sure none of the versions bled into the others and made me look unfocused, or worse, unserious.
What it actually did was exhaust me. Every switch between those versions cost something. I'd finish a coaching session and have to consciously set down that voice before I could pick up a client email that needed the consulting voice instead, and by the time I got to the studio at the end of the day, I often didn't have much left for the part of me that most wanted to be there. I was managing three separate performances instead of running one integrated life, and the seams between them were where all my energy was leaking out. Nobody got the whole of me in any of those spaces, including, most days, myself. I'd catch myself mid-sentence with a client, editing out a thought because it belonged to the wrong version of me for that particular room. That's a strange kind of loneliness, being fragmented on purpose and calling it strategy.
The part that finally cracked it open for me was noticing that the compartments weren't actually protecting anything. I wasn't more credible to coaching clients because they didn't know about the pottery. I wasn't more polished with consulting clients because I hid the parts of me that get their hands dirty for fun. If anything, the hiding cost me trust I didn't need to spend, because people can generally tell when they're getting an edited version of someone instead of the real one, even if they can't name what's missing. I had built walls to protect my credibility, and the walls were the thing quietly undermining it.
Sunflower Sundry is what happened when I stopped believing that.
A sunflower doesn't ask what kind of plant it should be. It grows the way it's built to grow: rooted, steady, always turning toward the light. It doesn't apologize for having deep roots and a wide face. It just grows, season after season, a little taller and a little more itself each time. That's the image I kept coming back to when I thought about what I actually wanted to build. Not a brand that fit into one lane, but one that could hold everything I do the way a single root system can hold multiple blooms.
So that's what Sunflower Sundry is. It's the clay work, shaped slowly and finished by hand. It's the coaching, where I sit with people who are standing at a crossroads and help them find their next direction. It's the consulting, where I bring the same grounded, clear-headed thinking to projects and organizations. Different mediums, same source. Same person, showing up fully in each one instead of splitting myself into pieces to fit somewhere else's idea of what a business should look like.
I named it Sundry on purpose. It means various, of different kinds, and I wanted that word doing quiet work in the background every time someone reads it. This isn't a business that does one thing. It's a business that holds several things, because I hold several things, and I got tired of pretending otherwise.
If you're here for the pottery, welcome. If you're here because you're in the middle of a career pivot and looking for someone to walk alongside you, welcome. If you're here because you're not sure yet which part of this speaks to you, that's welcome too. That's kind of the point.
Create boldly. Grow steadily. Bloom fully. That's not just a tagline I picked for the homepage. It's the actual instruction I've been trying to follow, and it's the invitation I'm extending to you.
Thanks for being here at the start of it.
Carrie
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