newsletter october 2024

Dear all,

This will be the first of many monthly update emails from Anders and me. Through these, we aim to celebrate our successes, share new initiatives, provide status updates from each department, and give insights into our current focus.

In September, we opened YONOBI's third café, this time in our lovely space in Aarhus. Welcome to Julie Le Fevre and her team, who manage the café daily. A special thanks to workshop manager Birgit Marie for her extra effort in reorganizing the workshop into a café and pottery space.

A new graphic expression
In 2023, we began a journey to redefine our graphic identity with Japanese artist Agata Yamaguchi Colle. This collaboration resulted in a poetic rebranding of YŌNOBI.

Agata explains:
"I led the rebranding of YONOBI in Copenhagen, which sells unique, handmade ceramic works from global artists and offers pottery courses. The renewed logo reflects YONOBI’s philosophy of balancing beauty and functionality, symbolizing the letter Y and clay being repeatedly twisted and kneaded by hand."

This new identity is now present across our business—from postcards to the webshop.

Where are we, and where are we headed?

Over the past month, we have seen some fantastic results that we can all be proud of. In Odense, our café has had more than 700 visitors, which is an impressive milestone. In Copenhagen, all our evening workshops are fully booked for the rest of the year – a huge success! Aarhus has also seen a significant improvement after a quiet summer. They are ending September with an occupancy rate of 39%, which is an increase of over 20% from the previous month. This is an amazing result, which could not have been achieved without your hard work. Well done, everyone!

We are still facing challenges, especially financial ones this autumn, as we are dealing with the 'backlog' from the low turnover in the spring and summer. However, these successes show that we are on the right track. Let’s continue focusing on attracting more customers and strengthening the new concepts that are already bearing fruit.

Remember, you are always welcome to provide feedback. Your insight into our customers, etc., is of great importance to us. It's just Anders and me, so we don’t have time to talk with everyone, but your workshop and café managers have open doors and are in close contact with us every week. They are well-informed about the company's operations and are ready to listen and help.

Last but not least...

A huge shoutout to our instructor Christian Rask for bringing the Yonobi spirit to DR’s hit show Married at First Sight! One of the couples had a pottery date at our place, and it was fun to see our little corner of the ceramics world in the spotlight. Christian, you’re doing an amazing job—thank you for representing us so well!

Finally, we want to share some messages that warm our hearts and remind us why what we do matters. It's thanks to your efforts that we can continue this journey. Thank you for always giving 110%!