Closing Down.

Thank you.

It’s good to be here among people who care about creating new things and ideas, as well as telling the stories of the people who make them. I would like to thank Bianca for creating Junction Magazine, which is great at telling these stories and does it in a way that gives space to each story.

I want to talk about Morris & James. About what it was, what it survived, how it ended, and what I think we can take from it.

For more than four decades, Morris & James was a Matakana institution. It started with Anthony Morris, a potter with a vision, and it grew into something bigger than any one person: a factory, creative space, café and destination.

Pots and ceramics with a colour and character you could recognise across a garden, a courtyard, a whole country. That was the thing about Morris & James, whether you love it or hate it: the product was consistent. Year after year, you knew what you were getting. And we grew a large community around that: a love of Kiwiana and colour, something made here at home.

It survived a lot. Financial pressure more than once, including a receivership. A fire. And one of the hardest transitions any creative business can face: the shift from a single founding artist to a group of stakeholders carrying that vision forward. These things all put a strain on the business.

When the closure was announced, we saw something that told us everything about what Morris & James meant. It was totally unexpected. People came from everywhere. They wanted a piece of it before it was gone. The appetite was, and is, absolutely still there.

So why does a business with that much love behind it close?

This is the part worth sitting with, and as is common with these situations, it is never about any one thing. A common part is the economics of making things by hand, at scale. And the words that matter there are at scale. One potter, one studio, a handful of pieces: that can work. But handmade work, produced at volume, in a high-cost country? The maths is brutal. The very thing that makes the work special, the human hand, is the thing that’s hardest to sustain commercially when you need thousands of pieces, not dozens.

For the sake of completeness, I think it is also worth highlighting a couple of the other issues we had and their impact, as in time some of these may relate to your businesses as well.

Morris & James was on a reasonably large property, with the next generation of Morris children all living overseas. The land value was always going to put an end to the pottery at some point in time. We had also built up skills over the years, but it was getting harder to replace them as the workforce shrank and people retired or moved on.

As our costs went up, I spent more time working in the business rather than on it. We did miss opportunities, and one of my regrets was not looking more to leverage the brand, which may have extended the life of the business for us.

It is easy to get caught up in the day to day of the business, but it is also critical to take time to think about the longer term: what is changing in the economy and technology, who is going to buy my business when I want to sell, and how will they operate it. It is easily said, and I know you will have heard it before, but it bears repeating.

We’re not the only ones learning this. Look at Denby, the ceramics manufacturer in the UK, 217 years on: a heritage pottery, generations of skill, and they’re wrestling with exactly the same pressures right now. Slow demand, energy costs, higher input costs and the transfer of skill. This isn’t a Matakana problem. It’s a making problem for craft at scale.

So what’s the positive? What do we take away?

This: the appetite never died. People still want things made by human hands, made with care, made somewhere real, and a real experience. That hunger is the opportunity. The challenge for all of us, designers, makers, brands, the people in this room, is to find the models that let craft survive the economics. Smaller runs. Premium positioning. Telling the story, not just selling the object. Building the community around the brand or product.

Morris & James proved the demand is real, even though sometimes a particular way of doing things comes to the end of its life cycle. The work now is building businesses that can meet that demand and last. The Junction Awards are a great way of recognising this, and congratulations to you all for being here. Your customers think you are good.

Just under 50 years of beautiful work doesn’t end as a cautionary tale. It ends as a brief, handed to everyone here who still believes that things made by people, in places that matter, are worth fighting for.

Kieran Rice, Junction Awards keynote, 24 June 2026