Marriage + Business - RBD Pottery

Hi! I’m Jamin Bultman and I run RBD (Rachel Bultman Design) Pottery with my wife, Rachel. Running a business as a couple has taken us down a crazy, fun and unpredictable road together, but it’s been more rewarding than I could have imagined.

Rachel and I both met in Homer, a small town in Alaska. It’s literally located at the end of the road: the furthest point of America’s continuous highway. I moved up there when I was 18 to go to a tiny Bible College and get a job. At the time (in 2009), it seemed impossible to get a job back in Michigan where I was from. Rachel had lived in Homer since she was 12, but we’d never met until she got back from college and we both ended up becoming baristas at a little coffee roaster & cafe. We became best friends almost instantly which was a pretty rare feat for both of us. We spent all summer working and camping together until I realized that I was in love with her. Lucky for me, Rachel had just been waiting for me to figure that out. A few days more then a year after we met, we got married. 

At the time, Rachel was going to college in Anchorage and working on her BFA (bachelor of fine arts) degree. She loved oil painting (portraits especially), but after taking a ceramic class she started to get really interested in sculpture and clay. The summer we were dating she decided to wrap her credits into an Associates Degree and she began interning with a local potter in Homer to get access to more clay. When her pieces combining surface art and functional ware (mugs) started selling, we realized that we could make some side money with this. I built a pottery studio in our house with the money she made and suddenly we had a business. 

Our business has given us the opportunity to work together on something that we both really love and it’s been so good for our relationship. It made us comrades in a battle to grow our brand, to come up with new ideas and to try and make the best products possible. That drive and teamwork has kept us going through the long hours and the times when we didn’t know how we were going to make it.

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