Over the holiday season Rabbit Hill, upon urging from Heath Croft, posted a picture of their Jr. Executive mug in Navy w/White on their facebook page.

The artwork is fantastic, and you’ll see the back fill area of the sky in their design really makes the clouds pop… The other amazing thing about this picture is the number of comments that it received! From posting a single picture of their mug, Rabbit Hill Inn now has their guests talking.

If you have mugs in your inn, and a facebook page then please do us, and yourself, a favor and post a picture of your mug!!! Getting a conversation going about your property and your mugs is a great way to utilize facebook and your blog. Keep it short and real and have fun!!!

Wishing you all a prosperous 2011!

Thank you for reading our blog~
Niles Deneen, VP, Marketing

At the start of this year with all of the economic uncertainty we decided to head out to more bed and breakfast conferences in the hopes of attracting new customers. A few weeks back my dad attended the Illinois Innkeepers conference where he met many lovely people that had not heard of Deneen Pottery, and were unfamiliar with our hand made mugs.

Our booth usually takes the longest to set up and tear down as we have so many different styles and colors of handmade mugs that need to be displayed. This is where my dad feels the most confident, order pad in hand, discussing the benefits of using our handmade mugs to serve coffee to guests.

The 10-15 minutes that is used to tell stories about successful inns, can mark the beginning of a relationship that we hope to enter with a new customer…

Then the fun begins with choosing the right style of custom mug, the custom design that will be placed on the stoneware, and then the appropriate custom glaze color. We have 11 styles of custom mugs and 31 solid glazes and over 64 different marble glaze variations. This means for an order size of 100 mugs, where 2 styles can be selected with 4 different glaze options, the order can have 6270 different possibilities! While overwhelming in it’s size that is why my dad, Julie Longtin (our GM) or myself – Niles Deneen can help by giving suggestions that keep things simple.

Nothing makes any of us here at Deneen Pottery more pleased than going over the popular custom glaze colors, or stoneware mug styles that we customize for each order.

We’ve got another big show coming up next week – The Innkeepers Conference and Trade Show sponsored by PAII… The Professional Association of Innkeepers International. Hope to see you there!