Back From A Closure, Clayroom Owner Moulds New Future

For four days, Chickie Hignett was out of business.

She packed the pottery from The Clayroom in Groton in boxes, stacked the studio chairs on her son’s SUV, and posted a note on facebook that she was closed. She erased her website.

“It was scary. It was downright scary,” said Hignett, 65.

Then, a breakthrough. The landlord across the street agreed to a lease she’d been trying to negotiate for a smaller place, and she had new studio.

She and a friend carried the shelves her pottery dries on across Route 1 themselves.

The Clayroom has been in business for three years, and Hignett said she wanted to stay in Groton because she’s invested here. But she couldn’t afford the retail rent in her old place. She knew she’d have to move close, or not at all; customers would stay with her if the new place was easy to find. Not if they had to go on a scavenger hunt.

The new place is across the street from the old Clayroom that was next to Book Trader, Etc. and Dunkin Donuts. It’s in a white house with light green shutters, in the back.

But getting there was a struggle. She had to put a resume together, for the first time in perhaps 30 years. Her daughter-in-law helped.

“Do you know they don’t even have a space anymore for objectives? It floored me,” she said. “Employers don’t care what your objective is.”

She applied to hotels, group homes, for desk work and for supervisory work. She hand-delivered resumes herself, “so people knew I didn’t drip from my nose and I didn’t shake and I could speak in coherent sentences.”

The response?

“Dead air,” she said.

She said she feels terrible for people searching for work.

“We all think people will recognize our talents, but unfortunately, that’s not the case,” she said. “So I came understand why people get discouraged out there.”

She said two things got her through: A positive outlook and faith.

“If I wasn’t meant to do this, it wouldn’t have happened. But it did.”

She believes the new place, about 800 square feet (the old space was 1,100 square feet), will do even better.

“It has a cozy energy,” she said. “The other had a friendly energy. People feel secure (here). There’s more community, more interaction, more chatter back and forth among other people in the room.”

“Everybody who comes here feels as if they’re coming home.”