There are two profile fields almost everybody fills in at speed: the craft (your category) and the sub-crafts (what exactly you do inside it). They look like admin labels. They are in fact the mechanism by which a customer searching for a macramé class near them reaches you rather than someone else. Leaving them empty is not penalised: you simply do not exist in the filters.
The 17 categories
The list is closed on purpose. If every studio invented its own label, customers would be looking at a menu of two hundred entries and would stop filtering anything at all.
- Ceramics & Clay · Cooking & Gastronomy · Jewelry & Metalwork
- Textile & Fiber · Sewing & Tailoring · Basketry & Weaving
- Woodwork & Carpentry · Leather & Goods · Glass & Mosaic
- Painting & Drawing · Printmaking & Graphics · Paper & Bookbinding
- Candles, Perfume & Cosmetics · Floral & Botanical
- Sculpture · Musical Instruments · Restoration
Sub-crafts: where the real game is played
People do not search for ceramics. They search for the wheel, for raku, for hand building. Lower volume, far stronger intent: those searchers already know what they want and book much more often than people browsing at random. Sub-crafts are your only way to catch them.
You can list up to five, and the cap is there to protect you: five techniques describe a specialism, twelve say you have mastered none of them.
How to choose without getting it wrong
- Start from what you teach, not what you can do. If you can work glass but only run mosaic workshops, the sub-craft is mosaic.
- Use the words a customer would use. Not “coil building” but “hand modelling”, if that is what people call it.
- Leave out what you do once a year. A technique added for completeness brings enquiries you then have to turn down.
- Re-read them in six months. Your catalogue changes, the labels do not: it is the classic field nobody ever opens again.
Mistakes that cost visibility
- Leaving them empty. By far the most common and the most expensive: you are in the catalogue but out of every specific filter.
- Picking one that does not fit to sit in a more searched category. The customer arrives, does not find what they expected and leaves — or worse, books and ends up disappointed.
- Picking all of them. Five coherent techniques beat five random ones.
- Setting them once and never touching them again, while the catalogue has changed completely.
Why they matter beyond the site
The labels you pick end up in your public page copy and in the structured data search engines read. It is the same material ChatGPT and other assistants rely on when someone asks where to try loom weaving in the Marche region. If the word “weaving” appears nowhere on your profile, you will not be in that answer.
Categories are also how customers browse out of curiosity: some arrive looking for workshops in their own city with no technique in mind, and choose by reading the labels. Profiles like la Stanza Del Telaio in Macerata or Ceramica Lustre in Pesaro get found exactly like that.
Frequently asked questions
- Can I pick more than one craft?
- Yes, if you genuinely work across more than one category: someone who does both ceramics and textiles can list both. The available sub-crafts change accordingly, because they belong to the parent category.
- How many sub-crafts can I list?
- Up to five. The cap is deliberate: it describes a recognisable specialism instead of a generic list.
- What happens if I leave them blank?
- Your profile stays public and in the catalogue, but disappears from technique filters. In practice only people already looking for you by name will find you.
- Can I change them later?
- Yes, at any time from your dashboard. Worth revisiting whenever your workshop catalogue changes.
- My technique is not on the list: what do I do?
- Pick the closest parent category and describe the technique in the workshop copy and in your own introduction. Free text is read by search anyway.
Two fields, five minutes. They decide whether people find you by technique or not at all.
Complete your profile
