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Carlota Gardens, LLC - talavera pottery, planters, pots, and garden pottery & home decor
Garden Wholesale Pottery & Talavera Pottery
Simon Akers, our 23 year old son, joined the business full-time after graduating from Berea College with a bachelors degree in Business Administration and a minor in Spanish. He has grown up with us in our travels to Mexico and has seen the artists make talavera pottery and garden pottery up front. He has seen Mexican planters around our house all his life!
Marion Ziemons, life partner of Tony, using a variety of skills to advance her world, both in the business and in the caving world. I have loved garden pottery and planters all my life, and our talavera pottery selections add color and life to all my plants and home.
Tony Akers, veteran of Mexican exploration, both above and below ground. He has traveled extensively throughout Mexico, and began our focus of bringing back garden pottery in the late 90's. Adding talavera pottery was easy, as it is high quality and expands our planter selections. Now, Tony continues to research available pottery and art in Mexico, and has strong relationships with our suppliers and Mexican artisans. With more than 25 years of collaboration, he has strengthened our foundation of Mexican pottery knowledge and logistics.
Tony Akers and Marion Akers, the proprietors of Carlota Gardens, LLC, are connected to Mexico, its people, its art, and its land. Our discovery of Mexico over 23 years ago, began a diverse adventure throughout the whole country, from the cities, to the villages, to the mountains, to the caves. We always loved pottery and the art of making planters and other styles of clay and ceramics. This led us to talavera pottery and our continued focus on garden pottery.
Carlota Gardens has grown and changed over the years. Beginning in 1998, we explored Mexico for its art and pottery, we have brought back over 35 different kinds of art, whether it be talavera, pottery, glass, ceramic, iron, hand-carved wood, stone, onyx, wool rugs, or all of the other marvelous indigenous art that Oaxaca, Guerrero, Michóacan, Puebla, Jalisco, Chiapas, Guanajuato, has to offer. We have also explored the other end – selling these treasures. We have had stores, in Ohio, one out of our house and one at the Jeffersonville Outlet Mall. We have participated in countless festivals and shows, exploring both retail and wholesale trade. We have sold on consignment, and more recently on the web. And when we discovered the Spring season – garden and plant time – was an increasingly larger part of our market, we began to focus more on garden pottery and garden décor, seeking out the best that Mexico has to offer. We have carried varieties of pottery from all over Mexico, and in recent years, our current focus is pottery from Guanajuato, Jalisco, and Oaxaca for the Spring season. We have worked for years with many of our suppliers, up to 10-20 years with our main suppliers.
We are a family who spends part of our year in Mexico, for personal and business reasons. We are a family of cave explorers, who travel to Oaxaca and other parts of Mexico for several months. We have another mission, and this is what drives us in the Spring season. Experience Mexico – a special part of Mexico – the Sierra Mazateca. This area is part of a karst ecosystem in the state of Oaxaca that has produced some of the world’s deepest cave systems. Tony has been caving for over 45 years and Marion for almost 25 years, and although the cave exploration is what brought us to the Sierra Mazateca, we have grown to love this place and consider it our home. Not only do we look for caves there, we live there, learn Mazatec customs and language, enjoy the fresh food and air, and make friends and family. We are a family, with our son, Simon, and he enjoys the two different worlds we have given to him. We have begun conservation efforts, for both the pristine areas of parts of the region and its caves and for the preservation of the culture and language of the Mazatec people. We have had a project called "Proyecto Sierra Mazateca", and have made strides in exploration and education. We have experienced many adventures, and hope to have more to come.
We will strive to keep bringing quality pottery to our customer and to provide the best service possible. We want to continue to bring new and more styles of pottery back – supporting artists and customers and exploring Mexico more.
How can we serve better? Let us know what kind of planters your customers are looking for. Talavera pottery? Garden Pottery? That's our specialty!
How can you contribute to or support our projects?
Thank you - Tony & Marion Akers (photos to the right from 2021)
ADDING SIMON to our business!! We wish him success throughout
his life and a hope he will soon make our lives easier....