A History of Success for Your Small Business and Ours

ExClaymations started as a small family hobby in about 1988.

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We began as a way to make ends meet. The founder of the products purchased a kiln in a garage sale for $500. 

This was more than the family could afford at the time.

A series of unlucky events had hit the family. 

Mickey Hinton, the dad of the artsy clan, had been forced by increasing disability to move by a disease that was breaking down the synapses in his cerebellum.

The family was financially underwater monthly and looming hardship motivated the family to look for a solution to the financial problems through their collected skills in art and entrepreneurship.  ​​

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Jan Hinton, the mom, was an incredible woman and artist.

This skill and passion for art she passed on to her three daughters in different ways. 

 Kim, who was the eldest daughter and a published poet,  sat down one day and wrote poetry about angels in order to create gift items that would be healing and kind to give and receive. After a few months of creating these poems and marketing a line of small angels and the noticing the incredible sales they generated, she sent the poems to her mother and her mother quickly began to make the line of angels carded on Kim's poems as well. 

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A the first major show in which the angels premiered, a wholesale representative saw the women standing around the angels and loading them into their baskets and asked to take the angels to the wholesale shows in the country and the amazing business known as Art to Wear took shape. 

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Art to Wear grew and thrived with approximately 30,000 wholesale accounts all over the country. The line became the most successful gift product for consecutive years across the country generating an average yearly revenue of over 3 million dollars and employing 75 people. 

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Then 9-11 happened.

The country went into shock and within a few years of that event, and continual closing of gift shops around the country, Art to Wear closed its doors and went out of business. ​​

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Kim has never stopped producing the jewelry. She has created two small lines of brooches on her gift poetry that have proven themselves to be best sellers through her booth of all her products at a public market in Seattle, Washington.

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This wholesale business is a rebirth of the original company. ​

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Our goal is still to create items that help people to spread joy to those they love. 

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Love and kindness motivate us. 

The caring and kindness in the cards fill both your customers and the receiver of the gifts purchased at your store, with healing and warm feelings which the creator believes, is something the world should have in abundance. 

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