Our Story

From two flea market tables to one home for handpainted Turkish ceramics

Mediterranean Crafts didn't start as a business plan. It started as a folding table — actually, two of them, thousands of miles apart.

One of us was setting up early mornings at a flea market in Florida, unwrapping hand-painted bowls and trivets from newspaper, hoping people would stop and take a second look. The other was doing the same thing on weekends at a farmers market in Calgary, watching people's faces light up the moment they picked up a piece and felt the texture of the paint under their fingers.

Neither of us knew the other tables existed at first. We just knew the ceramics did something people responded to — the color, the detail, the fact that no two pieces were ever quite the same because every one is painted by hand.

Two markets, one realization

Week after week, the feedback kept coming. People didn't just buy a bowl — they'd come back the following weekend with a friend, or message us asking if we shipped, or ask whether we'd be at the next market so they could pick up a piece as a gift. It became clear pretty quickly that we weren't just selling at markets anymore. We were building something people actually wanted to find again.

That's when Florida and Calgary stopped being two separate stories and became one. We combined what we'd each built — the sourcing, the relationships, the eye for which pieces people fall in love with — into a single place everyone could shop from, no matter where they lived.

One website, shipping from both sides of the border

That's Mediterranean Crafts today. One online home for all of it — but we kept the parts that made the markets work in the first place. We ship from two locations, so wherever you are, your order comes from close to home: orders to U.S. customers ship from our U.S. location, and orders to Canadian customers ship from Calgary. Faster shipping, fewer surprises at the border, and the same hand-picked pieces you'd find at our market tables.

Still the same table, just bigger

Every bowl, spoon holder, trivet, mug, grater, lamp, and tile we sell is still handpainted by skilled artisans using techniques passed down for generations. We still unwrap each piece like it matters — because it does. The market tables are gone, but the reason we set them up in the first place hasn't changed: we wanted to bring something genuinely beautiful and handmade into people's homes, and to watch them fall in love with it the way we did.

Thank you for being part of that, wherever you're reading this from.