This is a real engagement with a real name attached. The store is live, the Google listing is searchable, and everything below can be verified in about two minutes.
01 · The starting point. Invisible everywhere except the sidewalk.
Nika’s work sold, but only to one kind of customer: the tourists who found their way down her quiet side alley during the season. The studio sits off Piran’s main routes, genuinely hard to come across even inside the old town. No website, no way to buy a piece after flying home, and a Google listing with 13 reviews that barely surfaced for anyone.
Search for ceramics in Piran and she didn’t appear. Ask an AI assistant and there was, quite literally, nothing for it to read. Every winter, the business went quiet with the foot traffic.
02 · The website. A store built like a brand.
We built nikahorjak.com from scratch: a bespoke online store, not a template. Every glaze is named after a place around Piran and written up individually. Collections are curated into sets. Checkout runs on Stripe with straightforward EU shipping. There’s an editorial journal in Nika’s own voice, a newsletter, and a contact flow.
The point wasn’t just to have a website. It was to have one good enough that a stranger who lands on it trusts the studio instantly, because every other part of the visibility engine points here. The digital brand extends into the physical studio too: business cards, a sidewalk sign, and thank-you cards in every package, all designed as one identity.
03 · Visible to people. The map, the search results, the reviews.
We overhauled and now manage the studio’s Google Business Profile: categories, photography, description, and the details Google ranks on. At the register, a counter sticker and printed QR cards take a happy customer straight to the review form, backed by coaching on when and how to ask, so every good in-person interaction becomes public, permanent proof.
Discovery got fixed in the physical world too. We found an available municipal advertising panel on a busy street nearby and designed the sign that now points visitors straight down her alley. Walk-in traffic roughly doubled to tripled. One visitor told Nika the panel simply looked too good not to come in.
Under the site sits the technical SEO layer: clean structure, a sitemap, local landing content, and pages written around what people actually search for when they want handmade ceramics from the Slovenian coast.
04 · Visible to AI. A business machines can read.
This is the part almost no small business has. The site carries full structured data: who the studio is, where it is, what it sells, when it’s open, which languages are spoken, all in the machine-readable format AI systems and search engines rely on.
The practical effect stopped being theoretical fast. Ask ChatGPT for the best gift or ceramics shops in Piran and the studio is consistently named in the top five. Google’s AI Overview cites her by name for local searches. And the proof walks through the door: two American visitors told Nika they found her by asking ChatGPT, and days later a Scandinavian couple arrived the same way through Gemini. None of them would have reached her a few months earlier.
05 · What changed. From 13 reviews to 73, and counting.
Before the engagement, the studio’s listing had collected 13 reviews in its lifetime. Then the review engine switched on, and in little more than a month of asking, it passed 60. Today the Google listing stands at a 5.0 rating across 73 reviews and climbing. No ad spend, no incentives, no tricks. Just a QR card handed to customers who were already delighted, at the exact moment they were most delighted. Open Google Maps, look up ceramics in Piran, and the studio is there, with photos, reviews, and a link to the store.
The reviews did what reviews do: compound. Each one makes the listing rank better on the map, which brings more people through the door, which produces more reviews. The studio reports sales running at two to three times the same period last season, and for the first time the business doesn’t switch off when the tourists leave. Someone in Vienna or Milan who fell in love with a bowl in July can order its pair in December.
The internet started doing its own marketing, too. A traveler’s trip report on Reddit’s r/travel listed the studio as a Piran must-see, alongside Tartini Square, the city walls, and the Church of St George: “One of my favourite finds was Nika Horjak Ceramics, a beautiful little shop filled with handmade pottery.” A one-person studio earning a spot next to medieval landmarks is what organic discovery looks like once a business is genuinely easy to find.
And the growth is physical. As part of the engagement we prepared the studio’s application to Spittelberg, one of Vienna’s most beloved Christmas markets, juried and curated for handmade work, and she was accepted on the strength of the brand and the website. From 13 November to 23 December, the exact weeks when Piran goes quiet, her work will be on a stall in front of one of Europe’s largest holiday crowds, with the online store on every card handed across it.
They completely changed my business. Every week I get a report from Google showing how many hundreds of people now look me up and find me because of their work. I couldn’t be more satisfied.Nika Horjak · Founder and maker, Nika Horjak Ceramics
The structural change is permanent: the studio no longer depends on foot traffic to be discovered. It can be found, researched, trusted, and bought from by someone who has never set foot in Piran. And because the whole presence is machine-readable, that includes being found by the AI assistants your own customers are already using.
06 · The part that matters if you’re reading this.
Nothing in this engagement was specific to ceramics. The playbook was: build a website that earns trust, claim and manage the Google presence, make every fact about the business machine-readable, and turn happy customers into public proof, systematically. That works for a law office, a restaurant, a contractor, a clinic. The craft changes. The engine doesn’t.