Andrew is an award-winning ceramicist and the creator of Hotel Chocolat’s unique Pod cup, his first-ever commercial design project.

I work just outside Bath in an old cowshed. It's in an idyllic landscape. It's quite a small studio and it's very cluttered. I have a wheel and a kiln and lots of tools and drawings and test samples. But it's all mine, so I can just close the door at the end of the day and know it'll be exactly the same mess when I get back. It's very personal to me. It's a special place.

When I first met [Hotel Chocolat co-founder] Angus in Borough Market, he gave me a preserved cocoa pod as an inspiration. We wanted to make something different, that stood out. I remember feeling the weight, the textures, how it's held in the hand, the cupping of it. When you're holding a cup, it's quite warm and intimate. And then, of course, you lift it to your lips. We all have a very personal reaction when we think about using a cup.

Nature makes the most beautiful forms that we cannot really replicate ourselves. I started with lots of drawings of the ridges on the outside the cocoa pod, and I turned them inside out, reflecting the pod’s interior surface. The lines on the cup are about organic growth, and there's an elegance as well. The lines aren't regular. They're spaced in a way that you wouldn't expect.

Throwing clay on a wheel is amazing. It's a concentration of all your mental skill and your senses of touch and sight. Your whole body has to be centred. You have to stay connected to what your hands are doing, focusing on the thickness and dampness of the clay. Some days it doesn't work if your head's not in the right place, and you just have to stop. But it can be very satisfying. It's instinctive and takes practice and time over many years. They say in Japan it takes seven years for a potter to become a potter. And I'm still learning.

I made around 30 different models of the pod cup. It was about getting the details right and making something pure that would also work in production. One of the first changes we made was adding a flared top so that the cup would sit comfortably and securely in the hand. After throwing clay on the wheel, I’d draw the vertical lines and hand-carve them, refining and refining with tools called loops. The clay starts off soft and pliable but gets harder. As it hardens, it shrinks, and the crispness of the edges change. You have to consider all this while you’re carving to get it right.

My work is about the quality of materials and how things are done, and that's how I see Hotel Chocolat. We’re connected by the instinctive quality of our work. It’s all about using your hands. You can tell a handmade object from something that's designed on a computer. I think you keep the essence and simplicity of nature when the creative thought comes directly from the hand.

One of my earliest memories is making ceramics when I was about four, making a pig in a pottery class with my mum. I have a passion for the vastness of clay and what you can do with it. It's just the most incredible, exciting material. From a formless mass you can make the most beautiful forms, from toilets to teacups. And I love that I will never, ever know the limits of it.

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