Miaustore
Miaustore

On a Friday in late 2016, Bogdan, co-owner of a family pottery in western Ukraine, got a call from an unknown foreign number. The caller, a Swiss entrepreneur named Floris Schmuki who was working his way down a list of Ukrainian ceramics workshops, asked one question: "do you speak english?"

On Monday, Bogdan was standing in the arrivals hall of Chernivtsi's tiny regional airport, watching Schmuki walk out with luggage stuffed full of ceramic production molds. No contract, no due diligence, no weeks of back-and-forth — one phone call, one flight, and work began.

By 2022, that phone call had grown into a serious operation. The family's 30-person factory was producing thousands of ceramic cat drinking fountains a month, two full truckloads, forMiaustore, Schmuki's e-commerce brand, which sold them across Europe and North America and would pass $20 million in lifetime sales.

Then the war began.

Five Tons Behind a Closed Border

In February 2022, the largest shipment in Miaustore's history, more than five metric tons of ceramics, stood loaded on trucks when the invasion shut the borders almost overnight.

Even as crossings reopened in the following weeks, the goods couldn't move: mobilization rules barred men of military age from leaving Ukraine, grounding most of the country's truck drivers.

"Most truck drivers were not allowed to leave the country," Schmuki says. "Then we found out that men over 65 were exempt from that rule. They became the ones keeping our exports alive."

Clay From the East, Power From the Sun

The supply chain was under attack from the other end, too. The clay itself comes from the Sloviansk region in eastern Ukraine, for generations the heartland of the country's ceramics industry and now close to the front line. As transport from the east grew more dangerous and more expensive, the factory stockpiled some 40 tons of clay to keep the kilns fed.

The kilns had their own problem: they fire at high temperatures and consume enormous amounts of electricity. And Russian strikes on Ukraine's energy grid were causing rolling blackouts nationwide. And Ukraine's energy grid was damaged during the conflict, causing rolling blackouts. Schmuki's answer was a shipping container of solar panels, ordered from China and installed at the factory.

"It started as a survival measure," he says. "Then we ran the numbers and realized solar was cheaper than the grid power we'd been buying all along. The crisis pushed us into the best infrastructure decision we ever made."

Last One Standing

Ukraine's ceramics industry, concentrated in the embattled east, was devastated: by late 2022, an estimated 60 percent of the country's ceramic production had shut down. The factory in the west kept shipping.

Miaustore reportedly ended the year as Ukraine's largest household ceramics exporter, accounting for 17.4 percent of the country's household ceramic exports at its peak.

"Staying wasn't sentimental," Schmuki says. "The logistics still made sense, the team was exceptional, and walking away would have destroyed something that worked. Sometimes the rational decision just looks brave from the outside."

Schmuki sold Miaustore's e-commerce operation in early 2023. The fountains are still made in western Ukraine.

(Floris Schmuki is the founder of Miaustore, a ceramic cat fountain brand that generated more than $20 million in lifetime sales and reportedly became Ukraine's largest household ceramics exporter in 2022. He is currently building OneSec, an AI drone delivery startup.)