Mud Australia

Updated: September 12, 2026

Mud Australia sells handmade porcelain homewares from its Sydney studio: dinnerware, servingware, drinkware, cookware, lighting and home decor alongside linen and cutlery. Founded in 1994 by Shelley Simpson, it serves households and trade buyers through this site and fourteen stores in Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada. Pieces are “designed to last” and made from porcelain clay sourced from Limoges in France. The front end is a custom Nuxt build, with Sanity behind the editorial pages and BigCommerce running the regional storefronts.

Website Design

A near-black and warm stone palette. Text and buttons sit at #101820 against a warm off-white close to #f8f6f1, with sand at #e4e0d9 for panel grounds and mid grey at #63666a for labels. No interface colour competes with the glazed colour of the products.

One typeface, two weights. Neue Haas Unica Pro carries the whole site, Light for body copy, Medium for navigation, product names and buttons. Headings run large but at a low weight, so titles stay quiet next to the photography.

Full-bleed image, spaced text. Category tiles run edge to edge with a caption and one link, while text columns stay narrow. Photography alternates between objects on plain grounds and styled table settings.

Shopping Experience

Colour is the main filter. Shop All opens with a single control, “Filter available items by colour”, in place of a faceted sidebar. Cards state range depth in words, as in “Available in 19 colors”.

Price and range depth on the card. Cards carry name and price together, from USD 35.00 for the small Pebble Bowl to USD 195.00 for the Water Jug, with the colour count beneath.

A short product page. The buy box gives a From price, a tax note reading “USD Tax Excluded”, a colour selector, a quantity field and Add to cart. Below sit dimensions and volume in imperial units, then accordions for delivery, care and returns.

Region set before currency. A switcher pairs shipping destination with currency, and the US, Canadian and UK sites each run their own catalogue and pricing.

Brand Storytelling

Process is the argument. A panel on every product page explains that pigment is tinted into the body at slip stage for colour depth, that clear glaze goes only on the interior, and that the exterior is left as a vitrified stone-like surface.

Objects get origin stories. The Pebble Bowl is credited to a lighting prototype that broke in two during firing. Irregularities in size, glaze and texture are presented as the artisan nature of the product, not as faults.

Notable Features

Gift registry as its own product. A registry runs on its own subdomain with Create and Find entry points, beside a corporate gifting guide and gift vouchers in the Gifting menu.

A journal in five formats. Recipes, News, People, Ideas and Visual Essays each have their own stream, and recipe posts surface in the product areas too.

Stores and commitments in the chrome. Fourteen locations are listed by suburb and city in the header menu, and the footer states carbon neutrality achieved by the end of 2020 beside an acknowledgement of the Gadigal peoples.