The Craft Resin Story: From First Order to Global Resin Brand
On 7 June 2019, we sold one litre of Craft Resin epoxy resin for £28.99. That was the first order. No fanfare, no launch event - just a single transaction that proved one thing: someone out there needed what we had built. Three years later, sales were approaching a thousand units a day.
That is not a marketing story. It is a daily discipline story. Craft Resin was not built on one breakthrough moment. It was built by deciding, every single day, to solve the next problem in front of us and move forward.
The people behind Craft Resin are its founders, Gor Kartel and Sergey Hotin. Gor leads the strategic and commercial direction of the brand. Sergey drives the operational and product side. Between them, they built everything that Craft Resin is today from scratch, and they are still the people making the key decisions about where it goes next.
Where It Started
In 2018, we saw the same problem everywhere in the epoxy resin market. The product existed. People wanted to use it. But the experience of actually using it was broken. Complicated instructions. Sticky results. Bubbles no one explained how to avoid. Customer support that disappeared after the purchase. And a market that treated resin as a professional material rather than something accessible to anyone who wanted to create.
The idea behind Craft Resin was not to build a better chemical formula. It was to build a better experience: a product that anyone could use, understand, and get a real result from - whether they were making their first coaster or running a small handmade business.
Craft Resin Limited was registered in the United Kingdom and we started with almost nothing except the conviction that the gap in the market was real. In the early days, Gor and Sergey did everything themselves: sourcing suppliers, testing batches, handling customer queries, writing instructions. There was no department for any of it - just two people who needed every part of the business to work.
The team grew gradually as the product proved itself. Every new person who joined was chosen not for a particular CV but for a particular mindset: practical thinking, ownership of problems, and the ability to finish what they start.
What Matters to Us in Every Product We Make
When we develop a product, three things are non-negotiable: clarity, reliability, and accessibility. The expected result needs to be clear to the customer. The process needs to be repeatable. And the product needs to work for a real person at home, not just in a controlled production environment.
Everything started with a single formula: Craft Resin Arts and Crafts Epoxy Resin - a 1:1 mix ratio by volume, designed to be the most approachable entry point into epoxy resin for beginners and makers alike. Getting that formula right, understanding how it behaved at different temperatures, with different colourants, in different mold types, at different depths - that took time and a huge amount of real-world testing.
As that foundation became solid, the range expanded. Each new product answered a specific need that the original formula could not cover on its own. Epoxy Deep Pour came next - for river tables, thick moulds, and large encapsulations where depth and heat management matter enormously. Then Table Top - for coating flat surfaces with a durable, glass-like finish. Each addition was deliberate: a problem we saw customers trying to solve with the wrong tool, and a decision to build the right one.
More recently, the range has grown into new categories. UV Resin Kit brought fast-curing, no-mix resin to makers working on small-scale precision projects like jewellery and bezels. Craft Resin Silicone gave makers the ability to create their own custom moulds. UV Bonding Resin opened up adhesive applications that epoxy alone could not serve. The line continues to grow - but only when a new addition solves a real problem better than anything already in the range.
Craft resin formulas are designed for low-odour use and are supported by the relevant technical and safety documentation.
How We Made Deep Pour
Craft Resin Deep Pour Epoxy Resin is the formula built for river tables, large encapsulations, and thick castings. It is also the product that taught us the most important lesson in the brand's history.
Getting a deep pour formula right is genuinely difficult. The chemistry that makes a thin-layer resin work beautifully can cause serious problems at depth - overheating, yellowing, cracking - if not managed correctly. The Deep Pour formula we launched was not the formula that exists today. We changed it. The viscosity was adjusted. The thermal management of the curing reaction was refined. The guidance around pour depth, layer timing, and temperature requirements was rewritten based on what was actually going wrong in real projects.
The honest version of this story is that the early Deep Pour formula caused some customers real frustration. Not because the product was fundamentally wrong, but because the gap between what the formula needed to work correctly and what the guidance communicated was too wide. Closing that gap took time, iteration, and a lot of conversations with customers who were willing to explain exactly what had gone wrong.
Today, Craft Resin Deep Pour can be poured up to 6 cm deep per layer, runs at 600 CPS, and gives a working time of 90 to 100 minutes that professional makers building large projects actually need. The formula that exists now is the one that should have existed at the start. The difference between those two versions is what we learned in between.
How We Found Our Voice on Social Media
When we started building our online presence, the initial strategy was simple: find people creating with resin and share their content. Reposts, community sharing, celebration of makers. It built an audience. But it did not build a brand.
The shift happened when we made a decision that changed the direction of every channel: stop being a spectator of other people's creativity and start teaching. We moved to educational content - detailed tutorials, explanations of why things go wrong, guides to every step of the process from temperature to curing to bubble removal. The YouTube channel became the centre of this strategy. Long-form content answering the actual questions customers were asking. Comprehensive project walkthroughs. The science of resin explained in plain language.
Our Facebook community followed the same principle. Not a promotional page - an actual group where makers could share work, ask questions, and get real answers. The Instagram account @craft.resin grew alongside it with the same principle: content that is genuinely useful is the only content worth making.
The reposting strategy was not a failure; it was a starting point. But the decision to leave it behind and build something more substantial was one of the most consequential choices we made.
What Craft Resin Sells and Where
Today, Craft Resin products are available in ten countries: the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, and Poland. The most active communities are in the UK and the US, where resin art, DIY projects, and handmade small businesses have built the largest concentration of regular buyers.
The product range covers the major categories of resin application we serve:
- Arts and Crafts Epoxy Resin - 1:1 by volume, 1400 CPS, for moulds, jewellery, coasters, fluid art, and creative projects up to 6mm per layer.
- Table Top Epoxy Resin - 1:1 by volume, 3800 CPS, for countertops, bar tops, wood surfaces, and durable protective coatings.
- Deep Pour Epoxy Resin - 2:1 by volume, 600 CPS, for river tables, thick moulds, and large encapsulations up to 6 cm per layer.
- UV Resin Kit - no mixing required, cures under 365-405 nm light in 1 to 3 minutes, for jewellery, bezels, and small-scale precision work.
- Craft Resin Silicone - a two-part platinum-cure silicone for making custom moulds. Available in 15A and 30A hardness to suit everything from fine jewellery moulds to larger decorative shapes.
- UV Bonding Resin - a fast-curing adhesive resin for bonding glass, acrylic, crystal, and similar materials. Cures clear and invisible under UV light.
Beyond the core formulas, Craft Resin offers a growing range of accessories designed to support the full creative process: mica powder pigments in a wide range of colours, silicone mixing cups and stir sticks, graduated measuring cups, resin moulds for coasters and jewellery, and protective equipment including gloves and mixing tools. Everything a maker needs to get from first pour to finished piece without sourcing from multiple places.
All products come with technical documentation and safety data sheets. The full range is available at craft-resin.com, on Amazon US, and on Amazon UK.
Who Actually Buys Craft Resin
Craft Resin customers are not defined by skill level. They are defined by what they care about.
The people who buy Craft Resin are those for whom the result matters. That might be a resin artist who has been pouring for years and needs a formula she can trust to perform consistently across a hundred coasters. A woodworker building a custom river table for a client who paid serious money for it. A florist preserving wedding flowers that cannot be replaced. A small business owner whose income depends on the quality of every piece leaving their studio. A maker who just started and is not willing to waste materials learning on a product that does not work.
With the addition of Table Top Epoxy and Deep Pour to the range, and as the educational content on the YouTube channel grew more technical and specific, a new segment of the community came with it: professional woodworkers and large-scale resin makers. River table builders, furniture makers, workshop owners. People working with serious volumes of material, tight client deadlines, and zero tolerance for a bad batch. These are makers who had tried multiple brands before landing on Craft Resin and staying. The Deep Pour formula's 90 to 100 minute working time, 600 CPS viscosity, and 6 cm per layer capacity gave them what they actually needed for large live edge builds and commercial projects. The Table Top formula gave them the surface coating that held up under daily use.
What connects every customer across all of these categories is the same thing. They care about the outcome. They are willing to follow a process to get there. And they want a brand that takes the product as seriously as they take their work.
What the Brand Stands For
Craft Resin does not promise that every pour will be perfect. Epoxy resin is a chemical process that responds to temperature, humidity, ratio accuracy, and mixing technique. A brand that pretends otherwise is selling a fantasy.
What Craft Resin does promise is that if the process is followed correctly, the result will be what was expected. Crystal clear. High gloss. Fully cured. Consistent from batch to batch. And when something goes wrong, the resources to understand why and fix it for the next time.
The Craft Resin blog exists for exactly this reason - a growing educational resource covering the questions resin users ask most often, covering curing science, temperature and humidity, bubble removal, layering techniques, formula selection, and the most common mistakes at every stage of the process.
The Team Today
Craft Resin operates as a compact international team covering product development, supply chain and logistics, customer support, marketing, content, and technical operations. The team has grown significantly from the days when Gor and Sergey handled everything between them. The principle that guided hiring then is the same now: find people who solve problems rather than describe them.
What Comes Next
The next phase of Craft Resin is about depth rather than breadth. Better products. More comprehensive education. Stronger support for the people using Craft Resin to build something - whether that is a single meaningful piece or a growing small business. New formulas are in development. The product range will expand. The educational platform that started as a YouTube channel is growing into something more complete.
The goal has not changed since that first £28.99 transaction in June 2019. Help people get a result they are proud of. Build trust that compounds with every order. Keep moving forward.
Connect with Craft Resin
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