@UnluckyGrape Bulk products are handled differently. Artisans in Japan don't do bulk product. Those are usually handled by cooperatives and artisan associations. If a bulk order comes from, say, a restaurant chain, the restaurant would contact the appropriate coop or assc and request a series of samples to customize from their affiliated masters. The restaurant's experts would then select a particular sample, request to meet the master artisan who provided it, then discuss specific changes or customizations to the design. The master artisan would then refine the sample, resubmit it, and if it fits the experts' requirements, the restaurant would place the order with the coop/assc and the order and its design then gets distributed around the shops with the master artisan put in charge of QAQC and general production of goods. The reason I know this is because my ex used to work as purchasing vice-manager for a high end sushi restaurant in Bali, and they sourced their wares from Japan directly. In this case they wanted matched sets of artisanal serving ware, including large ceramic sushi plates, bowls, and teapots in the warped style (like what you see in Hyouge Mono), but customized with themes of Balinese flowers. It took them six months to get the whole set made in Japan and sent in. In the past there were artisanal shops big enough to handle bulk orders by themselves, but these days the surviving shops are much smaller. My ex told me that if you asked an artisan to provide in bulk, you'd get a very polite suggestion to try the department store.
Artisans WOULD provide sets by themselves, which is what you'll often see in Ryokans and Kyoto tea shops. If you've ever tried fancy washoku in Kyoto, you'll sometimes see that each table gets served with a different set of tableware than the next table over. This is the same in high-end ryokans. A room's tableware would be unique. So the artisan gets contracted to provide a set of tableware and matching serving ware and that set, once delivered, would always be used by itself, not mixed with other sets even from the same artisan. In some anime and manga you would sometimes see this implied, like when someone tells a serving girl to get the xyz set, with the xyz being the name of the artisan. My first encounter with this concept was an old eroge set in a Ryokan, where one of the events was the player breaking a plate then being told that it would take several million yen to replace because they would need to order a new set. This somehow led to the player getting to screw the mom who owns the ryokan. Anyway....