China crisis: The demise of Wedgwood

Published on Monday 5 January 2009 19:21

IT WAS the credit crunch echoed by the shattering of china. Two and half centuries of fine craftwork tradition ground to an uncertain standstill yesterday as Waterford Wedgwood, the luxury china and ceramics group that includes the Wedgwood, Royal Doulton and Waterford Crystal brands, filed for bankruptcy.

The group joins a litany of other household names – Woolworths, Hardy Amies and further revered ceramics firms Royal Worcester and Spode – who have gone into receivership in recent months. Synonymous with timeless style, the classic brands of china and glass produced by Waterford Wedgwood may have finally succumbed to the economic downturn, but they were already labouring in the face of changing lifestyles and dinner table habits, despite their efforts to appeal to changing fashions by producing ranges in conjunction with contemporary stylists such as Vera Wang, Jasper Conran and Martha Stewart.

Some 250 years after the original china firm was founded in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, by Josiah Wedgwood, "the father of English potters", the group, already plagued by debt, appears to have found the recession the last straw and has gone into receivership. The administrators, Deloitte, appointed to seek buyers for the group's components, stated yesterday that poor trading and failed buyout talks had prevented the company adequately restructuring itself "in an acceptable timescale".

Long a household name, Wedgwood merged with another upmarket craft firm, Waterford Crystal, in 1987, with the parent company based in the Republic of Ireland. In 2005 it bought out another iconic Stoke-on-Trent ceramics maker, Royal Doulton. The group employs around 8,000 people worldwide, 1,900 of them within the UK and a further 900 in Waterford.

Its luxury status perhaps made it a likely victim of the current credit squeeze, but changing fashions and lifestyles were already creating problems for these names, which were once on any aspiring bride-to-be's present list. Sarah Haywood, a wedding co-ordinator and author of The Wedding Bible, has seen the brands fade from gift lists over the past few years: "The purchase of the official dinner service that we used to see has declined.

"Wedgwood were among those who tried to address that and brought out signature ranges by designers like Vera Wang. They were trying to appeal to the younger, more modern market, and to some extent that might have been successful, but with the majority of my clients, we just weren't seeing that sort of traditional stuff on the lists any more.

"The average bride in the UK is 33 years old, her groom is 35, they've got homes, got all the stuff they want in them. Occasionally someone will go for some formal tableware or glassware, but it isn't the norm. They're going for more aspirational gifts, maybe Alessi-style kitchenware, but not that kind of formal dinner service. We don't live like that any more."

A Wedgwood collaboration with the illustrator Will Broome produced a range called Flash, featuring cartoon-like motifs, to help mark this year's 250th anniversary. It was a far cry from the instantly recognisable patterns established by Josiah Wedgwood, who founded the company in 1759, to revolutionise the often heavy crockery of his day.

Wedgwood was born into family of potters in Burslem, Staffordshire, and served his apprenticeship as a potter before setting up his own business. In the 1730s, a smallpox infection so weakened him that he had to have his right leg amputated, preventing him pedalling a potter's wheel, but his innovative approach to his craft ensured his prosperity. By the time he died in 1795, he had established what are still three of Wedgwood's most famous ceramic bodies – the scalloped white Queen's Ware, the pewterish Black Basalt and the classically-inspired white-on-pale-blue Jasper that is perhaps most readily associated with the name.

His enthusiasm for experimentation went further than pottery patterns, however. In 1783 he was elected a member of the Royal Society, for inventing the pyrometer to measure kiln temperatures. He was also a member of the Lunar Society – an informal but influential group of industrialists and intellectuals – and was involved in the campaign against slavery, mass-producing the emblem of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade.

The Wedgwood genes would play their part in wider scientific enquiry: Susannah Wedgwood, one of Josiah's seven children, was the mother of Charles Darwin, born 200 years ago – an anniversary likely to be less blighted by the credit crunch than the 250th of the Wedgwood empire, the name of which for so long has a byword for enduring craftsmanship.