Company
ReorganizedWedgwood
Stoke-on-Trent · Since 1759
The historic company entered administration in 2009. The pottery and the name continue under Fiskars.
Josiah Wedgwood opened his own pottery works at Burslem in 1759. Staffordshire already made pots. Wedgwood divided the making into repeated tasks, measured the materials, and fired for a market that wanted the same vase twice.
He also did something the mill owners were slower to do. He sold under his own name, opened a showroom in London, and made classical shapes fashionable. The factory produced the object. The showroom produced the desire. Both were the company.
Skill, split apart
Throwing, pressing, painting, and firing became different jobs, done by different people, often women in the painting shops and men at the kiln. Apprentices still learned a craft, but they learned a station in a sequence. Wedgwood's Etruria works, opened in 1769, was built for that sequence, beside a canal he helped promote so the clay and the coal would arrive. Designers and modelers sat above the sequence. They were the new skilled jobs, and they worked on paper.
The name after the firm
The company stayed in the family for a long time and then became part of Waterford Wedgwood, which went into administration in 2009. The brand, the museum, and production at Barlaston continued. Fiskars, a Finnish company, owns them now. A buyer can still order Wedgwood. The firm Josiah built cannot be visited except as a name on the back of a plate.
The work it organized
- Thrower
- Paintress
- Fireman
- Modeler
On the timeline
Related
- Arkwright's millsDissolved