wedgwood

James Burke in his 1979 series Connections dates modern consumer goods to Wedgwood China in the 18th century.

European potters like Wedgwood were desperately trying to re-create the purity and beauty of the Chinese product.

The pot works of Wedgwood and Royal Doulton (another pottery company bought by Wedgwood a few years ago) were slowly being closed down and replaced by production in Indonesia to save money.

The Wedgwood factory is about a 30 minute walk from where I grew up.

>European potters like Wedgwood were desperately trying to re-create the purity and beauty of the Chinese product.

Yes, Northeast side, like Wedgwood to Lake City.

I come from the city where Wedgwood was founded.

I would argue that what Wedgwood came up with was not only technologically inferior but also a strange cultural mishmash of influences with less cultural value than Chinese porcelain.

What they didn't bank on was the fact that the predominantly foreign (American and Japanese) buyers of the top-end Wedgwood wares didn't want Indonesian-made pottery, they were buying into luxury goods made in England.

The combined companies fared no better as a unit and went into administration in 2009 though the Wedgwood brand survives after being purchased by a private equity company and now a Finnish consumer goods company.

Josiah Wedgwood and Charles Darwin's paternal grandfather Erasmus Darwin were both members of the Lunar Society of Birmingham, which also included the chemist and liberal theologian Joseph Priestly, James Watt of steam-engine fame, and Watt's patron and partner Matthew Bolton, who was as much a technological entrepreneur as Wedgwood.

There were certainly brands and advertising in the Roman Empire, but I've read books on branding (in the marketing sense) that point to Josiah Wedgwood as more or less the inventor of modern (post-Roman Western) brand identity.

Wedgwood was working in a world that had been re-shaped by Chinese export porcelain, one of the first examples of a truly global product and marketing "brand".

If you have the time, I think that Veronica Wedgwood's (she published as CV Wedgwood) history of the era is pretty great.

Wedgwood merged with another luxury goods company Waterford Crystal in 1987, to become Waterford Wedgwood.

From stone tools through bronze casting, Venetian shipbuilders, Josiah Wedgwood, the Portsmouth Block Mill [0] and so on.