Last U.S. China Maker Survives on Vintage Design

Born of the Great Depression, it was a glossy, color-saturated line of cups, bowls and plates meant to affordably brighten lives and dinner tables. Seven decades later, Fiesta dinnerware is still designed to send a subtle message of optimism, but it’s no longer quite so cheap.

Yet Fiesta’s enduring popularity and strong sales even as consumers cut back are helping to keep struggling Homer Laughlin China Co. afloat. It’s the last major dinnerware producer that makes its products in the U.S., as competitors have shut down or moved offshore.

“We’re fighting for our lives right now,” President Joe Wells III says of the West Virginia company that’s battling the ever-rising cost of doing business and the ever-falling prices of foreign competitors. He represents the fourth generation of his family to run the Newell factory that has employed thousands of families in and around West Virginia’s Northern Panhandle.

Earlier this year, Ohio-based Libbey Inc. shut down the last U.S. factory producing Syracuse China, ending 137 years of history and 275 jobs in Salina, N.Y. Now, that china is made in China. Only a handful of U.S. dinnerware producers remain, all smaller than Homer Laughlin and most surviving by capitalizing on a niche.

Family-owned Pickard China in Antioch, Ill., for example, concentrates on custom work for clients like the federal government. It’s produced china for U.S. embassies and consulates worldwide, as well as the Bush White House, Air Force One and Camp David.

Privately held Homer Laughlin — founded in 1871 across the Ohio River in East Liverpool, Ohio, but in Newell since 1905 — won’t share financial data. Standard & Poor’s estimates it does about $50 million a year in sales.

Wells acknowledges, however, the commercial side of the business supplying restaurant chains like Olive Garden and Red Lobster has slowed more than usual this summer. Those sales typically account for about 60 percent of the bottom line.

“Our customers at this point in time are not ordering. They’re making do with whatever they have and only ordering when it’s an emergency,” Wells says. “But there’s going to come a time, and I hope in the not very distant future, when all of a sudden our customers are making a little bit more money, they’re seeing their customers come back, and they’re going to want to order more dishes, change the decor of their restaurants.”

Fiesta, he says, is helping the company get by until that time arrives. Ask why sales are up slightly, and Wells recounts the line’s Depression-era beginnings and colorful palette.

“It was done with the intent of giving people who were having a real miserable time something that wasn’t expensive, that could brighten up their table, make their lives a little cheerier” he says.

Consumers are eating at home more often now and “they want to have a cheerful dining room or wherever they eat, and Fiesta’s a part of that.”

Homer Laughlin, named for its founder but run since 1897 by the Wells and Aaron families, has produced 25,000 patterns in its nearly 140 years. But most people know only Fiesta, the solid-color, Art Deco style designed by Frederick Hurten Rhead and launched in 1936, in brilliant red and selling for pennies.

By the late 1960s, Fiesta had begun to fall out of fashion, and the company discontinued it in January 1973, inadvertently starting a collecting frenzy. By the early ’80s, some items that had once cost less than 50 cents were commanding hundreds of dollars.

Today, rare pieces and colors can be worth thousands. A covered onion soup bowl in turquoise, produced for only one year before being discontinued in 1937, is valued at $8,000 by the 2006 edition of the Collector’s Encyclopedia of Fiesta.

Fiesta has been produced in 40 colors, with at least one new shade rolled out every year since 2000. Last year, there were two, chocolate and ivory. The latest, a yellow-green hue called lemongrass, was inspired by Michelle Obama’s Inauguration Day outfit. It now costs as much as $48 for a four-piece setting at Macy’s.

Fiesta has a faithful nationwide following, with admirers who seek it out in their travels, online and in stores, bidding for pieces on eBay and Amazon, and even joining a fledgling Facebook fan group.

Kathy Phillips, who grew up in Chester, W.Va., but now lives in Lincoln, Neb., visits the factory outlet in Newell on every trip home, compelled to see what’s new. She buys Fiesta as gifts and never misses a chance to tell people where it comes from.

Sister Gerry Porter, who still lives in West Virginia, is equally quick to brag of its origins: “If I’m at a restaurant I say, ‘That’s Fiestaware!’ and I lift it up, and sure enough it is.”

That makes her part of an unofficial club, the Homer Laughlin Plate Flippers Association. A business card handed out to factory visitors and other customers encourages members to inspect plate bottoms for the company emblem and “express dismay with pompous harrumphing and/or heavy sighing” if it’s a knockoff.

Quality is part of the sales pitch, says regional sales manager Bill Pickin, but he also banks on that emotional connection. And he likes to think some buyers care that Fiesta is still made in the United States.

“So how much is American-made worth? How much is a better-quality product worth? You can’t put that in dollar terms,” he says.

A generation ago, most dinnerware imports came from Japan and Korea. Today, Wells says China is the biggest supplier.

His competitors’ steadily falling prices have forced Wells to periodically consider outsourcing. He has a union work force, and environmental and safety regulations they don’t have to contend with. Homer Laughlin, he says, simply cannot be the low-cost provider.

But he knows what happens to small towns when their potteries shut down: Workers are left with few opportunities to make a living. Hancock County, where the decline of the U.S. steel industry wiped out thousands of jobs, is already struggling with 13 percent unemployment. The loss of 800 jobs in a county of about 30,000 people would be devastating.

Wells says, “I’m an American, and I’m an American manufacturer, and as long as we can profitably keep jobs here, that’s what I’m going to do.”

9/13/2009 11:01 AM VICKI SMITH, Associated Press Writer NEWELL, W.Va.