Waterford Wedgwood Collapses Into Administration

WEDGWOOD, one of Britain’s most celebrated and world-renowned ceramics manufacturers, has gone into administration.

■British luxury ceramics brand “Wedgwood” collapses

Waterford Wedgwood (Ireland), a major ceramics manufacturer carrying brands including the British luxury tableware “Wedgwood”, effectively collapsed on the 5th. The company announced it had appointed the accounting firm Deloitte as administrator. Sales had been sluggish due to the spread of inexpensive ceramics from China and elsewhere, as well as the impact of the global economic downturn triggered by the financial crisis.

　Total liabilities are estimated to exceed 400 million euros (approximately 50 billion yen). Wedgwood and its associated brands are expected to come under the administrator’s control shortly, with a search for a supporting company or buyer to follow.

　Wedgwood is a long-established ceramics maker founded in 1759. It gained worldwide popularity as the “Queen’s Pottery”, holding a Royal Warrant. It merged with Irish glassmaker Waterford Crystal in 1986, but the merger failed to produce the anticipated synergies, and sales continued to struggle under pressure from low-priced ceramics manufactured in China and elsewhere.

This was, on a personal level, quite a shocking piece of news. Perhaps what has happened is that WEDGWOOD, pursuing an overseas expansion strategy of high-volume, low-margin sales, so thoroughly eroded the inherent value of its brand and its tableware that consumers ultimately turned away from it altogether…

When I was a child — or perhaps even before that, in Japan of an earlier era — Wedgwood was the aspirational tableware brand for snobbish ladies and housewives alike. In my own home, we have long used a Wedgwood Wild Strawberry 27cm saucer as everyday tableware, and glancing around the room as I write this, I notice there are also a mantel clock and a few small ornaments here and there… I rather suspect that in most people’s china cabinets, one or two pieces from this British-born tableware brand have quietly found their way in as well.

Looking back over the past decade or more, it is not only Wedgwood — other famous and popular brands, Richard Ginori among them, have similarly seen inexpensive print-decorated wares end up discounted on the shelves of ordinary supermarkets, Ito-Yokado and Aeon alike, reducing themselves to the level of thoroughly commonplace brands with nothing left of the pride of Made in England. Whether partly because prices were set extravagantly high to begin with, 30 to 50 per cent discounts off the domestic retail price are entirely routine, seconds and substandard pieces exist in seemingly inexhaustible supply, and more recently it appears that even Chinese-made products have begun to circulate — though perhaps in that last case we are talking about outright fakes.

True bone china and the art of porcelain have value precisely because they are hand-painted… Of course, one would think twice about using hand-painted antique pieces as everyday tableware, so as substitutes for that purpose, print-reproduced pieces have their place — yet even so, some degree of quality assurance is unavoidable. Once a brand loses its own quality control, its manufacturing pedigree, and the careful curation of its distribution network, it forfeits the premium value that is its very reason for existing, and finds itself left with nothing but an awkward mid-range price point, forced to compete against Nitori and the hundred-yen shop for the same customers… Casting a sideways glance at a bargain sale with cups at two thousand yen apiece lined up in the supermarket, and feeling something of that particular sadness — if on top of all this the recession born of the financial crisis comes crashing down upon us like an avalanche, what kind of world are we heading into…

Wedgwood, having gone into administration, will presumably be acquired and rebuilt by someone somewhere — and come to think of it, British Hi-Fi manufacturer brands have always had a similarly turbulent rise and fall regardless of boom or bust, quite literally like bubbles drifting on a still pool, though in past cases the pattern after a collapse has often been absorption by an investment group followed by a fresh start.

A number of long-established Hi-Fi brands such as QUAD and TANNOY have built their traditions through repeated cycles of merging and splitting apart again under the umbrella of investment groups, but the trend over recent years has increasingly been towards acquisition by Hong Kong, Taiwanese, or Chinese capital — such as IAG — or the outsourcing of production, once carried out by craftsmen within Britain, to local audio manufacturers and factories in the name of cost reduction. Already, the great majority of British budget and mid-range Hi-Fi and surround-sound speakers are manufactured in China, with only a few exceptions such as B&W, and when it comes to amplifiers and players, it is increasingly common to see audio equipment developed and manufactured by Hong Kong or Taiwanese companies serving as the basis for multiple European and American brands, each differentiated by a different front panel or external appearance, and sold under their own respective brand names.

Open the lid and it’s the same thing again — that is actually quite a common experience. Of course, there is tuning work done to flavour the final sonic character of each brand individually — the selection of power transformers, capacitors, op-amp grades, and so on — but when the underlying design is the same unit selling for 30,000 yen under Hong Kong Company A, 50,000 yen under American Company B, 70,000 yen under British Company C, and 100,000 yen under French Company D, and then all of these arrive in Japan repackaged as European products retailing at somewhere between 150,000 and 200,000 yen — well, that is rather the charming thing about Hi-Fi. I won’t go into the details…

I rather expect that in Wedgwood’s case the brand name itself will survive through a licence sale of some kind, but depending on who makes the acquisition, there may come a day — and perhaps not so distant — when the genuine bone china hand-painted by European craftsmen, and the consistently quality mass-produced European factory pieces, become things of the past, and the overwhelming majority of what circulates in general distribution is, in the most literal sense, Made in China. I very much hope it does not come to that… In any case, if there is anything in the current British-made collections that you have your eye on, it might be worth securing it before it disappears.