Art world titan buys the last remaining U.S. fine china company : NPR

The Pickard China factory in Antioch, Illinois, about 50 miles northwest of Chicago, is a cavernous space full of hulking, noisy, clay-splattered machines. The decorating room smells strongly of turpentine. The company’s team of gilders mixes the chemical in with the pigments they use to handpaint plates, cups and other high-end porcelain homewares.

“I don’t even notice the smell,” said employee Rachael Keeling, while deftly applying a narrow green band to a spinning porcelain plate destined for a golf club awards ceremony. “How crazy is that?”

Rachael Keeling is among a small group of British craftspeople employed at Pickard. She said she came to the U.S. to work for the company 25 years ago.

Akilah Townsend for NPR

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Keeling is among a small group of British craftspeople employed at Pickard. She said she came to the U.S. to work for the company 25 years ago from the famed Wedgwood factory in Stoke-on-Trent when fine china production in her home country started becoming more automated and moving overseas. Keeling said she’s still worried about her future. “I came here and it’s like, ‘Oh, is it going to happen again?’ “

A long decline

There used to be a handful of companies manufacturing high-end china in the U.S. Pickard is the last one left.

Its customers include the White House, U.S. embassies, fancy hotels, private jets, golf clubs, and higher-end retailers like Williams-Sonoma. “It’s a beautiful, beautiful service,” said Michelle Obama’s interior designer, Michael Smith, of the blue-green rimmed dinnerware set he and the former First Lady commissioned from Pickard during her husband’s second term in office. “It also lends itself to being used in convenient, flexible, and practical way.”

Pickard China’s David Nosko stand by one of the factory’s hulking, noisy, clay-splattered machines.

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Pickard’s clients include the White House, U.S. embassies, fancy hotels, private jets, golf clubs, and higher-end retailers like Williams-Sonoma.

Akilah Townsend for NPR

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Akilah Townsend for NPR

But despite its prestigious clientele, the company and the fine china industry as a whole have been facing a long decline. Pickard’s sprawling factory is in urgent need of repairs and upgrades, and its current output is roughly a quarter of what it was at the company’s peak in the 1970s.

“There’s a kind of cultural cliff that things have fallen off in terms of this sort of commodity,” said Philip Scranton, an emeritus historian of American industrial development at Rutgers University. Scranton said escalating manufacturing costs and the spread of casual lifestyles since the 1970s caused nearly all of the American china factories to go bust or move operations overseas. “And I am not sure whether there’s a way of recovering that market.”