With this first real post, we’re happy to introduce you to the newest aspect of the Bauer Pottery Company of Los Angeles. Bauer Pottery has had a presence on the web for several years at BauerPottery.com, though that is primarily a retail and general information site.These pages will be more about what we do at Bauer on a day to day basis: What’s going into and coming out of the kilns; what new pieces are being created; that sort of thing.
It will also be a place for you as a Bauer fan and collector to be able to interact more with us and with one another. Down the line we’d like to post information about what you are collecting, where you find your pottery, both new and vintage, and how you use and/or display it all.
While it’s nice to read about Bauer Pottery, we feel that it’s even more fun to see, so we’ll be posting lots of images here, drawing from both our Flickr page and from your submissions. For the time being, hold onto to all your stories and images, but we’ll be asking for them soon, so have them ready.
What’s New at Bauer
Many of you may know the history of the original J.A. Bauer Pottery Company, which can be traced back to the late 1800s in Paducah, KY. The original company moved to Los Angeles in the early 1900s, created many popular and well-imitated lines of pottery and ultimately went out of business in 1962. (Yes, this does give short shrift to the history of Bauer, but I’m trying to get us all to a point about what’s new!)The story of the new Bauer starts in 1998 when collector Janek Boniecki revitalized the trademark and began reproducing popular pieces from the ringware line of the 1920s and 30s. You can get a brief overview of this story in a profile on Janek published in the November 2002 issue of Entrepreneur magazine.
Since that time, Janek has been contracting to third-party manufactures to have the pottery made. As of October of last year, Janek purchased the factory of California Design Works, the company that had been making the bulk of the pottery since 2002.With full control of the production process, we hope to increase the quality, variety and availability of Bauer to all of you. If we’ve heard one complaint over the years, it’s been about the availability of a particular piece or a particular color. Hopefully, that will be a thing of the past.
Well, we could go on and on about what’s new and what’s coming up, but if we told you everything now, you wouldn’t come back for more. Check back, we hope to post relatively frequently. If you have any suggestions or questions, please drop us a line at blog @ bauerpottery.com.
