New (Old) Nesting (Mixing) Bowls

Take a deep breath.

Clear your head.

This is going to be one of those things.

Let's start with a happy new year to everyone! Most people get a little lull after the first of the year. We're into the third week of January and we're just now wrapping up all of our post-holiday sale shipping. The sheer volume of orders coupled with the fact that heavy rains here in Southern California took out most of our phone service and all of our internet connection at the factory and we've had a heck of a 2011 so far.

Now let's get to the exciting and confusing news. We've got a new item to introduce to you. Actually, it's not a new item in that it's both a vintage Bauer design as well as a piece we've been selling for several years now. Plus, it's not just one item but six.

We're very happy to finally launch* the Bauer Classic Style Mixing Bowl set on our web site. As you may know, we've been selling four sizes of what have been alternately called "Mixing Bowls," "Nested Mixing Bowls" or "Nesting Bowls." We will continue to make and sell this style, which going forward will be called "Bauer 2000 Mixing Bowls." They will continue to be available in the four sizes (7, 8, 9 & 10 inch) and 15 colors.


Bauer Classic Style Mixing Bowls: #9 Bauer Yellow, #12 Bauer Orange, #18 Turquoise, #24 Federal Blue


Bauer 2000 Mixing Bowls: 10" French Blue, 9" Lime Green, 8" Midnight Blue, 7" Chartreuse

The "new" set of bowls will be called the "Bauer Classic Style Mixing Bowls." This set will be available in six sizes and 15 colors. The Classic Style Bowl sizes are distinguished by numbers on the underside of each bowl. The larger the number the smaller the bowl, thus the #30 bowl is the smallest, and they continue up through #24, #18, #12, #9 with #6 as the largest. The middle four bowls (#24, #18, #12 & #9) are essentially same size as the four pieces in Bauer 2000 set of bowls.



Why are we causing all of this confusion? Well, when we started reproducing the mixing bowl set, the models were not as exact a reproduction of the ringware bowl set as we had hoped. Regardless of how we felt about them, they were still very popular. The Sundance catalog featured them for several years and we still sell many of them every month.

While the original bowls were flying off the shelves, we went back to the drawing board, or rather our model-maker's table, and made a new set of mixing bowls. These bowls reproduced the vintage bowls much more accurately. The rings were thicker, the rim was less flared out and the overall shape was more round and full. Both sets are lovely and most people can't really see much of a difference until they're side by side and we point out them out.

The easiest way to distinguish between the two styles is to turn one over and look at the bottom mark. A Bauer 2000 bowl reads "BAUER POTTERY LOS ANGELES" around the outside with "2000" stamped across the middle. A Classic Style bowl reads "BAUER POTTERY USA" round the ring and is also stamped with a "2000" across the middle, but below the "2000" is the size of the bowl: 6, 9, 12, 18, 24 or 30.


Bauer 2000 Mixing Bowl bottom mark


Bauer Classic Style Mixing Bowl bottom mark

So, why keep the first set of bowls if the second version is a more accurate reproduction? There are a couple reasons. The first being that a lot of people bought the Bauer 2000 set and sometimes want to add to their set or replace a broken or lost piece. We'd hate to leave all those people with no recourse but to buy a whole new set of bowls. Second, the pieces in the two sets cannot be mixed with one another and still nest properly. A Classic #12 does not sit properly inside a Bauer 2000 10 inch bowl and so forth.

Hopefully, this clarifies rather than confuses the situation. We are very excited to finally make these bowls more widely available. Please feel free to give us a call or send email with any questions you might have about our nested mixing bowls.

To shop for either style of Nested Mixing Bowl, click here now.




*Extra points to those who noticed that the Classic Style Bowls have been the header image for the Bauer blog since it launched.

Welcome!

It’s 2008, so every company from a one-man start-up to multi-national corporation has a blog, so why not a pottery company with over 100 years of history?

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.

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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.