Emma Bridgewater’s maternal great-grandparents owned coal mines in Ashington, Northumberland. On her father’s side, the family set up a boiler-making factory in Wakefield. So, perhaps, starting a pottery factory in Stoke-on-Trent which now turns over thirty-three million pounds a year was simply in her blood?
Becoming Britain’s “Queen of Pottery” her destiny?
If so, that’s not how she sees it. "There's nothing like ignorance and naivety," Bridgewater told Enterprise Nation, talking about her first years in business. "I had this naïve idea that if I found a factory… it would all be easy. Predictably it's been a lot less straightforward than that."
In 1985, Bridgewater started selling her wares from a stall in Covent Garden and then at trade shows. As The Telegraph reported, “Buyers from Harrods and Selfridges, as well as garden centres and cookery shops, placed orders.” The company began to grow.
Bridgewater believes this initial high-level of trade interest, what she calls a “Feeding frenzy,” was the key to her early success. "When we started people were literally pushing and shoving. You're gambling and you're betting on yourself. You don't want to do it without the back-up of demand." Shortly after that initial “frenzy “of interest, she approached 120 stockists, getting listings in 110.
She was on her way.
Today, the business employs nearly 500 people and produces more than 40,000 pieces a week. Its export market is booming. According to The Telegraph, “America loves Emma Bridgewater, and the Chinese can’t buy enough.”
But the Stoke entrepreneur seems a little taken aback by her international success. “To my mind, taking a brand into the export market should involve shops and great big tables of displays, but that’s considered old-fashioned,” she told The Telegraph. “The digital generation is quite accustomed to looking at one thing at a time on a screen. Their relationship with Emma Bridgewater the brand is purely through their phones. I find that so strange and remarkable.”
Almost forty years after Bridgewater first began, her product seems to be everywhere. A middle-class kitchen staple. The firm has created crockery that celebrated King Charles’s coronation, a ubiquitous “Polka Dot” range, and forged an unlikely but astute commercial alliance with Peppa Pig.
So, what keeps Bridgewater going?
"You have to be doing something you really care about. You have to believe that what you're doing makes a difference to people's lives. If you're not making a contribution through all that effort and sacrifice you will wake up one day and ask, 'what the hell am I doing?'", she told Enterprise Nation.
A proud statement of entrepreneurial intent those industrious ancestors in Northumberland and Yorkshire would undoubtedly agree with.