

Going bankrupt now because the lessons of its 1759 Founder have been forgotten - robg
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/10/opinion/10flanders.html

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andyking
I come from the city where Wedgwood was founded.

The one thing this article fails to mention is what I believe was the
company's ultimate downfall. The pot works of Wedgwood and Royal Doulton
(another pottery company bought by Wedgwood a few years ago) were slowly being
closed down and replaced by production in Indonesia to save money. Towards the
end, the company was even looking at moving its main HQ to Jakarta. Royal
Doulton became just a label - the site of their old headquarters in Burslem
lies empty. Thousands of people have lost their jobs in the pottery industry
in Stoke-on-Trent (an area KNOWN as The Potteries) over the past ten or
fifteen years or so.

What they didn't bank on was the fact that the predominantly foreign (American
and Japanese) buyers of the top-end Wedgwood wares didn't want Indonesian-made
pottery, they were buying into luxury goods made in England. By cutting costs,
they took away their selling point and couldn't differentiate themselves from
the mass-produced Chinese stuff you get in a supermarket. There are Far
Eastern "Doulton" dinner services selling for a shade over a tenner in big
discount shops - and they're absolute junk. They've killed their brands.

This area has centuries of heritage in pottery and thousands of people with
the skills to design and produce excellent quality wares. We are, without a
doubt, the best place to make pottery in the world. But it's soulless business
people with their eyes firmly on the bottom line rather than on trading off
that heritage that have killed it off and condemned our city to what feels
like a future of minimum wage jobs in nail distribution warehouses and mobile
phone call centres. You can make stuff cheaper by outsourcing it to the Far
East - but do you really want to compete with everyone else doing that when
you could be producing a uniquely British product?

~~~
ryanwaggoner
_But it's soulless business people with their eyes firmly on the bottom line
rather than on trading off that heritage that have killed it off and condemned
our city to what feels like a future of minimum wage jobs in nail distribution
warehouses and mobile phone call centres._

Oh boy, another rant about how "soulless" business people who worship the
almighty dollar have killed off something beautiful and magical in the world
because of their greed.

Please. Most manufacturing in the western hemisphere has been offshored
because they simply can't compete with overseas firms who have dramatically
lower costs. It's for survival, not higher profits.

I suspect that the demand for expensive and "uniquely British" pottery is no
longer big enough to support those companies, forcing them to compete in a
lower market. If the demand was there, someone would be starting a factory and
hiring all those experts in your area to supply that demand. And if you think
the demand is there, go raise some cash and do it yourself :-)

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skmurphy
They will be writing this article about the New York Times within a decade:
how the current leaders lost the winning recipe of the founders and drove it
bankrupt.

~~~
gibsonf1
I'll never forget how much I looked forward to getting the Sunday Times when
living in NYC in the early 90's - it was the ultimate paper with objectively
reported in depth stories from around the world. Now it leans so heavily I
hardly recognize it - the bias started with the current editor - a shame to
loose such an incredibly valuable source of news.

