Litho Decorating

All our products are unique and decorated by hand, and as well as decorating using hand-cut sponges, we also use litho decorating, or transfers, to create some of our more complicated and detailed patterns. The bold lines of one of our most popular ranges, Black Toast, uses transfers, as do the fiddly detail of British Birds or Gymkhana. Have a look at our video and watch the process by which transfers are applied to our unique pieces. Look out for the yellow dye - it involves a bit of magic in the firing process! We hope that you enjoy watching the video. Share it with your friends, or better still come and visit us in our lovely factory on the banks of the Cauldon Canal in Stoke-on-Trent. We hold regular factory tours, which are a fun and educational way to find out about some of the techniques that produce your favourite pieces of Emma Bridgewater pottery.

Personalised Pottery

Can you think of anything nicer than a personalised piece of pottery, to tell your friends and family that you have been really thinking of them? No, neither can we. Personalised pieces make the perfect gifts for pretty much any occasion, from weddings, to birthdays to christenings, retirement and moving house....the list is endless! Enormous care goes into transferring the funny and sweet messages you send to us onto your favourite pieces of Emma Bridgewater pottery, and each decorator in our studio will have spent some time working with Matthew, as he teaches them how to create the elegant lettering that makes each piece look so glamorous. We’ve seen some life-changing messages over the decade and a half that we have been producing personalised pottery; Bridgewater is obviously a romantic product, as marriage proposals are particularly popular! You can watch the techniques we use for personalised pieces on our video. Maybe you have got a friend who might like to watch it as well? better still, come for a real life factory tour at our site in Stoke-on-Trent, where you can tour our sunny decorating studio and watch personalised pieces being painted. We’ve got a pottery cafe here, too, so you can have a go at creating your own, totally unique piece. We know you will enjoy the experience.

Plate Making

We love the shapes of our elegant dishes and plates, and we’re lucky to have a master plate maker working with us in our factory on the banks of the Cauldon Canal in Stoke-on-Trent. This is Bill, and he has been making plates in Stoke for nearly half a century. If you click on the link opposite you can watch a short video which shows the complete process by which Bill creates our lovely plates. Have a look at it, and see if you can spot Bill cutting a slice of virgin clay to make into a piece that might ultimately be decorated with your favourite pattern. We hope you enjoy the video. Why not share it with a friend? We hope that it might inspire you to come and visit us in our factory, where you can take a factory tour, and where you will find our pottery cafe, to create your own unique pieces.

Slip Casting

The clay that is used to make your favourite pieces of Emma Bridgewater pottery will have travelled from Wales, Cornwall and Staffordshire. It is mixed up in huge quantities in the factory, in a machine rather like a giant food processor, and the slip casting technique that is used to create our beautiful shapes is time consuming and complicated. Bigger shapes take longer to cast than the smaller shapes, so casting a teapot is a more time consuming process than casting a baby mug, for example. Click on the link to our video below and watch the process by which we produce those special personalised pieces. We hope that you enjoy it and share it with friends. And don’t forget that you can come and visit us in our factory in Stoke-on-Trent all year round. It makes a great day out for children and grown-ups, and we’d love to see you.

Sponge Decorating

Each piece of Emma Bridgewater spongeware pottery is decorated using hand-cut sponges, a technique that was first developed in the nineteenth century, and which gives our pottery it’s colourful and idiosyncratic charm. Emma or Matthew design all of the patterns in our decorating studio, which are then cut into sponges using soldering irons on the factory floor. If you click on the link to the video opposite you can watch Rita or one of the team of twenty decorators creating some of the pieces that might make their way to your kitchen table. Some of these designs are really intricate. Just think of all the different shapes used on our Union Jack teapot, for example! Share the video with a friend or member of your family. We hope that you will enjoy it, and it might even inspire you to come and visit us in our lovely factory on the banks of the Cauldon Canal in Stoke-on-Trent, where you can enjoy a factory tour and even try your hand at hand decorating one of your own pieces. We hope that you enjoy the video, and we hope to see you at the factory soon, too.

Factory Tour

If you’ve not yet been able to make the trip to our factory why not take a virtual tour right now? This short film shows the complete production process from the preparation of the clay slip to the selecting and finishing of the end products.

As you sip your tea from your Emma Bridgewater mug you’ll be fascinated to see how many skilled pairs of hands your pottery goes through before it gets to you. See the casters at work creating pieces of hollow ware and see our master plate maker working the flat slices of clay into the beautiful shapes you know and use everyday.

We hope that you enjoy your brief tour and you will feel inspired to plan a trip to visit our lovely factory one day soon. You can then enjoy a much more detailed tour and take the opportunity of trying your hand at decorating your own pieces of pottery in our studio. We do hope to see you in Stoke-on-Trent soon. Why not share this video with your friends and family.