NEWELL, W.Va. — Born of the Great Depression, it was a glossy, color-saturated line of cups, bowls and plates meant to affordably brighten lives and dinner tables. Seven decades later, Fiesta dinnerware is still designed to send a subtle message of optimism, but it’s no longer quite so cheap.
Yet Fiesta’s enduring popularity and strong sales even as consumers cut back are helping to keep struggling Homer Laughlin China Co. afloat. It’s the last major dinnerware producer that makes its products in the U.S., as competitors have shut down or moved offshore.
“We’re fighting for our lives right now,” President Joe Wells III says of the West Virginia company that’s battling the ever-rising cost of doing business and the ever-falling prices of foreign competitors. He represents the fourth generation of his family to run the Newell factory that has employed thousands of families in and around West Virginia’s Northern Panhandle.
Privately held Homer Laughlin — founded in 1871 across the Ohio River in East Liverpool, Ohio, but in Newell since 1905 — won’t share financial data. Standard &Poor’s estimates it does about $50 million a year in sales.
Wells acknowledges, however, the commercial side of the business supplying restaurant chains like Olive Garden and Red Lobster has slowed more than usual this summer. Those sales typically account for about 60 percent of the bottom line.
“Our customers at this point in time are not ordering. They’re making do with whatever they have and only ordering when it’s an emergency,” Wells says. “But there’s going to come a time, and I hope in the not very distant future, when all of a sudden our customers are making a little bit more money, they’re seeing their customers come back, and they’re going to want to order more dishes, change the decor of their restaurants.”
Fiesta, he says, is helping the company get by until that time arrives. Ask why sales are up slightly, and Wells recounts the line’s Depression-era beginnings and colorful palette.
“It was done with the intent of giving people who were having a real miserable time something that wasn’t expensive, that could brighten up their table, make their lives a little cheerier” he says.
Consumers are eating at home more often now and “they want to have a cheerful dining room or wherever they eat, and Fiesta’s a part of that.”
Homer Laughlin, named for its founder but run since 1897 by the Wells and Aaron families, has produced 25,000 patterns in its nearly 140 years. But most people know only Fiesta, the solid-color, Art Deco style designed by Frederick Hurten Rhead and launched in 1936, in brilliant red and selling for pennies.
By the late 1960s, Fiesta had begun to fall out of fashion, and the company discontinued it in January 1973, inadvertently starting a collecting frenzy. Today, rare pieces and colors can be worth thousands. A covered onion soup bowl in turquoise, produced for only one year before being discontinued in 1937, is valued at $8,000 by the 2006 edition of the Collector’s Encyclopedia of Fiesta.
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