Executive Reading: July

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"Wedgwood: The First Tycoon"

By Brian Dolan
Even if you have never encountered a wedding registry, you have undoubtedly heard of Wedgwood. One of the world’s premier makers of fine and collectible china, the company still employs many of the designs, marketing strategies and business practices developed by its most famous namesake, Josiah Wedgwood, three centuries ago. The genius who reinvented his great-grandfather’s “peasant pottery” business and created the modern world’s first brand name is the subject of Brian Dolan’s fascinating book, “Wedgwood: The First Tycoon.”
    Although branches of the Wedgwood family had been potters in Staffordshire since the mid-17th century, their fortunes and businesses diverged widely within a few generations. Josiah’s father and grandfather continued to make the same rough, clumsy “crockery” they had always made, with no aim to improve their craftsmanship or the business. Up the hill, another branch of the family had managed to thrive by stealing the formulas and designs of Dutch immigrants and creating more popular glazed objects such as teapots — a novelty at the time. Both sides, in their way, were crippled by a lack of imagination.
    Josiah’s genuine love of innovation and learning, coupled with innate business savvy, is one of the most compelling themes in the book. He was born in 1730, the youngest of 12 children. After a bout of smallpox left him too weak in the legs to work the potter’s wheel, he focused on “trivial” matters, such as design. He also began to notice serious inefficiencies in production, distribution and marketing; his brother Thomas was too shortsighted to bother with these details.
    By 33, he had started his pottery works and earned a commission from Queen Charlotte, sparking heavy demand from the aristocracy for his delicate “cream ware” and enabling him to build a new state-of-the-art facility. A consummate early-adopter, Josiah designed the factory to enable “division of labor,” a novel concept in which the pottery process (mixing, forming, firing and glazing) was divided into individual jobs assigned to specialist workers. This greatly increased the quality and volume of the output, but it also isolated his employees from the complete process, enabling Wedgwood to protect his hard-earned trade secrets.
    Equally impressive is how well he understood the concept of “aspirational” marketing, centuries before the phrase would be coined. He created the first “showrooms” in London to display his newest designs even before they were available to purchase, and to show his royal commissions before they were shipped off to their new owner. Commoners and aristocrats alike would line up around the block to see what was coming. His regular access to nobility allowed him to spot new trends and seek out publicity-making commissions, including Pompeii-inspired “jasperware” and a complete dinner set for Catherine the Great.
    Dolan paints a vivid picture of the socio-economic realities at the rise of the industrial revolution that make Josiah’s success both so inevitable and so surprising. He took a flailing and minor trade, and through skill, taste and organization transformed it into an international industry of great importance and enormous artistic appeal. His passion for innovation in all things (as well as his careful adherence to lessons learned) made him the kind of entrepreneur any American could admire. But 18th-century Britain — about which Dolan has written several books — cared little about “self-made” men, despite the cachet of numerous royal commissions. Rather than succumb to a societal structure in which he could play no significant role, Wedgwood believed that self-education and self-improvement would lead to better business practices, better products, even a better society. At the time of his death, he had amassed a £500,000 fortune (a Trump-like sum by today’s standards), a thriving business, and a daughter, Susannah, who later gave birth to Charles Darwin.
    One glaring oversight: the book scarcely mentions Wedgwood’s commitment to what would now be termed “corporate social responsibility.” He invested in building canals and roads and schools. He was a staunch abolitionist. He designed several plates with messages of social reform to raise funds for causes in which he believed. And decades before most laborers had any acknowledged rights at all, at a time when a person could be fired for losing a limb, Wedgwood provided his employees with housing, education, training, health care and retirement plans. True, he started the workday with a bell and ran his factory “like a military regime,” but even under the auspices of enlightened self-interest, these were extraordinary measures and worthy of a closer look than Dolan gives them.

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