In an article about the great 18th century potter and entrepreneur, Joseph Wedgewood, originally published in The Economic History Review (1960), and kindly sent to me by one of our list, Stephen Straker, the economic historian N. McKendrick describes a classic case of the origin and marketing of high class pottery which, for my purpose, falls fairly into the category of Status Goods.

At the time Josiah Wedgewood was born, 1730, pottery was a modest craft industry. In the area in which he was born, Staffordshire, blessed with good china clay, there was a profusion of local potters who supplied the local market towns with ordinary ware, such as cups, plates, and cooking pots. Sometimes their products were retailed by pedlars slightly further afield in the cities of Liverpool and Manchester but that was about the fullest extent of the reach of the Staffordhsire potteries. In other parts of the country and indeed in the whole of Europe and Asia, there were also small constellations of potteries collected around suitable clay resources.

There was thus no shortage of these basic goods in the whole of the civilised world. Prices were low, profits were low and everybody, from the richest households to the poorest possessed much the same sorts of items and used them in much the same way. In short, although pottery was once a highly-priced Status Good thousands of years previously when pottery-making was a rare and highly skilled activity, was exported over long distances by ship and bought only by royalty and chieftains, it had long ceased to be so. There was no profit in it, apart from the normal low profit of trade à la Adam Smith by which a local potter would exchange the products of his specialisation with the goods of other specialists. Pottery-making would certainly not have contributed to what we now call the economic growth rate, or if it did it would have been at the rate of a miniscule fraction of one per cent.

However, Josiah Wedgewood was born in a time of great intellectual ferment. The rational ideas of the Enlightenment philosophers were now beginning to work their way through in a myriad of practical ways and scientific experiments. This excitement had spread from royalty, such as Peter the Great of Russia and King Charles II (and the Royal Society of which he became the Patron) right across Europe -- England particularly -- until it was activating the lowest ranks of society living in the most squalid conditions. By the time Josiah was a young man, anybody and everybody with the slightest excess of intelligence or ability would have found opportunities galore in the activities taking place around him (although, sadly, not around her so much). Canals were being dug, mechanical devices invented, roads improved, tea and coffee clubs were springing up in the towns and cities, and self-help, self-education and opportunities for meeting others of like mind was the culture of the day.

Josiah Wedgewood later fell in with probably the most talented group of practical individuals that has probably ever lived. This was the Lunar Society, so called because it met in Birmingham on nights when there was a full moon and attenders could travel there without being mugged. More specifically, Josiah was friendly with an 'inner group' of four other individuals comprising engineer and toymaker, Matthew Boulton, the inventor of the steam engine, James Watt, the doctor, evolutionary theorist and inventor, Erasmus Darwin and the first person to identify oxygen, Joseph Priestly.

By the time Josiah was 19 year old, and had finished his apprenticeship to his brother Richard, he was already carrying out wide ranging experiments in glazing, chemistry, glass and metalwork. By the time he went into partnership with Thomas Wieldon he had started what turned out to be nearly 5,000 carefully recorded trials in new glazes, involving metallic oxides of all sorts such as copper, iron and manganese. Ten years later he set up on his own pottery with a legacy of £10 and immediately started further experiments into transfer printing by which artwork from engraved copper plates could be transferred mechanically to his pots. The number of people he employed and the number of experiments he carried out multiplied apace. By the time he had sufficient free time to be able to travel and meet the other brilliant members of the Lunar Society he was already a fully paid-up intellectual, engineer and scientist, the equal of any of the others.

Due to the rise in tea and coffee drinking in clubs and in the home at that time, the pottery market was growing one and it was this degree of modest prosperity that enabled Josiah to afford the investment required for the relatively large continuing scale of research and development considering the still small size of his firm. But he was also assiduous in dividing the work in his factory into specialised skills and gaining efficiencies in manufacturing way ahead those of his contemporaries. (Products can be easily reverse-engineered by competitors; the culture of workforces is not not easily copied from one factory or country to another.)

It was only now that the story of Wedgewood pottery qua Status Goods begins because, in addition to his successful scientific and management experiments, he now turned his attention to marketing and he remained at this for most of the rest of his life. In a sense, he was really forced into it by his competitors because, whatever technical discoveries he made -- green and yellow glazes, creamware, jasper and black basalt and so on -- they were quickly imitated by others. Their products were not quite as good as his own (though one or two were) but, nevertheless, they were diluting his market. Foregoing the temptation to match them price for price, he chose to concentrate on the most technically challenging items possible and, because he was already meeting some of the higher social and intellectual strata in the country, he chose to direct his products towards the highest niche markets that were available, namely royalty and aristocracy. It was not that he despised the mass market, but that he saw more opportunities and profits in selling his latest designs to the highest status levels first. Knowing that most people all too readily defer to their apparent betters and will loyally follow their fashions like lemmings, Josiah knew that once royalty and aristocracy had bought particular items then he would have no problems selling into successively lower-spending markets -- though still at much higher prices than his contemporaries.

Josiah Wedgewood was the original exponent of every technique of the modern marketing specialist. He aimed at niche markets at home and abroad, even adopting design fashions he disliked; he advertised extremely selectively; he would persuade editors and journalists to puff his products; he branded his goods with fashionable and classical names; he ensured that portraits artists would include one of his pots in the background of the painting; he opened showrooms in London and other European capitals and major cities in which there would be private displays according to the status of the visitor; he aimed to convince and sell to the highest strata in one country after another; he lobbied governments to reduce tariffs on pottery; he befriended the rich and the influential at every opportunity, and he continued to price his goods high -- twice or thrice as much as anybody else's even though, by this time, there were potters, such as William Adams, who were making pottery at least the equal in quality to Wedgewood's.

Time and again in his letters to friends, family and his agents Josiah Wedgewood would write phrases such as 'a great price is at first necessary to make the vases [into] esteemed Ornaments for Palaces'. He charged what the market would bear at the highest level because he knew he was appealing to their sense of status. So long as his prices didn't go into the stratosphere, it was increasingly the case that no-one of rank could afford to be seen not to be able to buy Wedgewood pottery and show it off in their drawing rooms. And, of course, once he'd sold his items to royalty he would make sure that everybody else knew about it, thus consolidating both the status of his elite customers and the reputation of his own pottery. Once Josiah had sold to royalty in England and abroad, he would then aim for the slightly lesser nobility, and then to the gentry, and then successively downwards. He never lost sight of the fact that the ordinary market was larger than the elite one, but that it was necessary to start at the other end first. Meanwhile, he would initiate a new set of fashionable designs at the high end of his market -- a new Status Good -- and start the genteel pricing descent all over again.

In today's terms, Josiah Wedgewood would be a multi-billionaire; in today's terms of profits and investment effects on the economy, his firm and the English pottery industry would be the equivalent to Microsoft. Wedgewood's Etruria pottery factory was one of the major motors of the industrial revolution. Its products were Status Goods par excellence and in their economic effects were exceeded by few other consumer goods in history.