New lease of life for Portugal’s ceramics bastion
CALDAS DA RAINHA ( Portugal): Ignoring temporary walls which point to ongoing large-scale expansion, workers burn the midnight oil at Portugal’s byword for ceramic creativity to meet orders from around the globe.
For more than 130 years, Bordallo Pinheiro has been producing all manner of artistic glazed pottery, and business is booming again a decade after the company almost went to the wall.
From traditional azulejos tiles, multicoloured fruit-shaped tableware, animalshaped vases and ceramic sardines, to Mick Jagger and Pope Francis figurines, the factory is a Portuguese porcelain fancier’s paradise.
That order books are crammed is a far cry from when the company, founded in 1884 in the western town of Caldas da Rainha an hour north of Lisbon, was bought out in 2009.
In the ensuing decade, sales have tripled and production has raced ahead 60% – hence the need to ramp up capacity at the site in the town, also renowned for its hot springs.
Though some see elements of the firm’s intricate wares as kitsch, for collectors, it is a pillar of Portuguese contemporary artistic culture.
Sculptors make each mould by hand and the most complex require multiple moulds.
Bordallo Pinheiro’s status was underlined in May when London’s Monocle magazine for the high disposable income reader devoted several pages to it.
Today sees the company riding the Zeitgeist, with multimillion investments designed to lift production by around a third, as sales soar from Spain to South Korea and the United States.
It now plans to open its own stores, notably in Paris and beyond, rather than selling chiefly to other distributors – quite a turnaround from its previously bleak outlook due to tough competition from China.
Layoffs, late payment of wages ... Victor Formiga, a 56-year-old company veteran of 30 years, well remembers the “difficult days”.
He currently leads the team making the moulds into which liquid clay, or slip, is cast prior to firing in the kiln.
Painting and dipping into clear glaze follow, before firing a second time.
“Today, things are going much better. We’re proud of this expansion and I hope it will last,” says Formiga.
Even as the company, now based on the town’s outskirts having converted its original more central site into a museum and shop, sets its sights still higher, it remains faithful to traditional, handmade manufacturing.
“Bordallo will remain a kind of giant workshop. We want to pay tribute to our history by turning out almost exclusively handmade products,” says industrial director Tiago Mendes.
Save for a handful of items pressed mechanically, the remainder are made manually. The Bordallo factory employed 180 workers when it was bought out but is expanding the payroll to 255 to help cover teams working a night shift too.
By year-end, it hopes to have opened its first international boutiques in Paris and Madrid and aims to lift exports to three quarters from a current 50% of overall production.