Trays, racks and a clamp-on lamp.

Farberware takes its name from Simon Farber, a Russian immigrant who started out on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The New York Times reported in 1991 that he began there as a match peddler and that his company, S. W. Farber Inc., made gift trays and racks. That 1991 report dates the company to 1897, and a 1997 Times report on the family’s Bronx factory said Simon Farber had founded the business exactly 100 years earlier. A 2013 Times report gives 1900, the year the current Farberware cookware website uses, and the brand’s licensing company gives 1899 on its own timeline, where it describes Farber as a Russian immigrant and cookware factory manager.

The family opened a plant in Brooklyn, next to the Williamsburg Bridge. The 1991 Times report credits a clamp-on light, devised so that Simon Farber could sleep while his wife read in bed, with propelling the company’s success. The cookware website says Farber made tin and copper cookware on the Lower East Side, and the timeline published by Farberware Licensing Company adds that the business brought out a line of Farberware serving accessories and giftware in 1910, a coffee percolator with a patented, replaceable fuse in 1930, a “Coffee Robot” in 1937 that could keep coffee warm after brewing it, and a “Broiler Robot” in 1938 for preparing food at the table.

The second generation took charge in the 1940s. According to the Times, Simon’s son Isadore Farber became president and head of sales, while his son Milton Farber became vice president for production; two brothers-in-law were also executives. During the Second World War the company made small arms, and the federal government honoured Milton Farber for serving as chairman of production engineering and of the Small Business Mobilization Committee. The licensing company’s timeline describes the war years as a period of production for the U.S. government.

The Bronx, Syratech and a licensed name.

In 1944, the Times reported, the company moved to the Bronx and expanded into a new line of stainless steel pots and pans with bonded aluminium bottoms, a line it called Farberware; a range of electrical appliances came next. The licensing company dates its aluminium-clad stainless-steel cookware to 1949, a line of stainless-steel appliances including an immersible frying pan to 1955, the Open Hearth electric broiler and rotisserie to 1962, a coffee urn to 1966 and the Convection Turbo Oven to 1973. When Isadore retired, Milton succeeded him as president. The company was later sold to Hanson Industries, but Milton stayed with the business until he retired in 1973, and the Times says he also designed and supervised the building of a factory in Israel to produce Farberware.

The Bronx factory stood at the corner of Bruckner Boulevard and 144th Street. The New York Times reported in 1997 that in 1981 New York State had leased the building to U.S. Industries, a conglomerate based in Iselin, New Jersey, which pledged to operate a cookware factory there in exchange for state and city tax breaks and reduced rent. In April 1996 U.S. Industries sold the Farberware name and assets to the Syratech Corporation of Boston, owned by the entrepreneur Leonard Florence.

The Times said in 1997 that Florence licensed the Farberware name to an overseas cookware manufacturer. The New York Daily News reported on 25 October 1996 that Syratech had sold the name to Meyer Corp., whose chief executive, Stanley Cheng, said the company planned to produce the pots and pans in Thailand. U.S. Industries shut the Bronx plant in early September 1996, and the city and state, which sued the company that month, reached a settlement in principle with it in April 1997, the Times reported.

Today the cookware website, which sells cookware and bakeware under licence from Farberware Licensing Company, LLC, says Farberware was acquired by Meyer in 1996, moved into bakeware in 2002, introduced ceramic cookware in 2015 and began a collaboration with Disney in 2024; English Wikipedia describes Meyer Corporation, the U.S. affiliate of the Hong Kong cookware company Meyer Manufacturing, as based in Vallejo, California. The licensing company says the brand was licensed for kitchen gadgets, cutlery, flatware and dinnerware from 1991, and that after its 1996 acquisition it began licensing the name in cookware and electric appliances. Lifetime Brands lists Farberware among its brands, and its timeline says Lifetime Hoan teamed with Syratech to acquire the Farberware brand, securing the cutlery, kitchen gadgets and barbecue accessories categories; the timeline dates that step to 1990.

Design and documentation.

Cookware reaches most people through a shop shelf before it reaches a stove, so a pan’s identity is carried first by its packaging. A box or sleeve usually shows the piece from above or at an angle, names the range and the collection, and gives the brand a fixed corner where the logo sits from one product to the next. Colour on the box often signals the range rather than the company, which lets one maker run several lines side by side without each one looking like the others.

Smaller printed pieces carry the name once the box is gone. Hang-tags and card wraps travel with pans sold loose on a rail, while the underside of a pan or the end of a handle may carry a stamped or cast mark that stays with the piece for as long as it is used. Those small marks are where a name is most often seen at home.

Each guide in this group sets out who started the brand, who owns it now and how its name has been presented, and separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself.

A family name on steel, coffee makers and gadgets.

The Farberware name is the founder’s surname turned into a product word. The 1991 Times report describes the Bronx stainless line as “dubbed Farberware”, while the company itself traded as S. W. Farber Inc., using Simon Farber’s initials. The licensing company’s timeline includes several coffee products, from the 1930 percolator and the 1937 Coffee Robot to the 1966 urn, and the current cookware website lists percolators and teakettles among its cookware categories. It also sells the Millennium cookware line, which the licensing company dates to 1991 and the cookware website to 1992.

Another Farber also made a name in kitchenware. The New York Times reported in 2013 that Simon Farber was the uncle of Sam Farber, who founded the enamelled cast-iron cookware maker Copco in 1960 and sold it in 1982, and who later founded Oxo in Manhattan with his wife, Betsey, and his son, John. Working with the New York industrial design firm Smart Design, they created the Good Grips line of kitchen tools, unveiled in 1990 at the Gourmet Products Show in San Francisco, with fat black handles of a soft plastic called Santoprene. The Times said Sam Farber chose the name Oxo for its graphic symmetry, readable backwards, upside down and vertically.

For a design guide, Farberware shows how a founder’s surname, once stamped on stainless steel made in the Bronx, can outlive the factory and travel through licences into cookware, gadgets and appliances made by different companies. Compare it with Anolon, another cookware brand of Meyer, and All-Clad, the bonded stainless cookware brand. For this guide we use Bronx brick red, stainless grey and percolator copper with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Farberware’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.