A potter’s fix for a potter’s problem.

Trimming — turning a leather-hard pot upside down on the wheel to carve its foot — needs the pot held perfectly on centre. Most potters do it with lumps of clay. Brian Giffin, a production potter who had studied at the University of Northern Colorado in the early 1970s, built a mechanical answer instead: a disc with sliding arms that close on the pot from three sides. The company says he “brought the Giffin Grip® to the world in 1978,” and its line is “Holding pots on center since 1978.”

The first versions, the company says, were made of birch plywood with brass sliders, machined on a vintage Bridgeport milling machine; later ones were injection-moulded. Patent records show two inventions under the name, the first filed in the same year the company dates the product to: US 4,222,577, filed in July 1978 by Brian K. Giffin and issued in 1980, and US 4,585,240, filed in 1983 and issued in 1986 to Giffin Earthworks, Inc., describing three sliding arms in a spiral groove. We report the patents’ existence and dates, not their legal scope.

The business is now Giffin Tec, Inc., on Lummi Island, in Washington’s northern Puget Sound, an island reached by a short ferry crossing — an unlikely address for a tool advertised in a national ceramics magazine. It remains a family affair, and, by the company’s account, a small one on a small island: the company names Zack Giffin as general manager and Sam Giffin as “the youngest of three Giffin Brothers,” and Holly Giffin for a forty-year tenure with the firm.

A trade mark in an individual’s name.

The most unusual fact about Giffin Grip is in the trade-mark register. The United States Patent and Trademark Office lists GIFFIN GRIP as registration 2,864,255, filed in December 2002 and registered in July 2004, renewed in January 2024 and live. The application came late: it was filed in December 2002, twenty-four years after the product’s launch, and it is that registration which backs the ® the company prints in its copy. Its owner is recorded as “Giffin, Brian,” an individual — not the company that makes the product. It is filed in Class 7, the international class for machines and machine parts, which is how the register sees a trimming chuck: a component of a pottery wheel. The registration covers “CHUCKS MARKETED AS A COMPONENT OF POTTERY WHEELS FOR CENTERING AND HOLDING POTTERY TO AID THE POTTER IN TRIMMING.”

That is a meaningful arrangement. The brand, legally, belongs to its inventor; the company that builds and sells the product is a separate entity run by his family. It is the reverse of the pattern elsewhere in this series, where old names have been bought by groups and investors. The Giffin Grip name has never left the person who made it.

Its origin claim is equally direct. A 2025 advertisement in Ceramics Monthly carried the line “MADE IN THE USA • 10 Year Warranty • GIFFIN TEC INC • Lummi Island, WA.” The company describes a “90 day money back guarantee, and 10 years free replacement,” and sells a full-size Model 10® and a smaller Mini™, the latter advertised at $199. The two symbols are a small lesson in themselves: ® signals a registered trade mark, ™ a claimed but unregistered one, and the company marks its two models differently.

The listing mark — and a tool that does not need one.

Most of the equipment in this round plugs in, and for those products the listing mark is the regulator’s main concern. In an American workplace, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration says electrical equipment is “acceptable only if approved,” usually by being “listed, or labeled” by a Nationally Recognized Testing Laboratory, which applies its own registered mark; in Ontario, the Electrical Safety Authority requires approval “before an electrical product… is used, sold, displayed or advertised for sale.” Kiln makers cite UL 499, the standard for products that generate heat “to perform its intended function.”

A Giffin Grip has no plug. It is a mechanical accessory — a disc and three arms — that sits on the wheel head of a pottery wheel, which is itself the electrical product. Its safety story is therefore about engineering rather than certification: whether the arms hold a pot firmly and true at speed. The company’s answer is a warranty rather than a mark — “90 day money back guarantee, and 10 years free replacement” — which is the form of assurance a mechanical tool can offer.

That contrast is useful for buyers equipping a studio. The kiln and the wheel need the electrical paperwork: OSHA adds that listed equipment “shall be installed and used in accordance with any instructions included in the listing or labeling.” The accessories, like a trimming chuck, are judged by how they work and how long they are guaranteed to keep working. A ten-year replacement promise on a tool that sits on a spinning wheel is a strong statement of confidence in the design, and it is the closest thing a mechanical accessory has to a listing mark.

A surname and a verb.

The name is a surname and a verb, alliterative and functional: it tells the buyer whose idea it is and what it does. The ® that the company uses in its own copy is backed by the registration in Brian Giffin’s name. For a tool that sits on a wheel head rather than on a shelf, the name has to work in conversation, and a two-word name built on a surname does.

For a design guide, Giffin Grip shows the value of owning a category word. When a brand name is the obvious way to describe a whole kind of tool, it is valuable and vulnerable at once — the outcome every brand hopes for and every trade-mark lawyer watches. Keeping the registration live, as the 2024 renewal shows, is how a small maker protects a name that has become part of the craft’s vocabulary.

For this guide we use a Puget blue and a pale sea with a heavy grotesque. These are an unofficial interpretation, not the company’s colour values, and nothing of its logo is reproduced.

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