Doccia, outside Florence.

The house now called Ginori 1735 carries its founder’s family name and its founding year in a single mark. Its origin is a porcelain manufactory set up by the Florentine nobleman Marchese Carlo Ginori at Doccia, a locality now part of Sesto Fiorentino, just outside Florence. The art magazine Artribune, reporting on 31 March 2017, described the manufactory as founded in 1735 by Carlo Ginori, the date the brand uses in its name. English Wikipedia, in its article on Doccia porcelain, dates the start of operations to 1737, when Ginori bought a villa at Doccia next to his family’s own villa, and says the kilns were firing by July of that year.

Wikipedia describes Carlo Ginori as a student of chemical texts who ran his own experiments with clays and kilns, and says he recruited painters, modellers and kiln masters from Vienna and Florence. Among them were the painter Johann Carl Wendelin Anreiter, who had worked at the Vienna du Paquier manufactory, and the young sculptor Gaspero Bruschi, who led the rooms for models and moulds. Wikipedia dates the earliest datable Doccia porcelain to 1740 and says a privilege for porcelain production in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany was granted on 3 March 1741.

Early Doccia work ranged from stencilled white-and-blue tableware to Asian-inspired decorations and large sculpture. Wikipedia lists a Venus de’ Medici of 1747 and a porcelain fireplace of 1754, both now in the Doccia museum. The Ginori family owned and ran the manufactory until 1896.

That year changed the name. Both Wikipedia and the Florence edition of the Corriere della Sera, the Corriere Fiorentino, record that on 11 October 1896 the Doccia manufactory merged with the Società Ceramica Richard of Milan, a company led by the industrialist Giulio Richard. The combined business took the name Richard-Ginori. The Corriere Fiorentino, writing on 16 September 2020, said the arrival of the Richards brought mechanical innovations to the workshops and expanded lithographic decal printing to reduce the cost of hand decoration, and that the company was listed on the stock exchange for almost a century.

Ponti, Milan and a long industrial century.

The twentieth-century house is closely tied to one designer. Italian Wikipedia says that from 1923 to 1930 the architect Gio Ponti worked as artistic director of Richard-Ginori and renewed its range of products. Artribune, in its report of 31 March 2017, illustrated a Ponti piece for Richard-Ginori, “La Temperanza–L’Architetto,” dated 1927–28, and noted that Ponti’s ceramics were then on show in an Art Deco exhibition at the international ceramics museum in Faenza.

Richard-Ginori grew into an industrial group making tableware, sanitary ceramics and electrical insulators. Italian Wikipedia records a merger with the Società Ceramica Italiana of Laveno in 1965, followed by a series of later owners. A Florence court declared Richard-Ginori bankrupt on 7 January 2013, the Corriere Fiorentino reported that day.

The fashion house Gucci, part of the French group Kering, took over the brand and the factory. The Florence newspaper La Nazione reported on 5 June 2013 that work had resumed that morning at the Sesto Fiorentino plant after Gucci completed its acquisition of the manufactory, and quoted a Gucci note saying the kilns would need to be restarted. Kering has owned the house since 2013. The business newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore reported on 1 August 2018 that Kering had also bought the land on which the Sesto Fiorentino factory stands, and quoted a company note describing the aim of keeping production entirely in Italy.

The latest change was to the name itself. The Corriere Fiorentino reported on 16 September 2020 that the brand had a new name and a new identity from the previous day: “Richard” would disappear from all new production, and the signature would simply read Ginori 1735. It quoted the company’s president and chief executive, Alain Prost, saying the house was returning to its roots and leaning on its legacy of hospitality, good manners and lively spirit.

Marks, patterns, places.

A porcelain house carries its identity in places a reader might not think of as branding. The first is the factory mark: a small device painted or printed on the underside of a piece, often in underglaze blue, which has served for centuries as signature, guarantee and date code at once. Collectors read changes in a mark’s drawing, colour or wording to place a piece in time, which makes the backstamp a quiet but exacting part of the visual system.

The second is the pattern name. Services are catalogued under names and numbers that stay in use for generations, so a pattern works almost like a sub-brand, with its own motif, border and shape family. Cobalt blue, the pigment that survives high firing under the glaze, recurs across many European houses and often doubles as the house colour on packaging and print.

Finally there is place. The factory town and the museum attached to a manufactory act as brand surfaces in their own right: archives of shapes and moulds, showrooms, and the backdrop for how a house tells its own history. For designers, the lesson is that a heritage identity can live in a mark, a name and an address as much as in a logo.

A new wordmark, an old factory mark.

The 2020 change was set out as a two-level identity. According to the Corriere Fiorentino’s report of 16 September 2020, the company said the new logo combined tradition and innovation with defined letters that look as if written by hand, while the existing logo would stay unchanged as the distinctive factory mark used to authenticate each piece. The same report described the new identity as reflecting the manufactory’s move towards the luxury and lifestyle sector, and repeated that the house had been part of the Kering group since 2013.

Marks have a long history at Doccia. English Wikipedia says the early manufactory did not use a mark consistently, and that experiments included the dome of Florence Cathedral and the three stars of the Ginori family crest. It dates a regular mark, an incised asterisk read as a simplification of those three stars, to about 1780. Later in the nineteenth century, it says, porcelain carried a crowned N after the factory acquired models from the royal Naples factory, then, between about 1850 and 1890, a G inside a vertical lozenge or the name Ginori in an oval, and finally “Manifattura Ginori” in an oval centred on a star, painted in black, blue, green or red.

The house’s archive is also a public place. The Museo Richard-Ginori della Manifattura di Doccia stands next to the factory and holds its production from the start. Artribune reported on 31 March 2017 that the culture minister Dario Franceschini had announced, during the G7 culture meeting in Florence, that the Italian State would acquire the museum’s building and collections. The same report said an exhibition on Doccia porcelain sculpture, “La fabbrica della bellezza,” curated by Tomaso Montanari and Dimitri Zikos, would open at the Bargello museum in Florence on 18 May, with the Venus de’ Medici and the fireplace lent from Doccia.

For a design guide, Ginori 1735 shows a heritage name rebuilt around a family, a place and a year, with the factory mark kept apart from the shop-front logo. Compare Meissen and KPM Berlin, two other porcelain houses in this collection. For this guide we use cobalt, gilt and biscuit white with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Ginori 1735’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.