Olympic began when its founder walked away from another kiln company. Forty years later he gave that company’s name to a product line.

Olympic’s own history begins at the University of Washington, where Bob Haugen was studying for a master’s degree in ceramic engineering. With a fellow student he co-founded a kiln company called Medallion Kilns in Kirkland, Washington. The partnership ended, and he launched Olympic on his own. The name, the company says, comes from the Olympic Mountains across Puget Sound.

When he did that depends on which of the company’s own documents you read. Its history page says Bob Haugen “launched Olympic Kilns in 1972.” Its 2023 catalogue is headed “1971-2022 The First 50 Years!” The Better Business Bureau listing says it was founded in 1973. Three dates, three years. We write the early 1970s — or 1972, by the history page — and we print all three rather than choose. The catalogue’s own heading counts “The First 50 Years” from 1971 to 2022 — itself a span of fifty-one.

Then a detail we did not expect. In 2010, by its own timeline, Olympic launched a “Medallion Artist Series.” The name of the partnership its founder had left, nearly four decades earlier, came back as the name of a product line. The company does not explain the choice, and we do not speculate about it; it is enough that the name of the road not taken ended up on the catalogue of the road that was.

The company is still the founder’s. The legal entity is Haugen Manufacturing, Inc. — the manuals describe Olympic as a “Division of Haugen Mfg.” — and the site lists Bob Haugen as chief executive and founder, and his eldest son Rob Haugen, who joined in 1991 after the University of Georgia, as president. We found no investor or acquirer in any source we reached.

The company moved across the continent to be next to its bricks.

Olympic’s moves are a map of what a kiln is made of. From Kirkland it went to Lake Union in Seattle in 1973 and to Redmond in 1978. Then, in 1982, it moved to Atlanta, Georgia — the company says, “to be near the source of raw materials, insulating fire brick.” It moved again in 1998 to its current plant at 4225 Thurmon Tanner Parkway in Flowery Branch, Georgia.

That reason is worth dwelling on. A kiln is mostly a box of soft, light, insulating firebrick around a heating system; the brick is bulky and the freight is expensive. A company that moves more than two thousand miles to sit near its brick supply is telling you which input it thinks matters. No other maker in this round explains its location by its materials.

The origin claim on the homepage is plain: “Olympic Kilns are Made in USA.” The about page places the work in Flowery Branch. Both are the company’s own statements and we report them as such.

The range is the widest any maker here claims. Olympic says it offers “over 246 gas and electric models” and “more models, styles and types of kilns than any other kiln manufacturer today” — a self-claim we could not test. The history it gives runs through the 14-sided Oval of 1977, DownDraft gas kilns, gas Raku kilns from 1995, an Electric Raku in 2002, the Electro Sitter in 2008, and the small Doll E, which reaches cone 10 on an ordinary 120-volt outlet. Olympic is also the one maker in this round whose own homepage names the controller supplier: its 1214 E Raku “comes equipped with… the Bartlett Kiln Star digital controller,” with a Bartlett Genesis as an upgrade.

Read Olympic’s model numbers carefully. Three of the letters look like a safety mark and are not one.

Olympic’s electric models carry codes such as SQ1414ETLC and GF15ETLC. It is very easy to read “ETL” in those strings and assume a safety listing. It is not. In Olympic’s scheme the letters stand for the kiln’s type — E for electric, TLC for a top-loading clamshell design. Any buyer, school or inspector reading the code as a certification is reading it wrong.

What Olympic itself says about listing is narrower. Its 2024 electric-kiln manual says the power cord is “designed to meet UL requirements.” We did not find a UL, ETL or CSA listing statement for the kilns in that manual, in the catalogue or on the site. That is an absence in the documents we read, not a finding about the kilns themselves; but it is a noticeable contrast with L&L, which publishes the standard, the edition, the tester and the exceptions.

The standard in question, UL 499, is the US safety standard for electric heating appliances. In the edition we read, kilns occupy three short clauses of 171 pages and the word “cone” never appears. The scale potters actually fire to — the pyrometric cone, a small ceramic pyramid that bends with accumulated heat — is made in North America by a charitable trust in Westerville, Ohio. Olympic’s Doll E reaching “cone 10” is a promise against that scale, not against the safety standard.

A search of the US Consumer Product Safety Commission’s recall database for “Olympic” returned only products from unrelated companies, including a weight bench; searches for kilns by product name and title returned none.

The O in Olympic is an octagon framing a torch.

The wordmark sets “OLYMPIC KILNS” in a rounded black sans, and the first letter does the work: the O is an octagon framing a torch with a red flame. The torch reads naturally as an Olympic flame, although the company says the name comes from the mountains — and the octagon is, by coincidence, the same shape Paragon stacks behind its script logo. Two of the round’s seven marks are built on an eight-sided figure.

The taglines are about construction: “Kilns Built Better For Over 50 Years” across the site header, and “Built Better, Built to Last!” in the catalogue and manual. “Over 50 years” is the one date claim the company can make without choosing between its three founding years.

For this guide we use a firebrick sand and a pale brick tone — after the material the company crossed the country to be near — with a rounded sans. These are an unofficial interpretation, not Olympic’s own colour values, and nothing of its mark is reproduced.

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