Standard began by selling clay in smaller amounts.

Standard’s own history, in a 2024 article on its website, starts with a salesman. James Turnbull Sr. came home from the Merchant Marines in 1947 and went to work selling porcelain enamels — frits, the glassy raw materials of glazes and enamels — for the O. Hommel Company. When Pittsburgh’s public-school art teachers wanted another clay supplier, he “procured the industrial clay and sold it to them in smaller amounts. He eventually developed his own clay bodies, starting what would become Standard Ceramic Supply Company.” Distributors date the company to 1960; the company’s own article gives no year, and we give the distributors’ date as theirs.

It has stayed in one family. “Headed by Jim, who succeeded his father James, Sr., and managed by his son Graham, Standard is synonymous with the Turnbull name,” the same article says. The business runs from “Office & Plant Address: 24 Chestnut Street, Carnegie, PA,” a borough on Pittsburgh’s western edge, with a retail shop, Ceramic Supply Pittsburgh, and a gallery called ClayPlace@Standard. It delivers across the tri-state area, ships wet clay in cartons of two 25-pound bags, and does not run classes.

The name has just changed. Its website now redirects to standardclay.com and carries the copyright line “Standard Clay Company,” while its safety data sheets still say Standard Ceramic Supply Company. The logo pairs a concentric target with a serif “Standard” over “Clay Company.”

Two older names, absorbed.

Standard has grown by taking in other clay names. As of 30 October 2015, an archived announcement says, it took over all operations of A.R.T. Studio Clay Company of Sturtevant, Wisconsin — a firm “Founded in 1970 by Nick Nero, a drama professor at Lake Forest College,” and named after the American Repertory Theatre. Later it took over the ceramics division of Sculpture House, whose clay it had been making for a decade, the company says; Sculpture House has been owned by the Barrie family since 1965, and Standard’s announcement named Graham Turnbull as the contact for the transition.

That second deal carries a twist in names. Sculpture House traces itself to John Ettl’s studio in New York in 1883; Alex Ettl ran a clay operation called “Standard Clay Mines” on a farm in Princeton, New Jersey, which “sourced raw clays from Georgia, Kentucky, Ohio, Massachusetts.” That “Standard” was a different company from Pittsburgh’s Standard; the shared word is a coincidence of the trade, and we do not suggest any older link.

Standard’s product is the numbered clay body. Its catalogue lists about fifty, from 100 “The Clay Lady’s Clay,” 101 Hugo Buff and 103 Red through 182 Angel White, 257 Grolleg Porcelain and 437 Troy Porcelain to 266 Umbria — which, it says, “Gives a reduction-like dark brown color in an electric kiln” — and 417 Red Earthenware, which “Contains Pyrex for thermal shock resistance.” Its 508 Woodfire is listed as “CURRENTLY REFORMULATING DUE TO MATERIAL SHORTAGE.” It even sells “Horseshoe Pit Clay,” the mixed clay “that must be purged from the pugmill when changing” between bodies.

“A different seam in their mine.”

Standard presents itself as a maker and seller of blended clays rather than a miner. It sells clays from other producers — its materials list includes Kentucky and Tennessee ball clays, Georgia and Florida kaolins, English Grolleg china clay, a Missouri fireclay and the Cedar Heights clays Goldart and Redart — and its wet clays, it says, are “accurately formulated, completely mixed, pugged and de-aired.” That makes it dependent on the mines, and its homepage shows how much. A current notice warns that “Cedar Heights Clay Company has been mining the RedArt clay from a different seam in their mine,” so the fired colour of eighteen of Standard’s bodies, from 103 to 800, may vary.

That is the hidden geology of every bag of studio clay. The US Geological Survey estimates American clay output at 26 million tonnes in 2025, from about 120 companies in 38 states, with about 990,000 tonnes of ball clay and 4.8 million tonnes of kaolin. Its 2019 yearbook says ball clay came from five states, led by Tennessee, and that Georgia produced 92 per cent of US kaolin. Only a fifth of kaolin went to ceramics in 2025, the USGS says; a studio clay maker is a small customer of a large industry. The raw material is cheap — the USGS puts the average value at the mine at about $47 a tonne for ball clay and $170 for kaolin in 2025 — so a clay maker’s value lies in selection, consistency and service. Across the country, Coyote Clay & Color of Albuquerque once made clays from the opposite end of the scale: local mica and pumice from northern New Mexico.

Standard is also careful about safety. Its FAQ says plainly that “Dry packaged clays do not confirm [sic] to ASTM 4236,” and its data sheets warn that the bodies contain silica dust and are “Not harmful in moist form.” Its health-and-safety page goes further than most, telling potters that even commercial glazes labelled food-safe cannot by themselves assure safety, and suggesting a simple acid test with a wedge of lemon.

A target, a serif and a pun the name invites.

Standard’s old tagline was a pun the name invites: “Setting the standard……….,” and, in its web description, “Setting the Standard in the art of clay.” Its new logo — a target of concentric rings above a serif wordmark, in a brick red — reads like a stamp on a bag, which is where most potters meet it.

For a design guide, Standard is a case of a brand built on numbers. Potters order “266” or “308” the way printers order ink colours; the numbers are the product names. A change of company name from “Ceramic Supply” to “Clay Company” is a modest one beside that, because the numbers carry the trust, and a potter who has thrown on 266 for years will look for the number before the name.

For this guide we use the brick red sampled from Standard’s logo, a pale terracotta and a serif. Nothing of the Standard logo is reproduced.

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