From Charity Shop to Your Table, The Journey of a Piece of Replacement China

Most pieces of china that arrive at MrPottery have already had a life before we ever see them.

They may have spent thirty years in a kitchen cupboard, appeared every Sunday at the dinner table, survived several house moves or belonged to somebody who carefully kept the whole service together long after the pattern disappeared from the shops.

Then, for one reason or another, they find their way onto the shelf of a charity shop.

That is where our part of the story often begins.

It Starts on a Charity Shop Shelf

MrPottery principally buys its stock from charities. That means our buying days are rarely about ordering neat boxes of identical products from a wholesaler.

They are about searching.

A shelf might contain three pieces of Denby, half a Johnson Bros tea set, an unidentified Royal Doulton plate, six saucers without their cups and a serving dish from a pattern we have not seen for years.

Some of it comes home with us. Some of it does not.

The decision is not simply about whether something is attractive or whether we recognise the maker. We have to consider the pattern, the piece, the condition, what customers are looking for and what we already have in stock.

Ten more saucers are not necessarily useful if we already have thirty of them and nobody can find the matching cup. On the other hand, the lonely lid beside them may be exactly the thing somebody has been searching for since theirs met the kitchen floor three years ago.

Not Every Piece Comes Home

One of the odd things about replacement china is that the pieces which look most impressive are not always the most useful.

A complete tea set may look wonderful on a charity shop display, but individual customers are often looking for something much more specific: one dinner plate, two cereal bowls, a gravy boat stand, a coffee pot lid or the sugar bowl that disappeared somewhere between two house moves.

Serving pieces are particularly interesting because fewer people originally bought them. Tureens, casseroles, large jugs, oval dishes, butter dishes and unusual accessories can therefore be much harder to replace decades later.

Sometimes we buy something simply because experience tells us it is worth saving.

It may sit on a MrPottery shelf for quite a while before the right person comes looking for it. That is part of the business. Replacement china works rather differently from ordinary retail. Demand and supply do not necessarily arrive at the same time.

Cleaning, Checking and Grading

Before a piece reaches the website, it is cleaned and checked.

Pre-loved china is exactly that: pre-loved. It has been used, stored and handled, sometimes for decades.

We therefore double check that there are no chips, cracks, crazing, water staining, followed by more gentle signs of wear and tear that can affect its grade, pattern fading, cutlery marks and gilding wear.

Condition is important with replacement china because customers are often adding a single piece to an existing service. A heavily worn plate placed alongside five lightly used ones will stand out immediately.

Equally, we do not believe every piece showing signs of age should automatically be discarded. A perfectly usable item with some cosmetic wear may still have many years of service left in it, provided its condition is described and graded properly.

Then We Photograph It

This is the point where a plate starts becoming a product.

Where necessary, we photograph the piece so customers can see the shape, decoration and important details clearly. Unusual pieces, variations and items we have not catalogued before all need their own photographs.

Sometimes the differences are obvious. Sometimes they are not.

Two pieces bearing the same pattern name can differ in shape, size, rim colour or decoration. Cups are particularly good at this. Pottery manufacturers apparently spent a considerable amount of their history finding new ways to make customers wonder whether two almost identical cups were actually the same!

Cataloguing the Piece

Next comes the less photogenic part.

The piece needs a product listing, the correct manufacturer and pattern, a description, dimensions, condition grade, stock quantity and its place within the appropriate collection on the website.

If it is something we have never handled before, that may mean creating a completely new product, complete with all the necessary Customs information incase it should be sold overseas. 

If the listing already exists, the stock quantity needs updating instead.

Each item also needs to fit into our stock system so that, when somebody orders it six months later, we can actually find the thing.

That last part is surprisingly important.

There is little benefit in having thousands of pieces of replacement china if the one plate somebody has just ordered has disappeared into a mysterious crate marked “probably Denby”.

And Then It Waits

This is perhaps the strangest part of the journey.

Once catalogued, a piece may sell tomorrow.

Or next month.

Or several years from now.

Some patterns have a constant stream of customers searching for them. Others are much less common and the person who eventually needs that particular piece may not even know yet that they are going to need it.

One day a plate gets broken. A bowl develops a crack. Somebody inherits a family dinner service and discovers that three tea plates have vanished over the years.

Then they start searching.

And occasionally the exact piece they need has been sitting quietly on one of our shelves waiting for them.

The Pre-Loved Market Is a Very Large Jigsaw Puzzle

This is what makes replacement china slightly different from most retail businesses.

We are not manufacturing products to meet demand. We are matching pieces which already exist with people who need them.

A tea plate donated to a charity in Dorset might eventually replace one broken by a family in Yorkshire. A Denby casserole bought during one of our stock runs may end up in Germany. A Poole Pottery jug could travel to America and become part of a service that originally crossed the Atlantic decades earlier.

The whole thing is effectively one enormous, constantly moving tableware jigsaw puzzle.

Supporting Charities Along the Way

Buying stock from charities is also an important part of how MrPottery works.

The charity receives money for donated goods. We gain stock for the replacement china market. The piece stays in circulation rather than being discarded, and eventually somebody gets to continue using a pattern they already own and enjoy.

It is a simple model, but one we rather like.

The environmental benefit is almost incidental to the fact that it makes practical sense. The china already exists. It has already been manufactured. Often it remains perfectly usable decades later.

There is very little reason for a good plate to become waste simply because the rest of its original service has gone elsewhere.

Finally, Somebody Orders It

Eventually an order arrives.

Sometimes it is for one saucer costing a few pounds. Sometimes it is for several pieces needed to rebuild a service. Occasionally somebody discovers that we have the obscure serving piece they had stopped expecting ever to find.

The item is picked from storage, checked again and carefully packed for its next journey.

That journey might be twenty miles or several thousand.

Either way, the aim is the same: it should arrive safely and go back into use.

And the Story Starts Again

We spend a lot of time talking about discontinued china, but “discontinued” can be a slightly misleading word.

The manufacturer may have stopped making it years ago.

The people using it have not.

That is why the pre-loved market exists and why a single plate sitting on a charity shop shelf can still be worth rescuing.

By the time it reaches its new owner through MrPottery, it may already have had several decades of use behind it.

With a little luck, it has several more ahead.

You can browse our current range of discontinued china and replacement tableware, or if you are searching for a piece and are not quite sure of the pattern, have a look at our guide to identifying your china pattern.