© Copyright 2006-08 | Hinchcliffe and Barber

Hinchcliffe and Barber first produced ceramics in their studio/workshop at Sixpenny Handley. But as demand outstripped the production facility they approached Poole Pottery and arranged for them to manufacturer the biscuitware, thus allowing the studio to concentrate on the decoration - a model that has since become usual in some potteries, but was groundbreaking in the early eighties. Poole Pottery, impressed with the success of the Hinchcliffe and Barber studio range, asked H&B to design onto existing Poole Pottery shapes - a range known as Poole Blue.

Hinchcliffe and Barber’s marketing strategy cleverly combined the direct selling of studio pieces (in order to be able to identify the best selling designs) and targeting the media, focusing on lifestyle magazines. The product and the mood were well matched. The magazine coverage also had the added advantage of making Hinchcliffe and Barber a known name amongst the readers. The studio produced many special editions as magazine offers and this was also a relatively new concept at the time.

In 1985 George Davis, of the new group Next, commissioned Hinchcliffe and Barber to design the first tableware range for his new homeware shops and the Next Directory. He also prompted H&B to put into mass production some of their new studio-produced designs. This was in order to service interest from department stores and many smaller design-led shops, such as Co-Existence and The General Trading Company. H&B sought to find a pottery to take a licence to produce and finally settled on Saville Pottery. Saville Pottery were manufacturers of lampshade bases and were only to happy to take on production of the H&B range of tableware.

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