If you haven’t seen the renaissance happening at the Homer
Laughlin China Company, chances are the rock you are under doesn’t have Wi-Fi.
Homer Laughlin has always been a name and brand long-revered in the tabletop
industry, but with new faces and ideas sprouting up every day, you can feel the
HLC Dinnerware brand growing forward, fed by creative thinking and innovation.
We recently took a trip to the aptly titled Fiesta Drive in
Newell, West Virginia to visit Homer Laughlin and see first-hand just how they
are adapting and changing for the future. We have to tell you… they’re on to
something, as evidenced by their new FOUNDRY product line.
On its surface FOUNDRY looks like just your everyday cast
iron cookware… but that’s the key, its surface.
“Pete [Wicks, Vice President of Homer Laughlin] came to me
and said Mike, can you make something that looks like cast iron? I said we’d
give it a try. We get requests all the time for things we that we’ve never made
before… don’t know if we can make them. So we looked at it and started working
on it with our glaze engineer Tim Quinlan,” said Homer Laughlin's Michael Tkach.
Michael Tkach is the Director of Ceramic Engineering at the
Homer Laughlin China Company. It’s a title that takes on a lot of different
responsibilities, but one of his most intriguing roles was being tasked to make
every day ceramic dinnerware look and feel like cast iron. Or as he put it “the
illusion of cast iron."
He went on to say, “When you look at cast iron, it’s got a
beady surface to it, a texture, because it all comes from the sand. So that was
something that we had to figure out how to mimic, because that’s an integral
part of cast iron.”
But that wasn’t the only challenge Mike and Tim faced.
The politics of picking the right color can be a tricky one.
In the beginning there was much speculation about how far they’d push the
FOUNDRY line. A company like HLC is known for their colors, so naturally there
had to be discussions about just what colors they should use. Eventually they
decided to stay true to their source material and stuck with a black. Something
that again, wasn’t easy to nail.
“There are so many different variations of blacks to choose
from. Red black, brown black, yellow black, etc. So in order to develop the
black used in FOUNDRY we brought in cookware from home and found cast iron
fixtures around the factory. Then we just took spent time looking at them and
running them through a spectrometer until we got a color we thought best
represented that classic cast iron black.”
The end result? Well, we think they nailed it.
Upon first glance at something like their FOUNDRY Frying Pan
Server, chances are you’d mistake it for a cast iron pan. If you ran your hands
across the surface, you’d still might not know any better. Its not until you
lift it and realize how light it is, that the wizardry of it all strikes you.
Something Tkach was adamant about. “You know what the issues are with cast
iron, rust and weight. So why not have something that looks just like it but
have it also be even more functional for serving purposes?”, says Tkach.
FOUNDRY is a Hall China line, made right here in the United
States, with new pieces constantly being added to the collection. For more on
FOUNDRY click the link below!
No comments:
Post a Comment