Talking all things heritage brand with Burleigh Pottery.

Today’s guest is Jim Norman 

Mangaging Director of Burleigh

You can find him here –

Insta: @BurleighPottery

Website : Burleigh.co.uk

A few things we covered in this episode :

• Burleigh pottery pr agency  – Pure PR
• Burleigh workshop/offices

  

  

• Peacock large jug
• Heritage brand
• Asiatic pheasant plate
• Casters jug – massive jug
• Foot bath – enormous bowl – sold as a champagne bath

• 

• Engraved copper cylinder – calico design 1-2 years to engrave
• Dutch jug
• New technologies incorporated into traditional design
• Ralph Lauren X Burleigh collaboration

• Alison Howell – designer of RL collection
• Barnaby Gates Wallpaper collaboration

• Asiatic pheasant wallpaper design can be found on the Barnaby Gates website 

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT.

00:00 – EmmaMT (Host)
Hello and welcome to the Inside Stylus podcast where we talk all about interiors, with interviews with interior stylists, writers and big names in interiors, from brands and PRs to artists and designers. I also catch up with industry experts in the know and get them to share all their knowledge and advice. There’s so much to talk about. I’m your host, emma Morton Turner, an interior stylist and a writer with a ton of experience. I set up inside stylistcom so I could share all that interiors love with you. So don’t forget to head on over to the website for not only the show notes from today’s episode, but for links to interior stylists, writers and assistance profiles and a ton of inspiration. But for now, enjoy the show.

00:44
Today’s guest is the managing director of one of the most beautiful traditional British brands around. Founded in 1851, based in Middleport Pottery in Stoke-on-Train, the company’s designs are instantly recognizable with their deeply floral blue and white pieces. Can you guess who it is? Today they are as modern as ever, with wallpaper and fashion designer collaborations. Today I’m delighted to be talking with Jim Norman, managing director of Burley Pottery, so thank you for joining me today, jim.

01:12 – Jim (Guest)
Oh, thank you for having me. This is really exciting. I don’t do many podcasts. My kids will be delighted.

01:20 – EmmaMT (Host)
Great friendship. I’m right up.

01:22 – Jim (Guest)
Oh yeah, oh yeah.

01:23 – EmmaMT (Host)
That’s really cool. I do as much research as I can before a start and I always try to kind of introduce the person beforehand so that things that we talk about here are kind of interesting and people might not know. But when I was looking, you’ve been with Burley quite a while. Do you want to maybe share your journey whilst you’ve been at Burley and what you do? Yeah, sure.

01:44 – Jim (Guest)
So my career is going to jump around various industries and before I was at Burley I was with some nice pen brands, so Parker Pen and Waterman Pen, and I guess the segue between those and Burley is we have similar distribution. You know the Harrod Selfridges of this world. So I joined Burgess and Lee eight years ago in a kind of marketing role. That developed into kind of marketing and sales, into a commercial director role and then luckily into managing director and that’s been quite a journey because I have a marketing sales background but now I’m responsible for health and safety and production and you know the human resources of managing 60-70 people. So yeah, it’s been quite a journey but every step of the way has been interesting and I’ve loved it. To be honest, emma, it’s an incredible beautiful place to work.

02:48 – EmmaMT (Host)
The vibe I get from the website and I was talking to your PR agency, Pure PR. The vibe I get is that it’s a very family feel like. Just from looking at the images that you put on your website and the way you’re talking now it’s like how can you imagine people probably know each other on all kind of people who are like doing the design, people who are doing the transfers or the right answers, like you on the top? It’s very family feel.

03:13 – Jim (Guest)
Yes, I mean literally there are extended families who work here and have worked here and kind of taken over from family members. And yeah, it’s a small enough business that I know everybody fairly well. And one of the things I really like about it is that we are manufacturing sites and with a kind of a bit of office space tagged on, and when you talk about that, explain that to people, they often kind of imagine these modern steel sheds built on an industrial part somewhere. But you know, nothing could be furthered from the truth here.

03:49
Middleport Pottery was built in or finished in 1889, built by our founders, mr Burgess and Mr Lee, whose names combined to make Burley, obviously. And we’ve been making Burley here ever since and pretty much in the same traditional way. Not quite the same people, but sometimes you look around and you think maybe they are. But yeah, it’s a small site and I do spend quite a lot of time in the factory. I think it’s really important to get to know the people that you’re working with. They all do a fantastic job and you know when, when things don’t go right, you know they, we know one another and we can try and solve problems together. It’s a nice place to work. It really is a lovely place to work.

04:39 – EmmaMT (Host)
Yeah, that’s lovely. I must say, just before we start recording I commented on your office because your office for anyone listening on the podcast, it’s a very dark, very sleep, very stylish looking office. I was expecting it to be very white, but I mean, I’ve seen the pictures of the building so I know how kind of old it is.

04:58 – Jim (Guest)
Yeah, this is my point about these kind of like people picture manufacture, as you know, kind of kind of automotive production lines, machinery, kind of concrete floors and white walls and all this kind of stuff. But no, this is a building with character, has been here for 130 years and these were these shelves, stillages. They were designed for holding stock and they were built over 100 years ago and now I use it in Glossford. I have meetings in this room and I try and use it to present the best face of Burley.

05:32 – EmmaMT (Host)
That’s really lovely. I love it that they’re like the original parts of the building, yeah, so it’s got really rich history and this was really coming across when I was looking into that Cause I’ve been a stylist for over 20 years and I remember Burley from when I got introduced to it, when I started styling.

05:50
And my model has a really I think it’s the Peacock a really large jug with a pink pattern on it in her bathroom, cause her bathroom had pink tints and she wears the flowers in it and like this was 20 years ago, it’s like I really I know kind of that. It’s a real history. There’s lots of history, so can you maybe share a little bit about history? It’s really important, isn’t?

06:12 – Jim (Guest)
it For sure. No, absolutely it’s very much part of the DNA of the business that it is a heritage brand. That pattern you just mentioned, regal Peacock, that was launched in 1912. Wow, our oldest pattern is Asiatic Pesant, which we’ve been making since 1862. And Asiatic Pesant is and Regal Peacock are both still big sellers. So yeah, the heritage of the business is really important and I kind of sometimes I look at brands and there’s some beautiful brands out there and you see a year under their logo.

06:51
It will say kind of brand name, an 18 something or 17 something, and I wonder sometimes how much that really means, because in a Burley we say Burley established 1851. And there is real provenance to that heritage. Okay, so what I mean by that is because the brand, the business, was established in this area of Stokeham Trent and the area is called Bursalam. But Stokeham Trent is made up of six towns. This town is called Bursalam. Bursalam is known as the mother town of the Potteries.

07:24
This is where Josiah Wedgewood started kind of the pottery industry and we’ve been made here since 1851 and in this building, like I said, since 1889, and a lot of the machinery, the equipment that we use in this building, so the tanks that we mix clay in to make liquid clay slip. They were installed when the building was installed. We’ve been using them ever since. So when we talk about history it’s not a case of just like. Back in the day we used to do this in a faraway place in an old building. We still do it in the same building, using a lot of the same equipment with the same patterns. Sometimes it’s not often that Burley produces a brand new, launches a brand new pattern and, like I say, some of our patterns are almost as old as the business. So, yeah, history is really important to us, but it’s only really valuable if you kind of give it some meaning and some context, which we kind of try to do from a marketing point of view, I suppose.

08:27 – EmmaMT (Host)
Yeah, that’s kind of fascinating that a brand that started so long ago and has a design that has kind of lasted just the changes of styles and what people are into, and it’s like I’m feeling like kind of I’m gonna say this word, I hope this isn’t offensive but a chintzier sort of design. I love the. A chintzier, I love any kind of vintage and it’s almost like vintage is very popular, so vintage patterns are probably still popular, but were they 20 years ago, 30 years ago? Those patterns have lasted. That that’s a phenomenal bit of pattern to be popular.

08:59 – Jim (Guest)
Yeah, and this is kind of one of the beauties and the strengths of Burley’s designs is that you know how can a design Asiatic Peasants that was produced in 1862, and it’s still it’s our second best selling design now. Wow, that tells you a lot about design, doesn’t it? Because that pattern has stood the test of time. You know, it’s been through kind of art deco and kind of austerity, and you know all of the trends that usually kind of go from kind of high bling to kind of very kind of modest design. But some of our designs have just kind of traveled and traversed through all of those trends and all of those kind of social changes and still remained popular. And I think that’s, you know, if there’s a mark of good design, that’s gotta be it, hasn’t it?

09:46 – EmmaMT (Host)
Yeah.

09:48 – Jim (Guest)
Floats above trend.

09:49 – EmmaMT (Host)
Yeah, and also I think it would be worth kind of stopping for a second and sharing what kind of product should do, because I’m thinking if you have maybe some plates and one chip, so you can still come and buy one because they’re still available.

10:01 – Jim (Guest)
Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah. If you bought an Asiatic Peasant dinner plate a hundred years ago, you can buy another one now and it will pretty much be the same plate. You know, the back stamp will have changed slightly because we now say made in England, because we do a bit more exporting, you didn’t need to do that back then. But the design’s the same, the color’s the same, the body of the clay is still the same. Come from the same part of England. It’s yeah, it’s pretty impressive, I guess, that you can do that.

10:34 – EmmaMT (Host)
Yeah, so we haven’t really shared what it is that you actually produced.

10:38 – Jim (Guest)
Do you want to maybe give us, because I know, so I’m talking like everybody would know, and I’m realizing that I’ve mentioned a jug, but it’s still a little bit more than a jug, isn’t it?

10:48
Yeah, of course, I guess we’re an earth and where ceramics business. Okay, so we make. We’re best known for making tea sets, tea cups and saucers, tea pots, plates, bowls, jugs. We make some weird and wonderful shapes as well. So I guess part of the heritage is, over the years we’ve produced thousands, tens of thousands of different shapes as a business and some of them have kind of fallen by the wayside. We’re not making tens of thousands of shapes today, but others have sustained.

11:25
So those big jugs that you were talking about, we have a jug called a casters jug, which used to be used by casters to pour slip into molds, and we now use it. Well, we set it as a big kind of display piece and we presented one to the then Prince of Wales when he reopened the site for us. And we also have something called a foot bath. It’s an enormous kind of like flat tank of a piece which was originally designed to bathe your feet in the Edwardian era and we now sell it to people who want to use it as a champagne bath. So I feel like we buy some people a bottle of champagne, but yeah, so those kind of shapes are really interesting. But yeah, we are best known for our ceramics but increasingly now kind of a bit of a pivot for us, if you like, is we are using those iconic designs and the iconic name of Burley to take the brand into new, whole new categories as well, which I’ll probably be interested to talk about as well.

12:34 – EmmaMT (Host)
Yeah, I’m really interested in that. Before we talk about that, though, we met at one of the pure PR press launches many years ago BC before COVID and you had all the examples of the stages of transferring the patterns, because the patterns are very intricate and they’re very heavily patterned, they’re instantly recognised. Once you know Burley, you can recognise it. Like I go to shoot houses and you go, oh, this looks like one. And then you look. I think every stylist will look underneath a plate in a restaurant to go. I reckon this is a Burley, and then they’ll look underneath and see. But it’s a really interesting process. Can you share that?

13:15 – Jim (Guest)
Yeah, of course. Now I’d love to, because actually this is the thing that is truly unique about our business. It’s a process called tissue transfer decorating, used to be prevalent across the ceramics, across the pottery industry. We’re now the only business that’s left tissue transfer decorating and it’s one of the reasons that the Prince of Wales now King has been so supportive and interested in our business.

13:42
So, just to use as an example, we start with an engraved copper cylinder. So this pattern is the calico pattern. You might recognise it. It’s been engraved onto a cylinder and this engraving would take about a year to two years to complete a single engraving on a traditional cylinder. And this is the basis of the calico pattern. Once it’s engraved onto the cylinder, heated up from the inside, we spread colour over it like kind of spreading margarine on a piece of toast spread colour over it and as it rotates on the machine so it kind of sits on the machine, it rotates and we run a sheet of tissue paper underneath it and the pattern from the engraving transfers onto the tissue paper. And then comes the kind of super skillful bit, because we have a team of people, decorators, here, who take that tissue paper onto a plain piece of ceramic. Let me just grab one Just as an example.

14:49
Right, this is a jam pot, so an undecorated piece of ceramic. And then they will wrap the tissue paper around the ceramic. And because we print it fresh every half hour, 40 minutes, the tissue paper is a little bit tacky, a little bit damp. So as soon as it starts, is in contact with the biscuit ware, with the ceramic, the pattern starts to stick, because this kind of is slightly absorbent still, and so you place the pattern, wrap the piece. Now, this is a really simple piece to decorate because it’s just a single flat side. But you wrap it on, the pattern starts to transfer. You then rub it on, you wash the tissue paper away and you get a decorated piece.

15:32
Now, to do justice to my colleagues who do the decorating, I’ll kind of show you a slightly more complicated piece. So, if you can imagine, somebody gave you a teapot and said and a sheet of wrapping paper and said I’ll wrap that for me, you never. Yeah, it’s just gonna be a right mess, wouldn’t it? But what our tissue decorators do is they very skillfully wrap the teapot with a very soft, malleable tissue paper to make sure all the surfaces are covered, and this is one of the beautiful things about tissue transfer, because you can’t do this form of decoration on complex shapes with any other methods. So decals if this was a decal, you’d have a kind of a badge there and you’d have a badge there and you might have a bit of a stripe on the handle and that would be it.

16:20
But with tissue decorating, as you can see, you can decorate the spout, you can decorate the knob on top of the lid, the handle, every surface you can decorate. We then wash away the tissue decoration, the tissue paper rather, and that’s just left with the pattern on the ceramic. We then glaze that ceramic and what starts off as this kind of purple color that comes out as a beautiful cobalt blue in the kiln. So yeah, that’s sort of a whistle stop tour through decoration and the thing that makes us totally unique and to really the best thing you could ever do is come to Middleport and see it in action. We have tours around the factory. So anybody who’d like to come to Middleport and see the only place in the world where you can see tissue transfer decorating, please come and visit us.

17:06 – EmmaMT (Host)
Yeah, it’s fascinating. I’m just going to describe a few things. I will put images of all of the things that you’re talking about here on the show notes so people can see the channel.

17:17
But the cylinder is really. If you say it takes one to two years. The cylinder looks about 40 centimeters long, maybe 15, 20 centimeters in diameter. It’s not huge but it’s so intricate and that tissue paper to move around the teapot and the handle and the spout. This is what you showed me at the launch and it’s absolutely fascinating. So I will put I’ll put links to your website videos, but I’ll also put images on the show notes so people can see what we’re talking about.

17:45 – Jim (Guest)
Yeah, thank you. Yeah, it is. I can never really do justice to the skill that we have here, but it is. It’s an amazing skill and it’s a beautiful skill and because there’s so much time and effort into making each piece, it feels a little bit like I always kind of get the sense that when things are made with that kind of level of craft skill, it imbues a little bit of the personality of the decorators into the pieces that they’re making.

18:15
Because we’re wrapping a sheet of pattern around this piece, there’s no way you can ever position the pattern the same way twice. Yeah, I can make, we can make a million of these teapots and no two would be exactly the same, because that flower would be slightly in a different position every single time, whereas with the kind of a decal decorating method, a very modern decorating method, they’re identical. It’s kind of the McDonald’s process. You know everything needs to be the same, everything has to be uniform, whereas with tissue transfer everything is a little bit different and it’s kind of those little imperfections that make it super interesting, super cool and super valuable.

18:54 – EmmaMT (Host)
Well, how do you I mean, I know they’re massively skilled and there aren’t many people who do it but when you’re going round a curved surface like a teapot with a flat essentially a flat piece of tissue paper, what happens where there’s creases or wrinkles, or how do you deal with that?

19:08 – Jim (Guest)
Right as well. So, of course, yes, you have to pinch and fold the paper to get round an uneven surface, a rounded surface, and that’s very much the nature of the decoration. But what that means on a finished piece, hold on, I’m going to grab another piece from my office. One second, it’s like show and tell I’m loving this.

19:28 – EmmaMT (Host)
Yeah, it is, isn’t it?

19:29 – Jim (Guest)
Yeah, I think this is why my office is full of pieces because, like, whenever people come in, I get to tell exciting stuff, right? So this is a Dutch jug, right? I’m just going to try and show. So if you look at the way the pattern is positioned, there will be certain points where so just around here, where it looks like half of a flower is cut away, and that’s that is the nature of decorating with tissue paper.

19:57
And that’s one of the joys of tissue transfer decorating is you can see on a single piece like that that it has been hand decorated. You can see that somebody has had to crease and fold. So you never get that kind of perfection of decals, much like a painter interprets a picture and it’s never going to be. It’s not a photograph, it’s a painting or a little bit like. And a vinyl record has got that kind of little crackle and buzz to it that it’s not kind of like pure digital music, it’s it’s vinyl, it’s got warmth and character to it. The same history with tissue decorating, as you can tell. I love this stuff.

20:38 – EmmaMT (Host)
Yeah, and I think it is. That’s a charm to it, and until you hold held that jug up close to the camera. It’s such a like intricate pattern that you really have to look to see. That’s half a flower, because, just like lots of flowers, it’s. Yes, I noticed it.

20:53 – Jim (Guest)
So yeah, yeah. So yeah, I’m, aesthetically, you know, as a, you know we buy with our eyes, we like, you like the designs, and you look at the design and you think, okay, yes, I like that, I like the flowers, I like the color, like the shape. But then, and that’s great, and you might, you might never really look at the detail of you know that flowers has got a little bit kind of folded or missing away from it and it might take you years before you really notice it. But then when you do notice that, you might start to wonder why is that flower like that? And find out a little bit more. Other people, the, the aficionados, will kind of spot it straight away.

21:27 – EmmaMT (Host)
Yeah, and we’ve touched a little bit on new technologies. This is a very old, old, traditional way of putting the pattern on and you were saying you’ve got the original machinery and everything. I love it that you’re using the traditional techniques, but how are you using modernizing?

21:48 – Jim (Guest)
Yeah, so there’s a really good example with the, with the, the roller actually. So, like I said, that took the best part of two years to engrave a roller like this. This is a particularly detailed, intricate one. Unfortunately, though, the skill of engraving a copper roller like that is literally a dying art. Our, our engraver at this business, retired when he was 74, I think, and we tried to bring apprentices on, and we were we’re unable to get anybody to kind of carry on that skill, and knowing that Christopher was was getting older, we started, a few years before that, started investing in bringing in some new technology.

22:32
So now we digitally engrave those rollers, and it still feels like a bit of a shame, because I’d love to have hand engraved rollers still, but we digitally engrave them, and that has two benefits. The most important one is it allows us to still tissue transfer, decorate, because without those rollers you can’t you can’t definitely. So we are preserving the skill, the craft skill, of decorating by digitally engraving. And the other thing is that we can shorten that process from two years down to kind of four or five months, and that that shortening of time made gave us the opportunity to work with Ralph Lauren in particular.

23:13
Right so Ralph Lauren, the man himself. Mr Ralph Lauren loves Berly and he was always using Berly in his home and he was and he was buying Berly for his shops. But we were never able to produce the bespoke range for him because a two year time window was was never enough. But by producing digitally we are able to make four, five, six different designs over a six month period for him, ready for a launch kind of the season coming. So yeah, that that investment in new technology has preserved the craft skill and also given Berly new opportunities in new markets.

24:01 – EmmaMT (Host)
Yeah, that’s fascinating. It’s beautiful the range and I love how it looks very Berly, but it also looks very Ralph Lauren. So, yeah, yeah, sorry, night one. I’m like, oh, that’s so clever, because it’s also stars Like I think of you as flowers, but the stars are just done in a way that feels very on train like, very on brand for you guys.

24:16 – Jim (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, and it’s quite. It’s quite Americana as well. And so what we did? We go through a process of their. Their designers came out with all of these designs. They gave us mood boards. A lot of it was based on fabrics that have been in their range, because principally the fabrics business. And then, through the skill that we have here, a wonderful design called Alison Howell, she was managed to manage to translate those designs into a ceramic design, because you know, what looks good on fabric doesn’t necessarily fit on on ceramics. So, yeah, she did a brilliant job of kind of translating all of their design inspiration into things that would work in ceramics.

24:58 – EmmaMT (Host)
You’ve also seen there’s a few collaborations. You’ve also just done one with Barnaby Gates, who are a wallpaper company. Yes, now that’s a bit different. Yeah, I did a little real on Instagram earlier in the week saying when I was walking around, the pressure going and and it’s just the most perfect pattern for wallpaper. Right From from you guys. Yeah, you guys, it was like yeah, no one put this before.

25:24 – Jim (Guest)
It was brilliant, yeah, and actually that’s yeah. So I’ll talk a little bit about licensing and Barnaby, but what? What they did really really clever, ladies is that they they did the kind of reversal of what I’ve just explained. We did with Ralph Lauren. You know, they gave us a two dimensional print and we converted it into a three dimensional print that fits on on a ceramic piece. But what Barnaby Gates have done is taken asiatic pheasant you know that wonderful old iconic design and converted it back into a kind of two dimensional wallpaper design, and that’s really really clever. I really love that they’ve done that. And the other thing that I love about the whole kind of wallpaper link up is they use in printing wallpaper. They use rollers, not dissimilar for what we use, bigger, but not that dissimilar being to the fact you and seeing it printed, and so it’s kind of there’s. There’s that relationship with our tissue transfer decorating method as well, which is lovely.

26:21 – EmmaMT (Host)
Yeah.

26:23 – Jim (Guest)
But yeah, looking kind of standing back a little bit and thinking about why we’re working in wallpaper now is we have this, this brand which has got, you know, wonderful heritage, wonderful provenance and beautiful designs, and but we are, we’re kind of constrained a little bit in our in our Victorian factory. There’s only so much that we can produce and we know that people love designs that we make and so the opportunity to take those designs into new product categories is quite exciting for us and hopefully it’d be kind of exciting for for consumers as well. Certainly, the launch of gates have had has been very well received. So starting to see barely introduced in wallpaper.

27:09
We did a collaboration with jackfield tiles a couple of years ago, so there are calico designs on tiles as well and there’s more coming next year. Some some I have some products are balls with a card, show you. But there are some some beautiful things coming more home where using burly designs and interpreting them slightly differently as well, much like Barnaby Gates has done. It’s a really exciting time for Burley and I think that our founders would be delighted to see the work that they started kind of taking off and coming into new categories and traveling around the world, and they always intended it to travel around the world. But continuing to travel around the world is the new and interesting places.

28:01 – EmmaMT (Host)
Yeah, it’s like moving with the times and reaching new markets, and Barnaby Gates is quite a young audience and you’re quite a traditional brand and people like younger generations might not have come to it in the same way. That opens up all sorts of doors.

28:17 – Jim (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, exactly, and I think when a new design comes into wallpaper or other categories, consumers will look at it. As you know, they’ll judge it from an aesthetic point of view. Is it something I like? Is it a color I like? Is it a design I like? And that’s great and much like I was describing earlier, people might buy wallpaper and decorate their house and not really know the history of Burley and why. They might just like that beautiful, iconic design. But then, if they want to explore a little bit further, they can go so much deeper and go all right, okay, that pattern Calico’s been around for 52 years now and yeah, yeah, there’s so much more depth to it.

28:59 – EmmaMT (Host)
Yeah, there’s something else that I thought was really good. When we get press releases, which we get hundreds a day, there’s a massive theme which, as it should be, about sustainability and British made, and you have a I don’t know what you call it logo sort of thing. That’s what I don’t have, what you’ve got like a tagline, that’s all made here and I think that’s really and I was talking about this with Cara at the press show I was like it’s not just that the wording is perfect, it’s that you’ve used a really modern font and it’s really impactful. It’s like really big across the whole image on the website and on your social media. And we were saying how lots of people say that their products are made in the UK, but actually they’re based in the UK. They make one thing in the UK, but then everything is shipped out to China and everything’s made in China and that’s kind of what this is.

29:53
What I’ve been told is what you’re all about. All made here means it’s all made here do you want to talk about that?

29:59 – Jim (Guest)
Yeah, okay, and that’s come from a lot of experience of consumers particularly coming into our shop, and my office is above our factory shop, right so, and we just have wooden floorboards as separated. So I could hear a lot of what happens in the shop beneath me and the number of times, the number of times people would come into the shop and talk to our shop manager or shop staff about Berlin. The house is lovely, it’s really nice. You know traditional product. Where’s it made? Are?

30:33 – EmmaMT (Host)
you kidding me.

30:36 – Jim (Guest)
It’s all made here and the words are all made here. Well, words I have heard, you know, hundreds of times just listening to people talking in the shop it’s all made here. And we thought we’re clearly we’re not getting that message out enough if we’re having to tell people who are actually physically in our shop. So, yeah, so we kind of came up with this kind of campaign name all made here. And yeah, it references the fact that all of Berlin is made here. It always has been made here. It’s not kind of a case of we kind of expatriated all of the production and so we’ll bring it back to be quaint. It’s always been made here.

31:15
But yeah, there are some businesses and brands out there who make a business choice and that’s for them to make, to kind of to make somewhere else or to part make somewhere else and finish in the UK. And that’s fine as long as, as long as everyone understands and is aware of that. But we feel that by saying all made here and saying it fairly big and fairly bold it, it just reinforces the fact that it is all made here. And it’s interesting you mentioned a modern logo, right, so that the font all made here actually comes from our designer, alison, who kind of rewrote that into a font. But that is an engraving. On the base of all of our products we have a back stamp. Those back stamps are engraved onto the, on to the roller, onto the cylinder, and they’ve been there for hundreds of years. So that all made here font is basically just a reimagination of a very old font that was never intended to be digital, it was always engraved and yeah, that’s so cool.

32:22 – EmmaMT (Host)
I love that. I thought she just found really you all you guys have just found a really cool font. That just worked really well. But that’s really interesting because it looks so modern.

32:31 – Jim (Guest)
So it’s from the beginning there’s nothing in this place that doesn’t have a story. Yeah, right, yeah, there’s, yeah, other than my laptop perhaps I mean but you know what I mean like everything now the the desk that I’m sat at is is a desk that was in our archive room, that is, that was used from kind of the 1950s, and I just thought, right, I don’t want a modern desk in my office, I want the original one. Yeah, so got it kind of tied it up and and that’s it’s. It’s got that heritage, it has got a story yeah, that’s really cool.

33:04 – EmmaMT (Host)
I love that, and I’ve mentioned POPR a few times. I’m just gonna interject here and say that I know you, popr are a really great agency, and if anyone listening who’s a stylist or a writer wants to get images or products, just get in touch with POPR. I will share the links in the show notes so, but I think everyone knows POPR, so I do get in touch with them.

33:25 – Jim (Guest)
Yeah, they are. Yeah, they’re brilliant. I mean, they really are. We’ve worked with POPR for a while now and they’re they’re endlessly kind of creative. They seem to know everybody that wonderful. I’m very supportive of you promoted yeah, love them, love those guys.

33:42 – EmmaMT (Host)
You have answered all my questions hardly without me asking anything. I’m not going to ask you about future collaborations. I’ll just watch this space. Yeah but my last question is nearly always what’s next? What’s next for Burley?

33:56 – Jim (Guest)
So we’re just working on a range that we’ll launch in spring, which is based on the colour code design, which I’ve shown you a few pieces in colour code, but we’re launching it in a pinky purple colour. Yeah, it’s a really beautiful soft colour and it was actually inspired by our biggest market at the moment is Japan. It actually has been for a while. Japanese go mad for Burley. They absolutely love it, and one of the other things that Japanese go mad for, as you might know, is cherry blossom. They love blossom. They celebrate blossom every spring, so the colour that we’re launching next year is kind of inspired by the cherry blossom in Japan.

34:48 – EmmaMT (Host)
So Japan will be a big market for that.

34:51 – Jim (Guest)
It has a slightly kind of blueish hue to it as well, so actually kind of sits really nicely with the cobalt blue of the traditional calico. But it’s kind of light and spring like and, yeah, that’s going to be a lot of fun for launching next year. Hopefully we’ll be working on some new stuff for Ralph Lauren as well. Yeah, there’s always something new happening, but always with a kind of a heritage, authentic route to it.

35:20 – EmmaMT (Host)
Yeah, yeah.

35:23 – Jim (Guest)
Yeah, it’s going to be another fun year for Burley, I’m sure.

35:27 – EmmaMT (Host)
Yeah, sounds really exciting. Can’t wait to see that. Thank you so much for your time today. I’ve loved this chat. I love hearing how brands kind of take their heritage and translate it into modern times but don’t lose any of that authenticity. It’s really really inspiring stuff. So thank you so much for sharing that. That’s been brilliant.

35:44 – Jim (Guest)
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak to you and hopefully reach a broader audience. Really appreciate it.

35:53 – EmmaMT (Host)
Thanks for listening to the Inside Stylus podcast. You can find all the details from today’s episode over in the show notes on insidestyluscom. If you enjoyed the show, I’d love it if you had head on over to iTunes and rate and review it. It’s the best way to help other people find the show and I’d really appreciate it. Until next time. Bye for now, you.

00:00 – EmmaMT (Host)
Hello and welcome to the Inside Stylus podcast where we talk all about interiors, with interviews with interior stylists, writers and big names in interiors, from brands and PRs to artists and designers. I also catch up with industry experts in the know and get them to share all their knowledge and advice. There’s so much to talk about. I’m your host, emma Morton Turner, an interior stylist and a writer with a ton of experience. I set up inside stylistcom so I could share all that interiors love with you. So don’t forget to head on over to the website for not only the show notes from today’s episode, but for links to interior stylists, writers and assistance profiles and a ton of inspiration. But for now, enjoy the show.

00:44
Today’s guest is the managing director of one of the most beautiful traditional British brands around. Founded in 1851, based in Middleport Pottery in Stoke-on-Train, the company’s designs are instantly recognizable with their deeply floral blue and white pieces. Can you guess who it is? Today they are as modern as ever, with wallpaper and fashion designer collaborations. Today I’m delighted to be talking with Jim Norman, managing director of Burley Pottery, so thank you for joining me today, jim.

01:12 – Jim (Guest)
Oh, thank you for having me. This is really exciting. I don’t do many podcasts. My kids will be delighted.

01:20 – EmmaMT (Host)
Great friendship. I’m right up.

01:22 – Jim (Guest)
Oh yeah, oh yeah.

01:23 – EmmaMT (Host)
That’s really cool. I do as much research as I can before a start and I always try to kind of introduce the person beforehand so that things that we talk about here are kind of interesting and people might not know. But when I was looking, you’ve been with Burley quite a while. Do you want to maybe share your journey whilst you’ve been at Burley and what you do? Yeah, sure.

01:44 – Jim (Guest)
So my career is going to jump around various industries and before I was at Burley I was with some nice pen brands, so Parker Pen and Waterman Pen, and I guess the segue between those and Burley is we have similar distribution. You know the Harrod Selfridges of this world. So I joined Burgess and Lee eight years ago in a kind of marketing role. That developed into kind of marketing and sales, into a commercial director role and then luckily into managing director and that’s been quite a journey because I have a marketing sales background but now I’m responsible for health and safety and production and you know the human resources of managing 60-70 people. So yeah, it’s been quite a journey but every step of the way has been interesting and I’ve loved it. To be honest, emma, it’s an incredible beautiful place to work.

02:48 – EmmaMT (Host)
The vibe I get from the website and I was talking to your PR agency, Pure PR. The vibe I get is that it’s a very family feel like. Just from looking at the images that you put on your website and the way you’re talking now it’s like how can you imagine people probably know each other on all kind of people who are like doing the design, people who are doing the transfers or the right answers, like you on the top? It’s very family feel.

03:13 – Jim (Guest)
Yes, I mean literally there are extended families who work here and have worked here and kind of taken over from family members. And yeah, it’s a small enough business that I know everybody fairly well. And one of the things I really like about it is that we are manufacturing sites and with a kind of a bit of office space tagged on, and when you talk about that, explain that to people, they often kind of imagine these modern steel sheds built on an industrial part somewhere. But you know, nothing could be furthered from the truth here.

03:49
Middleport Pottery was built in or finished in 1889, built by our founders, mr Burgess and Mr Lee, whose names combined to make Burley, obviously. And we’ve been making Burley here ever since and pretty much in the same traditional way. Not quite the same people, but sometimes you look around and you think maybe they are. But yeah, it’s a small site and I do spend quite a lot of time in the factory. I think it’s really important to get to know the people that you’re working with. They all do a fantastic job and you know when, when things don’t go right, you know they, we know one another and we can try and solve problems together. It’s a nice place to work. It really is a lovely place to work.

04:39 – EmmaMT (Host)
Yeah, that’s lovely. I must say, just before we start recording I commented on your office because your office for anyone listening on the podcast, it’s a very dark, very sleep, very stylish looking office. I was expecting it to be very white, but I mean, I’ve seen the pictures of the building so I know how kind of old it is.

04:58 – Jim (Guest)
Yeah, this is my point about these kind of like people picture manufacture, as you know, kind of kind of automotive production lines, machinery, kind of concrete floors and white walls and all this kind of stuff. But no, this is a building with character, has been here for 130 years and these were these shelves, stillages. They were designed for holding stock and they were built over 100 years ago and now I use it in Glossford. I have meetings in this room and I try and use it to present the best face of Burley.

05:32 – EmmaMT (Host)
That’s really lovely. I love it that they’re like the original parts of the building, yeah, so it’s got really rich history and this was really coming across when I was looking into that Cause I’ve been a stylist for over 20 years and I remember Burley from when I got introduced to it, when I started styling.

05:50
And my model has a really I think it’s the Peacock a really large jug with a pink pattern on it in her bathroom, cause her bathroom had pink tints and she wears the flowers in it and like this was 20 years ago, it’s like I really I know kind of that. It’s a real history. There’s lots of history, so can you maybe share a little bit about history? It’s really important, isn’t?

06:12 – Jim (Guest)
it For sure. No, absolutely it’s very much part of the DNA of the business that it is a heritage brand. That pattern you just mentioned, regal Peacock, that was launched in 1912. Wow, our oldest pattern is Asiatic Pesant, which we’ve been making since 1862. And Asiatic Pesant is and Regal Peacock are both still big sellers. So yeah, the heritage of the business is really important and I kind of sometimes I look at brands and there’s some beautiful brands out there and you see a year under their logo.

06:51
It will say kind of brand name, an 18 something or 17 something, and I wonder sometimes how much that really means, because in a Burley we say Burley established 1851. And there is real provenance to that heritage. Okay, so what I mean by that is because the brand, the business, was established in this area of Stokeham Trent and the area is called Bursalam. But Stokeham Trent is made up of six towns. This town is called Bursalam. Bursalam is known as the mother town of the Potteries.

07:24
This is where Josiah Wedgewood started kind of the pottery industry and we’ve been made here since 1851 and in this building, like I said, since 1889, and a lot of the machinery, the equipment that we use in this building, so the tanks that we mix clay in to make liquid clay slip. They were installed when the building was installed. We’ve been using them ever since. So when we talk about history it’s not a case of just like. Back in the day we used to do this in a faraway place in an old building. We still do it in the same building, using a lot of the same equipment with the same patterns. Sometimes it’s not often that Burley produces a brand new, launches a brand new pattern and, like I say, some of our patterns are almost as old as the business. So, yeah, history is really important to us, but it’s only really valuable if you kind of give it some meaning and some context, which we kind of try to do from a marketing point of view, I suppose.

08:27 – EmmaMT (Host)
Yeah, that’s kind of fascinating that a brand that started so long ago and has a design that has kind of lasted just the changes of styles and what people are into, and it’s like I’m feeling like kind of I’m gonna say this word, I hope this isn’t offensive but a chintzier sort of design. I love the. A chintzier, I love any kind of vintage and it’s almost like vintage is very popular, so vintage patterns are probably still popular, but were they 20 years ago, 30 years ago? Those patterns have lasted. That that’s a phenomenal bit of pattern to be popular.

08:59 – Jim (Guest)
Yeah, and this is kind of one of the beauties and the strengths of Burley’s designs is that you know how can a design Asiatic Peasants that was produced in 1862, and it’s still it’s our second best selling design now. Wow, that tells you a lot about design, doesn’t it? Because that pattern has stood the test of time. You know, it’s been through kind of art deco and kind of austerity, and you know all of the trends that usually kind of go from kind of high bling to kind of very kind of modest design. But some of our designs have just kind of traveled and traversed through all of those trends and all of those kind of social changes and still remained popular. And I think that’s, you know, if there’s a mark of good design, that’s gotta be it, hasn’t it?

09:46 – EmmaMT (Host)
Yeah.

09:48 – Jim (Guest)
Floats above trend.

09:49 – EmmaMT (Host)
Yeah, and also I think it would be worth kind of stopping for a second and sharing what kind of product should do, because I’m thinking if you have maybe some plates and one chip, so you can still come and buy one because they’re still available.

10:01 – Jim (Guest)
Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah. If you bought an Asiatic Peasant dinner plate a hundred years ago, you can buy another one now and it will pretty much be the same plate. You know, the back stamp will have changed slightly because we now say made in England, because we do a bit more exporting, you didn’t need to do that back then. But the design’s the same, the color’s the same, the body of the clay is still the same. Come from the same part of England. It’s yeah, it’s pretty impressive, I guess, that you can do that.

10:34 – EmmaMT (Host)
Yeah, so we haven’t really shared what it is that you actually produced.

10:38 – Jim (Guest)
Do you want to maybe give us, because I know, so I’m talking like everybody would know, and I’m realizing that I’ve mentioned a jug, but it’s still a little bit more than a jug, isn’t it?

10:48
Yeah, of course, I guess we’re an earth and where ceramics business. Okay, so we make. We’re best known for making tea sets, tea cups and saucers, tea pots, plates, bowls, jugs. We make some weird and wonderful shapes as well. So I guess part of the heritage is, over the years we’ve produced thousands, tens of thousands of different shapes as a business and some of them have kind of fallen by the wayside. We’re not making tens of thousands of shapes today, but others have sustained.

11:25
So those big jugs that you were talking about, we have a jug called a casters jug, which used to be used by casters to pour slip into molds, and we now use it. Well, we set it as a big kind of display piece and we presented one to the then Prince of Wales when he reopened the site for us. And we also have something called a foot bath. It’s an enormous kind of like flat tank of a piece which was originally designed to bathe your feet in the Edwardian era and we now sell it to people who want to use it as a champagne bath. So I feel like we buy some people a bottle of champagne, but yeah, so those kind of shapes are really interesting. But yeah, we are best known for our ceramics but increasingly now kind of a bit of a pivot for us, if you like, is we are using those iconic designs and the iconic name of Burley to take the brand into new, whole new categories as well, which I’ll probably be interested to talk about as well.

12:34 – EmmaMT (Host)
Yeah, I’m really interested in that. Before we talk about that, though, we met at one of the pure PR press launches many years ago BC before COVID and you had all the examples of the stages of transferring the patterns, because the patterns are very intricate and they’re very heavily patterned, they’re instantly recognised. Once you know Burley, you can recognise it. Like I go to shoot houses and you go, oh, this looks like one. And then you look. I think every stylist will look underneath a plate in a restaurant to go. I reckon this is a Burley, and then they’ll look underneath and see. But it’s a really interesting process. Can you share that?

13:15 – Jim (Guest)
Yeah, of course. Now I’d love to, because actually this is the thing that is truly unique about our business. It’s a process called tissue transfer decorating, used to be prevalent across the ceramics, across the pottery industry. We’re now the only business that’s left tissue transfer decorating and it’s one of the reasons that the Prince of Wales now King has been so supportive and interested in our business.

13:42
So, just to use as an example, we start with an engraved copper cylinder. So this pattern is the calico pattern. You might recognise it. It’s been engraved onto a cylinder and this engraving would take about a year to two years to complete a single engraving on a traditional cylinder. And this is the basis of the calico pattern. Once it’s engraved onto the cylinder, heated up from the inside, we spread colour over it like kind of spreading margarine on a piece of toast spread colour over it and as it rotates on the machine so it kind of sits on the machine, it rotates and we run a sheet of tissue paper underneath it and the pattern from the engraving transfers onto the tissue paper. And then comes the kind of super skillful bit, because we have a team of people, decorators, here, who take that tissue paper onto a plain piece of ceramic. Let me just grab one Just as an example.

14:49
Right, this is a jam pot, so an undecorated piece of ceramic. And then they will wrap the tissue paper around the ceramic. And because we print it fresh every half hour, 40 minutes, the tissue paper is a little bit tacky, a little bit damp. So as soon as it starts, is in contact with the biscuit ware, with the ceramic, the pattern starts to stick, because this kind of is slightly absorbent still, and so you place the pattern, wrap the piece. Now, this is a really simple piece to decorate because it’s just a single flat side. But you wrap it on, the pattern starts to transfer. You then rub it on, you wash the tissue paper away and you get a decorated piece.

15:32
Now, to do justice to my colleagues who do the decorating, I’ll kind of show you a slightly more complicated piece. So, if you can imagine, somebody gave you a teapot and said and a sheet of wrapping paper and said I’ll wrap that for me, you never. Yeah, it’s just gonna be a right mess, wouldn’t it? But what our tissue decorators do is they very skillfully wrap the teapot with a very soft, malleable tissue paper to make sure all the surfaces are covered, and this is one of the beautiful things about tissue transfer, because you can’t do this form of decoration on complex shapes with any other methods. So decals if this was a decal, you’d have a kind of a badge there and you’d have a badge there and you might have a bit of a stripe on the handle and that would be it.

16:20
But with tissue decorating, as you can see, you can decorate the spout, you can decorate the knob on top of the lid, the handle, every surface you can decorate. We then wash away the tissue decoration, the tissue paper rather, and that’s just left with the pattern on the ceramic. We then glaze that ceramic and what starts off as this kind of purple color that comes out as a beautiful cobalt blue in the kiln. So yeah, that’s sort of a whistle stop tour through decoration and the thing that makes us totally unique and to really the best thing you could ever do is come to Middleport and see it in action. We have tours around the factory. So anybody who’d like to come to Middleport and see the only place in the world where you can see tissue transfer decorating, please come and visit us.

17:06 – EmmaMT (Host)
Yeah, it’s fascinating. I’m just going to describe a few things. I will put images of all of the things that you’re talking about here on the show notes so people can see the channel.

17:17
But the cylinder is really. If you say it takes one to two years. The cylinder looks about 40 centimeters long, maybe 15, 20 centimeters in diameter. It’s not huge but it’s so intricate and that tissue paper to move around the teapot and the handle and the spout. This is what you showed me at the launch and it’s absolutely fascinating. So I will put I’ll put links to your website videos, but I’ll also put images on the show notes so people can see what we’re talking about.

17:45 – Jim (Guest)
Yeah, thank you. Yeah, it is. I can never really do justice to the skill that we have here, but it is. It’s an amazing skill and it’s a beautiful skill and because there’s so much time and effort into making each piece, it feels a little bit like I always kind of get the sense that when things are made with that kind of level of craft skill, it imbues a little bit of the personality of the decorators into the pieces that they’re making.

18:15
Because we’re wrapping a sheet of pattern around this piece, there’s no way you can ever position the pattern the same way twice. Yeah, I can make, we can make a million of these teapots and no two would be exactly the same, because that flower would be slightly in a different position every single time, whereas with the kind of a decal decorating method, a very modern decorating method, they’re identical. It’s kind of the McDonald’s process. You know everything needs to be the same, everything has to be uniform, whereas with tissue transfer everything is a little bit different and it’s kind of those little imperfections that make it super interesting, super cool and super valuable.

18:54 – EmmaMT (Host)
Well, how do you I mean, I know they’re massively skilled and there aren’t many people who do it but when you’re going round a curved surface like a teapot with a flat essentially a flat piece of tissue paper, what happens where there’s creases or wrinkles, or how do you deal with that?

19:08 – Jim (Guest)
Right as well. So, of course, yes, you have to pinch and fold the paper to get round an uneven surface, a rounded surface, and that’s very much the nature of the decoration. But what that means on a finished piece, hold on, I’m going to grab another piece from my office. One second, it’s like show and tell I’m loving this.

19:28 – EmmaMT (Host)
Yeah, it is, isn’t it?

19:29 – Jim (Guest)
Yeah, I think this is why my office is full of pieces because, like, whenever people come in, I get to tell exciting stuff, right? So this is a Dutch jug, right? I’m just going to try and show. So if you look at the way the pattern is positioned, there will be certain points where so just around here, where it looks like half of a flower is cut away, and that’s that is the nature of decorating with tissue paper.

19:57
And that’s one of the joys of tissue transfer decorating is you can see on a single piece like that that it has been hand decorated. You can see that somebody has had to crease and fold. So you never get that kind of perfection of decals, much like a painter interprets a picture and it’s never going to be. It’s not a photograph, it’s a painting or a little bit like. And a vinyl record has got that kind of little crackle and buzz to it that it’s not kind of like pure digital music, it’s it’s vinyl, it’s got warmth and character to it. The same history with tissue decorating, as you can tell. I love this stuff.

20:38 – EmmaMT (Host)
Yeah, and I think it is. That’s a charm to it, and until you hold held that jug up close to the camera. It’s such a like intricate pattern that you really have to look to see. That’s half a flower, because, just like lots of flowers, it’s. Yes, I noticed it.

20:53 – Jim (Guest)
So yeah, yeah. So yeah, I’m, aesthetically, you know, as a, you know we buy with our eyes, we like, you like the designs, and you look at the design and you think, okay, yes, I like that, I like the flowers, I like the color, like the shape. But then, and that’s great, and you might, you might never really look at the detail of you know that flowers has got a little bit kind of folded or missing away from it and it might take you years before you really notice it. But then when you do notice that, you might start to wonder why is that flower like that? And find out a little bit more. Other people, the, the aficionados, will kind of spot it straight away.

21:27 – EmmaMT (Host)
Yeah, and we’ve touched a little bit on new technologies. This is a very old, old, traditional way of putting the pattern on and you were saying you’ve got the original machinery and everything. I love it that you’re using the traditional techniques, but how are you using modernizing?

21:48 – Jim (Guest)
Yeah, so there’s a really good example with the, with the, the roller actually. So, like I said, that took the best part of two years to engrave a roller like this. This is a particularly detailed, intricate one. Unfortunately, though, the skill of engraving a copper roller like that is literally a dying art. Our, our engraver at this business, retired when he was 74, I think, and we tried to bring apprentices on, and we were we’re unable to get anybody to kind of carry on that skill, and knowing that Christopher was was getting older, we started, a few years before that, started investing in bringing in some new technology.

22:32
So now we digitally engrave those rollers, and it still feels like a bit of a shame, because I’d love to have hand engraved rollers still, but we digitally engrave them, and that has two benefits. The most important one is it allows us to still tissue transfer, decorate, because without those rollers you can’t you can’t definitely. So we are preserving the skill, the craft skill, of decorating by digitally engraving. And the other thing is that we can shorten that process from two years down to kind of four or five months, and that that shortening of time made gave us the opportunity to work with Ralph Lauren in particular.

23:13
Right so Ralph Lauren, the man himself. Mr Ralph Lauren loves Berly and he was always using Berly in his home and he was and he was buying Berly for his shops. But we were never able to produce the bespoke range for him because a two year time window was was never enough. But by producing digitally we are able to make four, five, six different designs over a six month period for him, ready for a launch kind of the season coming. So yeah, that that investment in new technology has preserved the craft skill and also given Berly new opportunities in new markets.

24:01 – EmmaMT (Host)
Yeah, that’s fascinating. It’s beautiful the range and I love how it looks very Berly, but it also looks very Ralph Lauren. So, yeah, yeah, sorry, night one. I’m like, oh, that’s so clever, because it’s also stars Like I think of you as flowers, but the stars are just done in a way that feels very on train like, very on brand for you guys.

24:16 – Jim (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, and it’s quite. It’s quite Americana as well. And so what we did? We go through a process of their. Their designers came out with all of these designs. They gave us mood boards. A lot of it was based on fabrics that have been in their range, because principally the fabrics business. And then, through the skill that we have here, a wonderful design called Alison Howell, she was managed to manage to translate those designs into a ceramic design, because you know, what looks good on fabric doesn’t necessarily fit on on ceramics. So, yeah, she did a brilliant job of kind of translating all of their design inspiration into things that would work in ceramics.

24:58 – EmmaMT (Host)
You’ve also seen there’s a few collaborations. You’ve also just done one with Barnaby Gates, who are a wallpaper company. Yes, now that’s a bit different. Yeah, I did a little real on Instagram earlier in the week saying when I was walking around, the pressure going and and it’s just the most perfect pattern for wallpaper. Right From from you guys. Yeah, you guys, it was like yeah, no one put this before.

25:24 – Jim (Guest)
It was brilliant, yeah, and actually that’s yeah. So I’ll talk a little bit about licensing and Barnaby, but what? What they did really really clever, ladies is that they they did the kind of reversal of what I’ve just explained. We did with Ralph Lauren. You know, they gave us a two dimensional print and we converted it into a three dimensional print that fits on on a ceramic piece. But what Barnaby Gates have done is taken asiatic pheasant you know that wonderful old iconic design and converted it back into a kind of two dimensional wallpaper design, and that’s really really clever. I really love that they’ve done that. And the other thing that I love about the whole kind of wallpaper link up is they use in printing wallpaper. They use rollers, not dissimilar for what we use, bigger, but not that dissimilar being to the fact you and seeing it printed, and so it’s kind of there’s. There’s that relationship with our tissue transfer decorating method as well, which is lovely.

26:21 – EmmaMT (Host)
Yeah.

26:23 – Jim (Guest)
But yeah, looking kind of standing back a little bit and thinking about why we’re working in wallpaper now is we have this, this brand which has got, you know, wonderful heritage, wonderful provenance and beautiful designs, and but we are, we’re kind of constrained a little bit in our in our Victorian factory. There’s only so much that we can produce and we know that people love designs that we make and so the opportunity to take those designs into new product categories is quite exciting for us and hopefully it’d be kind of exciting for for consumers as well. Certainly, the launch of gates have had has been very well received. So starting to see barely introduced in wallpaper.

27:09
We did a collaboration with jackfield tiles a couple of years ago, so there are calico designs on tiles as well and there’s more coming next year. Some some I have some products are balls with a card, show you. But there are some some beautiful things coming more home where using burly designs and interpreting them slightly differently as well, much like Barnaby Gates has done. It’s a really exciting time for Burley and I think that our founders would be delighted to see the work that they started kind of taking off and coming into new categories and traveling around the world, and they always intended it to travel around the world. But continuing to travel around the world is the new and interesting places.

28:01 – EmmaMT (Host)
Yeah, it’s like moving with the times and reaching new markets, and Barnaby Gates is quite a young audience and you’re quite a traditional brand and people like younger generations might not have come to it in the same way. That opens up all sorts of doors.

28:17 – Jim (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, exactly, and I think when a new design comes into wallpaper or other categories, consumers will look at it. As you know, they’ll judge it from an aesthetic point of view. Is it something I like? Is it a color I like? Is it a design I like? And that’s great and much like I was describing earlier, people might buy wallpaper and decorate their house and not really know the history of Burley and why. They might just like that beautiful, iconic design. But then, if they want to explore a little bit further, they can go so much deeper and go all right, okay, that pattern Calico’s been around for 52 years now and yeah, yeah, there’s so much more depth to it.

28:59 – EmmaMT (Host)
Yeah, there’s something else that I thought was really good. When we get press releases, which we get hundreds a day, there’s a massive theme which, as it should be, about sustainability and British made, and you have a I don’t know what you call it logo sort of thing. That’s what I don’t have, what you’ve got like a tagline, that’s all made here and I think that’s really and I was talking about this with Cara at the press show I was like it’s not just that the wording is perfect, it’s that you’ve used a really modern font and it’s really impactful. It’s like really big across the whole image on the website and on your social media. And we were saying how lots of people say that their products are made in the UK, but actually they’re based in the UK. They make one thing in the UK, but then everything is shipped out to China and everything’s made in China and that’s kind of what this is.

29:53
What I’ve been told is what you’re all about. All made here means it’s all made here do you want to talk about that?

29:59 – Jim (Guest)
Yeah, okay, and that’s come from a lot of experience of consumers particularly coming into our shop, and my office is above our factory shop, right so, and we just have wooden floorboards as separated. So I could hear a lot of what happens in the shop beneath me and the number of times, the number of times people would come into the shop and talk to our shop manager or shop staff about Berlin. The house is lovely, it’s really nice. You know traditional product. Where’s it made? Are?

30:33 – EmmaMT (Host)
you kidding me.

30:36 – Jim (Guest)
It’s all made here and the words are all made here. Well, words I have heard, you know, hundreds of times just listening to people talking in the shop it’s all made here. And we thought we’re clearly we’re not getting that message out enough if we’re having to tell people who are actually physically in our shop. So, yeah, so we kind of came up with this kind of campaign name all made here. And yeah, it references the fact that all of Berlin is made here. It always has been made here. It’s not kind of a case of we kind of expatriated all of the production and so we’ll bring it back to be quaint. It’s always been made here.

31:15
But yeah, there are some businesses and brands out there who make a business choice and that’s for them to make, to kind of to make somewhere else or to part make somewhere else and finish in the UK. And that’s fine as long as, as long as everyone understands and is aware of that. But we feel that by saying all made here and saying it fairly big and fairly bold it, it just reinforces the fact that it is all made here. And it’s interesting you mentioned a modern logo, right, so that the font all made here actually comes from our designer, alison, who kind of rewrote that into a font. But that is an engraving. On the base of all of our products we have a back stamp. Those back stamps are engraved onto the, on to the roller, onto the cylinder, and they’ve been there for hundreds of years. So that all made here font is basically just a reimagination of a very old font that was never intended to be digital, it was always engraved and yeah, that’s so cool.

32:22 – EmmaMT (Host)
I love that. I thought she just found really you all you guys have just found a really cool font. That just worked really well. But that’s really interesting because it looks so modern.

32:31 – Jim (Guest)
So it’s from the beginning there’s nothing in this place that doesn’t have a story. Yeah, right, yeah, there’s, yeah, other than my laptop perhaps I mean but you know what I mean like everything now the the desk that I’m sat at is is a desk that was in our archive room, that is, that was used from kind of the 1950s, and I just thought, right, I don’t want a modern desk in my office, I want the original one. Yeah, so got it kind of tied it up and and that’s it’s. It’s got that heritage, it has got a story yeah, that’s really cool.

33:04 – EmmaMT (Host)
I love that, and I’ve mentioned POPR a few times. I’m just gonna interject here and say that I know you, popr are a really great agency, and if anyone listening who’s a stylist or a writer wants to get images or products, just get in touch with POPR. I will share the links in the show notes so, but I think everyone knows POPR, so I do get in touch with them.

33:25 – Jim (Guest)
Yeah, they are. Yeah, they’re brilliant. I mean, they really are. We’ve worked with POPR for a while now and they’re they’re endlessly kind of creative. They seem to know everybody that wonderful. I’m very supportive of you promoted yeah, love them, love those guys.

33:42 – EmmaMT (Host)
You have answered all my questions hardly without me asking anything. I’m not going to ask you about future collaborations. I’ll just watch this space. Yeah but my last question is nearly always what’s next? What’s next for Burley?

33:56 – Jim (Guest)
So we’re just working on a range that we’ll launch in spring, which is based on the colour code design, which I’ve shown you a few pieces in colour code, but we’re launching it in a pinky purple colour. Yeah, it’s a really beautiful soft colour and it was actually inspired by our biggest market at the moment is Japan. It actually has been for a while. Japanese go mad for Burley. They absolutely love it, and one of the other things that Japanese go mad for, as you might know, is cherry blossom. They love blossom. They celebrate blossom every spring, so the colour that we’re launching next year is kind of inspired by the cherry blossom in Japan.

34:48 – EmmaMT (Host)
So Japan will be a big market for that.

34:51 – Jim (Guest)
It has a slightly kind of blueish hue to it as well, so actually kind of sits really nicely with the cobalt blue of the traditional calico. But it’s kind of light and spring like and, yeah, that’s going to be a lot of fun for launching next year. Hopefully we’ll be working on some new stuff for Ralph Lauren as well. Yeah, there’s always something new happening, but always with a kind of a heritage, authentic route to it.

35:20 – EmmaMT (Host)
Yeah, yeah.

35:23 – Jim (Guest)
Yeah, it’s going to be another fun year for Burley, I’m sure.

35:27 – EmmaMT (Host)
Yeah, sounds really exciting. Can’t wait to see that. Thank you so much for your time today. I’ve loved this chat. I love hearing how brands kind of take their heritage and translate it into modern times but don’t lose any of that authenticity. It’s really really inspiring stuff. So thank you so much for sharing that. That’s been brilliant.

35:44 – Jim (Guest)
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak to you and hopefully reach a broader audience. Really appreciate it.

35:53 – EmmaMT (Host)
Thanks for listening to the Inside Stylus podcast. You can find all the details from today’s episode over in the show notes on insidestyluscom. If you enjoyed the show, I’d love it if you had head on over to iTunes and rate and review it. It’s the best way to help other people find the show and I’d really appreciate it. Until next time. Bye for now, you.