Jibber, Jabber, JOBBER !!!!

One of the most confusing things people run into when they are collecting pottery in general and dinnerware in particular is the term "JOBBER". Just exactly what is a jobber anyway? The best definition for our purposes is a company that orders and purchases large quantities of merchandise from manufacturers for the purpose of reselling to retailers rather than directly to consumers.

Examples abound throughout the dinnerware world. All to often, reference publications use the term manufacturer when they are actually referring to a jobber. Further complicating matters Jobbers often use trademarks to refer to a line of merchandise that they are trying to sell. They may order items to be sold under these trademarks from a number of different manufacturers.

Unfortunately, those of us who sell this pottery and dinnerware are even more confused than the people who write the reference material.

Just as an example, Marshall Burns & Company of Chicago. One of their trademark lines was Marcrest. They ordered items for their Marcrest Line from a number of different manufacturers.

Daisy & Dot -- This pattern in the popular Colorado Brown color was made by Western Stoneware, while various other colors were made by other manufacturers.





Marcrest at Quality Junk in the Atomic Mall


Swiss Alpine -- This pattern is almost always unmarked but was made by Stetson for Marshall Burns, again for the Marcrest line.




Almost every major pottery, Homer Laughlin, Franciscan, Taylor, Smith & Taylor and many others sold to jobbers to resell to merchants. Often they sold the same pattern to more than one jobber to be resold under different pattern names.

This led to a common practise throughout the industry where retailers would be offered an exclusive for a certain pattern in their territory, while their competitors were offered the same pattern for the same territory simply under a different name.

The bottom line here is that you must be careful when searching for a specific pattern. It never hurts to do a little research.

Thanks for listening...