Rowe Pottery

Jim Rowe started making pottery in 1968, earned his BFA in ceramics and art history in 1972, and in 1973 set up shop in Cambridge, Wisconsin -- a small town an hour outside Madison -- in a 100-year-old blacksmith shop with a brick kiln out back. He sold his salt-glazed stoneware at craft fairs and from his studio, slowly building a reputation for pieces that were genuinely functional and genuinely beautiful. By 1975 he was hiring other potters. By the 1980s he was producing museum-quality reproductions of antique American stoneware alongside his original work. In 2007 a former Rayovac executive named Bev Semmann joined as director of sales and marketing. She saw immediately what the brand could become. In 2013 she bought the business and rebuilt it -- moving to a smaller facility, replacing equipment, expanding wholesale partnerships. In an almost poetic turn, she bought newer production equipment directly from Jim Rowe himself, who had sold the business nearly a decade earlier but never stopped making pottery. Today Rowe Pottery operates as a pure artisan studio in Cambridge, where every piece is handcrafted either on the potter's wheel or through slip casting, trimmed, dried, and then hand-painted by a decorator whose brushwork transforms a light pink glaze into the brand's signature cobalt blue after firing. Food safe, oven safe, microwave safe, dishwasher safe -- made for real cooking, real meals, and real everyday life. On a registry, Rowe Pottery is the stoneware that gets used every single day and looks better for it.