About Myrth

Handcrafted porcelain place setting in canyon glaze styled for a dinner party, Myrth Ceramics

Myrth is a porcelain tableware studio in Providence, Rhode Island, run by us, Abby and Eric Smallwood. We're two product designers with more than 40 combined years designing for brands like New Balance, Bose, and OXO, and we bring that discipline to porcelain. We formulate our own clay and glazes and make every piece ourselves, from first sketch to final firing, and we build all of it to the durability standard the restaurants we work with need.

We started making ceramics in 2008, in the evenings, alongside the products we were designing by day. Same work, different material. We've been at it full time since 2020.

Our Story

The seed was planted in 2008. We were working full time as product designers in Boston and joined a community pottery studio expecting a hobby. We came out with a second practice.

Under the mentorship of ceramicist Darrell Finnegan we learned the fundamentals of ceramic design and production, and found that everything we knew about product development, materials science, and manufacturing applied directly to making functional ceramics at a high level.

In 2015, still designing by day, we opened our own production studio and named it Myrth. The name is a feeling, the specific one a great dinner party produces. We borrowed the old word for laughter and joy, spelled it with a Y to make it ours, and liked that it rhymes with earth, the material we work in. It named the place we wanted our work to live in: mirth, and making more of it. That's what Made for Mirth means.

For five years we built it around the day jobs, designing new products in the evenings, fulfilling orders on weekends, and finding an audience among home cooks, design-minded couples, and Boston restaurants that wanted something better than standard white hotel china.

At the start of 2020 we made Myrth the whole job. Best decision we've made. Same work we'd been doing for fifteen years, now on our own products, from first sketch to final firing.

Today we're one of the few American studios making porcelain tableware entirely in house. Restaurants including Oleana, Comfort Kitchen, Bar Volpe, Giusto, Uchi, and PostBoy rely on us for tableware distinctive enough to define a room and durable enough to come back from a full day of service looking untouched. Our home customers rely on the same thing, for pieces that look better the more they're used.

Myrth ceramics founders Abby and Eric with their dog Raine at the studio.

Abby Smallwood • Co-Founder • Head of Marketing

Abby is a product designer with fifteen years designing for brands like New Balance, most of it in footwear, a background people are always surprised by and one that shows up in how she thinks about form, durability, color, and finish. She leads marketing, design, and customer experience at Myrth, and works directly with chefs to pair their menus to the right pieces. She is most likely to be found cooking something to photograph, or living with a hand-thrown prototype in her own kitchen to find out whether it earns a place in the line.

Eric Smallwood • Co-Founder • Head of Manufacturing

Eric is the engine behind our production. Fifteen years designing for brands like Bose and OXO, across Boston's top design consultancies, gave him an engineer's precision and a designer's eye, and both are on the studio floor daily. He runs all manufacturing and designs the molds that give our pieces their forms. He is also our glaze specialist, the person who developed our clay body and every recipe in the palette, and the one still deep in test tiles when a new glaze is coming together.

Raine • C-ARF-O • Head of Customer Relations

Raine is an Australian Shepherd and the embodiment of Myrth, the best boy ever. He heads up client relations and security at the studio, adores booping studio visitors, and enforces mandatory ball-toss breaks throughout the workday. He prefers his water served fresh in a Helping Bowl.

Mix and match Myrth porcelain place settings in Vertigris, Nightfall, and canyon glazes

Promise

We make tableware because the objects you eat from every day matter. Well-made tableware makes well-made food better. A good bowl makes a Tuesday night dinner feel like an occasion.

Our aim is simple: porcelain your family is still using three generations from now. Not because you're being careful with it, but because it's built to last that long.

Shop Our Products→

Industrial ceramics studio with shelves of white bowls and plates, carts, tables, and pottery equipment in a spacious, well-lit room with exposed ceiling pipes and support beams.

Made In Rhode Island

Every piece of Myrth porcelain is handcrafted in our Providence, Rhode Island studio, from clay formulation to hand-applied glaze to final firing. No overseas production. No contract manufacturing. We do all of it ourselves, and we intend to keep it that way.

A dining table set with colorful plates, glasses of red wine, and cutlery, decorated with a white vase holding red flowers, in a warmly lit room with wooden walls and chairs.

Restaurant Grade

Myrth porcelain is trusted by chef-driven kitchens, and that trust is earned in service.

We engineer our clay and glaze recipes to what a commercial kitchen does to a plate: daily dishwasher cycles, heavy stacking, the wear of silverware against glaze, the occasional drop. Everything is tested for durability before it reaches a restaurant table or a home kitchen.

The result is tableware that gets better with use instead of showing its age. No hazing or surface clouding, no chipping, no glaze degradation over time.

Our hospitality program →

Porcelain appetizer plates being formed on the roller jigger at Myrth's East Providence studio

Process

Every product starts as a detailed sketch, which we turn into a handmade prototype. Prototypes live in our own kitchen for months before we commit to them, and we test and refine samples until they meet our standards for form and durability.

Once a form is settled, Eric models it in CAD and makes the production molds himself, here in the studio. Most studios our size send this out or design around molds someone else made. Doing it ourselves is why our forms are ours.

Our manufacturing process uses three forming methods: plates and bowls are jiggered on a roller press, drinkware and vases are slip cast, and occasional limited edition items are hand-thrown. Every piece is finished with one of our hand-applied semi-matte glazes.

Throughout every step we keep the handcrafted characteristics that make each piece distinctive, the small variations in glaze and form that tell you a person made this.

How to care for your Myrth ceramics →

A workspace with numerous ceramic tiles in various colors organized on wooden boards, some with handwritten labels, and other ceramic pieces on shelves. There are containers, a laptop, cups with liquids, and a few small tools and supplies on the table.

Materials

All Myrth ceramics are made from a durable porcelain clay body fired in our electric kilns. We developed the clay and glaze recipes ourselves, and they are what give the work its durability, surface quality, and depth of color. Our glazes are built from scratch through color development, surface refinement, and durability testing, which is how we arrive at a palette of earthy, textured shades that sit well in a home and age well on a table.

Learn more about our materials →