Built for Service: Made by Designers, Trusted by Chefs
Most tableware brands have a catalog and a sales team. We have a studio and two people. That's not a limitation. It's the whole point.
Abby, Eric, and Raine
Myrth is a design practice that makes porcelain. Eric and I both trained as industrial designers at Syracuse. Before we started the studio, I designed shoes at New Balance, with a focus on materials, color, and trend. Eric spent years at Boston design consultancies working with clients including Bose and OXO. Industrial design is fundamentally about how people use things: how an object feels in your hand, how it fits into a daily ritual, how it holds up when real life happens to it. That obsession with the person on the other end of the object is baked into how we think about every piece we make.
We started Myrth in a community pottery studio, spent six years learning ceramics from the ground up, and eventually left to build our own production operation from scratch. Manufacturing was never foreign to me. My grandfather ran a small sheet metal fabrication business, the kind of operation where everyone knows everyone and the quality of the work is personal. Both my parents worked there. My father restored classic cars. I grew up around people who made things with their hands and took enormous pride in it, and that shaped how I think about this work at every level.
If you're a chef reading this, some of that probably sounds familiar. Not the specifics, but the orientation. You source your own ingredients. You develop your own technique. You don't hand off the parts that matter to someone else. We work the same way. We formulate our own clay body and develop every glaze from scratch. We make our own molds. Every step of production happens under one roof, held to the same standard from raw material to finished piece. You can't hold a standard you don't own every part of, and I think you already know that.
The chefs who find us tend to notice the work before they know much about us. The glazes have a depth and texture that most tableware doesn't, and there's a slight variation in the surface, a thicker pull of glaze here, a subtle shift in form there, that tells you a hand was involved. We don't engineer that out. The pieces are made by hand and we want some sign of that to remain. We call it signs of life. Most of the chefs who are right for us have spotted it before we say anything.
What they're looking for is usually the same thing. Tableware that matches the quality of what goes on it. Something that doesn't look like every other restaurant in the city. Their food has a point of view, and the plate is part of that. We think about it this way: our pieces aren't finished until they're plated. The form we make is the beginning. You complete it.
We bring forty years of product design and manufacturing experience to a studio equipped to produce at scale. Our ceramics knowledge was built in practice over more than a decade: formula development, process refinement, and production expertise developed entirely under our own roof. The result sits somewhere between a design studio and a production facility, with the standards of both.
If that sounds like how you think about your kitchen, we'd like to hear from you.
