All of that is little consolation, however, to the more than 300 workers of the factory who now face unemployment. After years of wobbly bottom lines, the factory was declared bankrupt in January.

On a chilly morning recently, workers milled about the entrance, hoping for a new owner who could save the company and preserve the heart of this town, barnacled snuggly to Florence, where every family is connected to the factory in one way or another.

“There are laws to save pandas,” Valentina Puggelli, an employee in the company’s communications office. “We want to save something as rare.”

How a company founded in 1735, having long withstood various revolutions in industry and popular tastes, went bankrupt is the subject of considerable debate here. The answers say as much about the demise of Richard Ginori as they do about the larger forces buffeting nearly all of Italy’s small- and medium-size manufacturers at a time of increased global competition and domestic economic crisis.

Formal dining is gradually dying out, and with it the market for hand-made porcelain, which is painstakingly slow and expensive to produce. Like so many similarly sized Italian industries, the company faced a choice between trying to preserve its status — and market — as a high-end niche product with a “Made in Italy” cachet, or to appeal to the broader, less expensive, tastes of a global marketplace.

It chose the latter, and began producing more quotidian products — including tableware as a promotional give-away for a supermarket chain — putting the company in direct competition with more commonplace ceramics. Yet Italy’s high labor costs and high taxes left it at a distinct disadvantage. It was a decision that many employees now blame for the company’s decline.

“Richard Ginori has to capitalize on its high quality,” said Giovanni Nencini, an employee and factory spokesman for the trade union Cobas. “We are the Ferrari of porcelain, but the strategic plans of recent years have lowered the quality of the brand.”

Certainly, Richard Ginori was not alone in the pressures it faced. It has been a fragile time for porcelain makers worldwide. Many storied brands — Wedgwood, Spode, Rosenthal — have similarly been unable to survive in a market flooded by cheaper, more utilitarian tableware, often from China, which first developed ceramics with a white clay body some 1,500 years ago.

Italians now buy about 60 percent of their tableware from China, according to Confindustria Ceramica, the business lobby that represents 273 Italian ceramics manufacturers and their 37,000 employees. In recent months, the association accused the Chinese of dumping products in the Italian market below the cost of manufacturing, prompting the European commission to impose import duties — temporarily for now — of up to 59 percent on some Chinese tableware.

Despite the efforts of some past owners to turn Richard Ginori around and bring in top-notch designers, like Paola Navone, the current artistic director, investment fell short, critics say, and Italy’s business climate hobbled the company.

Today, workers fantasize that a new owner will bring “the same illumination and heart,” said Letizia Filippini, a decorator, as did Carlo Ginori, the Florentine marquis who opened the original factory here in 1735, after scouring Tuscany to find kaolin, the white clay that is the essential ingredient of porcelain.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/09/business/global/porcelain-factorys-fate-reflects-fragile-time-for-italy.html?partner=rss&emc=rss