Burning passion
By JASMIN JOUHAR (text)
FRANK RÖTH (photos)
January 22, 2023 · Designer, craftswoman, entrepreneur, hostess: Stefanie Hering has been making porcelain for 30 years.
A visit to the Hering Berlin factory in Thuringia.
To get to the holy of holies of Hering Berlin, you have to cross the entire factory building.
Past the foundry, past the ovens, past the plunge pools with the glazes and past numerous trolleys full of bowls, plates, cups and mugs.
Behind a heavy door you enter a small room with a large window, filled to the ceiling with shelves, on top of which are even more bowls, plates, cups and mugs.
The table, the office chair, the lamp, everything is covered with fine white dust.
Doreen Klemm, the sure hand of the entire porcelain manufactory, works here.
Here she is in peace, shielded from the noise of the machines in the workshop.
Here she can concentrate on the tasks that no one else has mastered like her.
She decorates porcelain objects with fine rings made of orange-colored shellac.
With her left hand she swings a plate on a rotating plate.
With her right hand she holds the brush on the plate, paints rings with incredible precision, without any tools.
Shellac is waterproof once dry.
If Klemm wipes the still unfired porcelain mass out of the spaces between the rings with a damp sponge, a relief of grooves results – raised where she applied the shellac, deepened where she washed out the untreated porcelain.
craft,
executed with incomprehensible perfection.
The pieces then go into the kiln for the first firing, annealing, at around 1000 degrees.
The shellac burns and the white surface with the fine striped relief emerges.
A steady hand: Doreen Klemm paints precise rings on the porcelain objects in the Reichenbach manufactory.
“Doreen is my right hand,” says Stefanie Hering.
"She implements what I think of." The trained porcelain painter Doreen Klemm has been working for Stefanie Hering's Hering Berlin brand for 21 years.
However, Klemm's workplace behind the heavy door is a good two hours' drive from the capital.
Because the Berliner Hering has her porcelain produced in Thuringia, in the small town of Reichenbach right on the A9 motorway.
“Doreen is my right hand.
She implements what I think up.”
Stefanie Hering, designer and entrepreneur
The Reichenbach porcelain manufactory has existed there since 1900: a family business, a few old brick factory buildings and two modern industrial halls on the outskirts of the village, almost in the countryside.
Sheep graze outside the window of the foundry.
Thuringia is a traditional ceramics region, Kahla with the manufactory of the same name is not far away.
About once a month Stefanie Hering gets in the car and drives to Reichenbach.
But, as she says, calls are made every day.
During the tour of production, Hering, short light blonde hair, blue blouse, black trousers, white sneakers, stops everywhere and talks to employees.
There is always something to clarify.
Under her arm she has a black plastic object, a 3D printed prototype for a new product.
In between, she disappears with it into the modeler's workshop.
Can the new design be implemented in this way?
Or does the piece need to be revised again?
When Stefanie Hering comes back, she smiles: he gave his okay.
We continue to the shipping department, here too there is a lot to discuss, here too shelf after shelf is lined up with porcelain objects.
Some are pure white, have holes or grooves, others have golden decorations.
In addition, pieces with blue or black animal drawings, expansive bowls and slender, towering carafes.
Two employees fold shipping boxes and pack the parts, the orders are printed out on the large work table.
Hering Porzellan goes all over the world, to Croatia as well as to Taiwan, to the USA and to Switzerland.
Can the new design be implemented in this way?
Or does the piece need to be revised again?
When Stefanie Hering comes back, she smiles: he gave his okay.
We continue to the shipping department, here too there is a lot to discuss, here too shelf after shelf is lined up with porcelain objects.
Some are pure white, have holes or grooves, others have golden decorations.
In addition, pieces with blue or black animal drawings, expansive bowls and slender, towering carafes.
Two employees fold shipping boxes and pack the parts, the orders are printed out on the large work table.
Hering Porzellan goes all over the world, to Croatia as well as to Taiwan, to the USA and to Switzerland.
Can the new design be implemented in this way?
Or does the piece need to be revised again?
When Stefanie Hering comes back, she smiles: he gave his okay.
We continue to the shipping department, here too there is a lot to discuss, here too shelf after shelf is lined up with porcelain objects.
Some are pure white, have holes or grooves, others have golden decorations.
In addition, pieces with blue or black animal drawings, expansive bowls and slender, towering carafes.
Two employees fold shipping boxes and pack the parts, the orders are printed out on the large work table.
Hering Porzellan goes all over the world, to Croatia as well as to Taiwan, to the USA and to Switzerland.
He gave his okay.
We continue to the shipping department, here too there is a lot to discuss, here too shelf after shelf is lined up with porcelain objects.
Some are pure white, have holes or grooves, others have golden decorations.
In addition, pieces with blue or black animal drawings, expansive bowls and slender, towering carafes.
Two employees fold shipping boxes and pack the parts, the orders are printed out on the large work table.
Hering Porzellan goes all over the world, to Croatia as well as to Taiwan, to the USA and to Switzerland.
He gave his okay.
We continue to the shipping department, here too there is a lot to discuss, here too shelf after shelf is lined up with porcelain objects.
Some are pure white, have holes or grooves, others have golden decorations.
In addition, pieces with blue or black animal drawings, expansive bowls and slender, towering carafes.
Two employees fold shipping boxes and pack the parts, the orders are printed out on the large work table.
Hering Porzellan goes all over the world, to Croatia as well as to Taiwan, to the USA and to Switzerland.
others are provided with golden decorations.
In addition, pieces with blue or black animal drawings, expansive bowls and slender, towering carafes.
Two employees fold shipping boxes and pack the parts, the orders are printed out on the large work table.
Hering Porzellan goes all over the world, to Croatia as well as to Taiwan, to the USA and to Switzerland.
others are provided with golden decorations.
In addition, pieces with blue or black animal drawings, expansive bowls and slender, towering carafes.
Two employees fold shipping boxes and pack the parts, the orders are printed out on the large work table.
Hering Porzellan goes all over the world, to Croatia as well as to Taiwan, to the USA and to Switzerland.
Stefanie Hering from Berlin has had her crockery produced in the workshop in Thuringia for many years.
It all started 30 years ago in a workshop in Prenzlauer Berg.
The master ceramist and studied porcelain designer Stefanie Hering became self-employed in 1992 - and immediately with great ambitions: "It was clear to me that I didn't want to sell my products on a pottery market." Instead of on the market, she presented her designs at international trade fairs in New York, Tokyo , Frankfort.
"I wanted to see what the world thought of it." And the world was thrilled: companies from the porcelain industry invited her to work together, and the German Historical Museum in Berlin bought the thesis for her design studies.
"I knew I didn't want to sell my products at a pottery market."
From the beginning she relied on a personal language.
"I wanted to develop forms that could stand for themselves and have a consistency," says Hering.
Equally important: the properties of the material.
"Porcelain is also called white gold, I wanted to show that." That's why she works with so-called bisque porcelain, whose particularly fine and matt surface does not disappear under a glaze.
Stefanie Hering has it painstakingly sanded by hand during production to further refine the texture.
One of the Hering collections is called Velvet, and the plates and bowls actually feel velvety soft.
However, the insides of the bowls and the serving surfaces of the plates are glazed white.
This results in a nice contrast between matt and glossy and is also more practical in everyday life:
On an unglazed biscuit surface, a knife and fork would make quite an unpleasant noise.
But even if she was quickly successful with her first drafts, the porcelain business is not easy.
Globalization gripped the ceramics industry in the 1990s, and cheap goods from the Far East brought many European companies into difficulties.
Old manufactories had to close.
But Hering remains true to her path, "uncompromisingly only doing what I think is right".
Partly alone, partly with co-managing directors.
She was struggling, because Hering Berlin had to pay off right from the start.
"I don't have any wealthy parents who said we funded the fun."
But even if she was quickly successful with her first drafts, the porcelain business is not easy.
Globalization gripped the ceramics industry in the 1990s, and cheap goods from the Far East brought many European companies into difficulties.
Old manufactories had to close.
But Hering remains true to her path, "uncompromisingly only doing what I think is right".
Partly alone, partly with co-managing directors.
She was struggling, because Hering Berlin had to pay off right from the start.
"I don't have any wealthy parents who said we funded the fun."
But even if she was quickly successful with her first drafts, the porcelain business is not easy.
Globalization gripped the ceramics industry in the 1990s, and cheap goods from the Far East brought many European companies into difficulties.
Old manufactories had to close.
But Hering remains true to her path, "uncompromisingly only doing what I think is right".
Partly alone, partly with co-managing directors.
She was struggling, because Hering Berlin had to pay off right from the start.
"I don't have any wealthy parents who said we funded the fun."
Old manufactories had to close.
But Hering remains true to her path, "uncompromisingly only doing what I think is right".
Partly alone, partly with co-managing directors.
She was struggling, because Hering Berlin had to pay off right from the start.
"I don't have any wealthy parents who said we funded the fun."
Old manufactories had to close.
But Hering remains true to her path, "uncompromisingly only doing what I think is right".
Partly alone, partly with co-managing directors.
She was struggling, because Hering Berlin had to pay off right from the start.
"I don't have any wealthy parents who said we funded the fun."
At the end of the 1990s, when Stefanie Hering considered downsizing the company and concentrating entirely on design, she promptly received several larger orders.
The workshop in Prenzlauer Berg with its seven or eight employees was too small for this and the firing capacities were not sufficient.
In 1999, through an invitation to tender, she came into contact with the Reichenbach manufactory, which, in addition to its own contract manufacturing collections, also produced for other clients.
We understood each other straight away, those responsible accepted the challenge of manufacturing the complicated Hering products in large numbers.
"For us, preparing a piece for the oven takes three times as long as it normally does," says Hering.
Because you also need a very pure mass for biscuit porcelain - that's the name of the basic material made of kaolin, feldspar and quartz -,
Reichenbach even changed production.
Since then, the raw mixture has been filtered particularly thoroughly so that no contamination clouds the white, unglazed biscuit.
The sequence of work steps in the manufactory also had to be changed for Hering: Actually, the glazed porcelain that has been fired twice is first decorated, for example painted.
At Hering Berlin, however, there are decors on unglazed bisque.
In the workshop: Doreen Klemm perforating the porcelain
The finished work of art
A full treasury
The cooperation has proven itself over the years, on the company premises in Reichenbach there is now a factory outlet and a warehouse for the online shop.
In addition to Doreen Klemm, Hering has two other employees in the factory in Thuringia.
The rest of the Hering team works in Berlin, there are 15 people in total, four of them in the design department.
"No design would be standing still," Hering replies when asked how much time she has left for designing.
In addition to porcelain objects and crockery, Stefanie Hering and her employees also develop glass objects and lamps.
After various stations in the city, from Prenzlauer Berg to Wannsee and Tiergarten, Hering Berlin has been in Zehlendorf since last year,
in a listed villa in the English country house style from 1906. The company resides on the bel étage, Hering and her family live above it.
The house with garden was a Corona project: Stefanie Hering took care of the renovation and conversion herself, the impressive original substance with wood paneling, old tiles, fittings, windows and doors was preserved.
In addition to offices and a meeting room, there is also a large kitchen, because the entrepreneur is an enthusiastic hostess.
When she entertains her customers, they can try out the porcelain and glasses themselves and order them all the better.
She also regularly invites chefs to guest cook.
Stefanie Hering took care of the renovation and conversion herself, the impressive original substance with wood paneling, old tiles, fittings, windows and doors was preserved.
In addition to offices and a meeting room, there is also a large kitchen, because the entrepreneur is an enthusiastic hostess.
When she entertains her customers, they can try out the porcelain and glasses themselves and order them all the better.
She also regularly invites chefs to guest cook.
Stefanie Hering took care of the renovation and conversion herself, the impressive original substance with wood paneling, old tiles, fittings, windows and doors was preserved.
In addition to offices and a meeting room, there is also a large kitchen, because the entrepreneur is an enthusiastic hostess.
When she entertains her customers, they can try out the porcelain and glasses themselves and order them all the better.
She also regularly invites chefs to guest cook.
you can try out the porcelain and glasses for yourself and order them all the better.
She also regularly invites chefs to guest cook.
you can try out the porcelain and glasses for yourself and order them all the better.
She also regularly invites chefs to guest cook.
"No design would be standing still."
Gastronomy and the hotel industry are among their most important customers – and sources of inspiration.
Guests in some of the most well-known and classy restaurants and inns dine from Hering Porzellan.
For example in Massimo Bottura's three-star restaurant "Osteria Francescana" in Modena, in Gordon Ramsay's "Pétrus" in London and in "Tantris" in Munich.
Also in Schloss Elmau, in the Hamburg luxury hotel The Fontenay or in the Hilton on Bora Bora, dishes are served on dishes with the blue “h”.
Stefanie Hering gets enthusiastic when she talks about working with chefs.
The exchange is ideally at eye level, the chefs inspire you with their wishes for new products.
Conversely, she likes to share her knowledge about the set table, about the possibilities of presenting a meal with plates, platters and bowls,
Objects stacked in the Gloss Furnace
Products ready for delivery
However, the pandemic caused this part of the business to collapse temporarily.
A closed restaurant does not need a new underplate, Hering Berlin experienced a 44 percent drop in sales.
"It makes you breathe heavily and deeply," says Hering.
“One calculates and draws up business plans.” Government instruments such as short-time work would also have helped.
While gastronomy accounted for around 50 percent of sales before the crisis, the value has now leveled off at 30 percent.
The remaining 70 percent is divided between interior projects and private customers.
The porcelain industry is doing well at the moment.
The big brands, which have been badly hit at times, also have full order books, says Hering.
However, the processes disrupted by the pandemic have not yet been properly reestablished.
"We could all produce even more effectively." And of course she has to struggle with material shortages and price increases.
They set the prices for the gold-decorated pieces every week because the price of gold fluctuates so much.
A palette with polished gold
However, the resolute Stefanie Hering is quite used to crises - as a result of the financial crisis in 2008, several high-revenue countries failed completely.
After September 11, 2001, all sales in the USA collapsed.
In view of the impending gas shortage, she remains optimistic.
"There will be some solution." The ceramics industry, like the glass industry, is very energy-intensive and dependent on gas.
There are still no furnaces that can be fired with hydrogen, says Hering.
Should gas actually be rationed, they would have to work with Reichenbach to decide which pieces still went into the oven.
In the end, that would probably be undecorated white porcelain - because every decoration requires another firing.
"And if they cut our gas completely, we'll die with full order books," she says.
"Not a nice death!
You can tell she doesn't quite believe in this worst-case scenario.
Which is perhaps also due to the fact that she has come a long way.
"We've been doing this for 30 years.
Now people really understand the value of something as mundane as a plate.
What emotions it can trigger.” And Stefanie Hering adds with some pride: “We held our ground.”
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