Dishes for Kings

In the backwoods Bavarian town of Selb one day last week, white-aproned workmen finished wrapping 3, 670 dishes fit for a king. They were the first of four shipments of a 14,680-piece, $113,000 dinner service for Saudi Arabia's King Saud. The manufacturer: West Germany's Rosenthal, the world's No. 1 porcelain maker.

Red China. King Saud, whose gold-encrusted china is Rosenthal's biggest order since World War II, had joined an illustrious clientele. Rosenthal has made china for the royal houses of Greece, The Netherlands, Rumania and Iran, for Indian maharajas and Ethiopia's Haile Selassie. In 1952 the company turned out a special order of $8,214.15 worth of crockery for Marshal Tito's wedding. Before Eisenhower left Berlin in 1948, his staff gave him a 130-piece Rosenthal set inscribed with the flaming-sword insignia of SHAEF. Not to be outdone by Western capitalists, Soviet Ambassador Valerian Zorin in Bonn last week ordered an $800 Rosenthal dinner service--the company's biggest Red china sale since Tito's nuptials.

But crowned heads and commissars account for only a small proportion of the 50,000,000 pieces that pour each year from Rosenthal's ten plants. In the U.S. alone, Rosenthal estimates, sales in 1955 amounted to nearly $5,000,000.

He tries to design china to fit the buyer's personality as well as his pocketbook. From the ornate Sans Souci ware, originally designed for Frederick the Great, to severe, modern patterns that now make up nearly 50% of its production, Rosenthal aims to make good china everyone's dish.

Secret of Success. "The secret of my success," Founder Philip Rosenthal boasted, "is a combination of American merchandising ideas and German craftsmanship." The son of a Westphalian china merchant, Rosenthal ran away to the U.S. at 17, punched cows in Texas, rode horseback mail routes in Colorado, wound up heading the glass and china department of a Detroit department store. In 1879, when he was 24, Rosenthal returned to Germany to buy china. Instead, he bought a castle near Selb, in the heart of North Bavaria's famed porcelain country, and started turning out decorated chinaware. By 1934, when he was banished by the Nazis, Rosenthal had 5,000 employees and ten companies.

Since World War II Rosenthal has been run by Philip Jr., 39, who got his M.A. at Oxford, did a stretch in the Foreign Legion, and is an amateur pilot, skier, cross-country runner and sports-car enthusiast. Realizing that the company's designs were outmoded at war's end. young Philip had new lines styled by Europe's top artists--Finland's Tapio Wirrkala, Germany's Bele Bachem. France's Jean Cocteau. In 1951, when U.S. sales slumped, Rosenthal teamed up with Designer Raymond Loewy to make medium-priced contemporary dinnerware for American tastes. Since then Rosenthal has zoomed from 18th to second place in U.S. sales of imported china.

Time Out For Beer. Like his father, who set up one of Europe's first company-owned kindergartens for employees. Philip Jr. says: "The most precious thing we have is our workers." Since the war, Rosenthal has made its pension plan one of Germany's most liberal, built the German porcelain industry's most advanced clinic for prevention of silicosis, a longtime occupational hazard.

Rosenthal can well afford such benevolence. Stockholders' dividends in 1954 amounted to $168,483, or 9.5% of par value. Next month, when the second shipment of King Saud's china leaves Selb, Rosenthal workers will take time out for a stein of Bavarian beer. In the shipment will be the 250 millionth piece of china turned out by Rosenthal since 1945, and the 100 millionth to go overseas.

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