Stefanie Hering's designs are unique, because each bears the artisans' touch

The journey, during which a mixture of kaolin, feldspar, and quartz – the mass – produces porcelain objects of exquisite beauty, begins in the moulding shop. This is where the mass is worked into different consistencies: for the turning shop, where plates and bowls are made on the potter’s wheel, the mass is claylike, so it is easy to shape by hand. For vessels and other hollow shapes – from vases to teapots – the mass (known as slip) needs to be liquefied.

Each plaster mould, made by the master artisans in Reichenbach by hand in an elaborate yet precise process, can only be used about 40 times, since it absorbs water during the drying process. Then a new plaster mould has to be made using an original metal mould.

Product designer Stefanie Hering breaks new ground not only in porcelain processing but also in the design of her surfaces: for example, for the “Blue Silent”, “Silent Iron”, and “Silent Brass” collections, she works with earthylooking glazes specially created for these services. For the “PalmHouse X” line, she uses luminous colours that are applied to both glazed and bisque porcelain. And finally, for the “Pulse” collection, Stefanie Hering developed a decorating method based on the traditional material shellac.

All of designer Stefanie Hering’s creations, for which she has already received the Design Award of the Federal Republic of Germany, are characterised by dialogue with the material and working very closely with the core qualities of porcelain. It is only a logical consequence of this approach that the use of pure bisque porcelain has become a key trademark of her label Hering Berlin: porcelain in its most original, unadulterated form, not glazed, but with a matte, smooth surface, worked using special procedures in the Hering Berlin master workshops in Reichenbach. Though it looks fragile and extremely difficult to clean, is actually denser, harder, firmer, and more resistant to abrasion and scratches than glazed porcelain. Being fired at 1400°C closes all its pores. The porcelain forms its own glaze, so no dirt can penetrate it – which makes bisque porcelain from Hering Berlin ideal for use in dining services.

The kiln is where porcelain objects get their strength, as well as the dazzling white colour that characterises fired porcelain from Hering Berlin. In addition to the two usual firing processes - the bisque firing at 980°C and the glost firing at 1400° C, during which all porcelain objects shrink by 17% - up to three more firings are necessary for Hering Berlin porcelain, depending on the type and colour of the decoration. The new, specially developed glazes for collections such as “Silent Brass”, “Blue Silent”, and “Silent Iron” can also be fired at 1400°C, unlike the more heatsensitive conventional glazes. This high temperature makes them particularly resistant to abrasion and scratches.

Porcelain objects from Hering Berlin are manufactured in workshops exclusively in Thuringia in Germany, keeping the distances travelled extremely short. The porcelain designers and artisans work in a resource-saving and energyefficient manner, no different from many generations of porcelain artists before them. Young people are also trained in the relevant crafts for the production of Hering Berlin objects – an important contribution to preserving, further developing, and thus future-proofing traditional cultural techniques and production processes.