The Holt-Howard Collection · Profiles in Passion
The Man Behind the Pixie
Before there was a Pixieware condiment jar, before there was a Cozy Kitten butter dish or a Coq Rouge egg boiler, there was a nine-year-old boy sitting in a boat on the Sheepscot River in Newcastle, Maine, looking up at a cliff face and drawing what he saw. The year was 1933. The boy was Robert J. Howard Sr., and the drawing — a careful, confident rendering of the indigenous American profile painted on the stone above him — survives to this day, framed and treasured by his son. It is the earliest known work of an artist who would go on to design thousands of products, invent an entire product category, and create objects so beloved that strangers would spend decades hunting for them at estate sales across the world.
Robert Howard never thought of his art as anything other than his passion. Throughout his life he drew and painted constantly — oil paintings in particular — and when he finished a piece he gave it away to a family member, a friend, whoever happened to be nearby, and then simply began another. This generosity was not modesty. It was the natural expression of a man for whom the making was the point, not the keeping.
“He would draw or paint something, give it away, then do another. He never thought of it as anything other than his passion.”
— Robert Johnson Howard Jr.That same spirit — abundant, improvisational, aimed at bringing pleasure to others — would eventually animate every product Holt-Howard ever made.
The founding of Holt-Howard Associates is the kind of story that sounds apocryphal until you hear the details. Robert Howard and his brother John had grown up together in Walpole, Massachusetts. They met Grant Holt — who hailed from Evanston, Illinois — while all three were students at Amherst College. The idea of going into business together took shape during their college years, and their families believed in it enough to put money behind it: the three families loaned the young men a combined $9,000 to get started.
But before that startup existed in any formal sense, Robert and John needed to earn a living. They took to the road selling bibles, travelling across America, young and frugal, sleeping in cemeteries when night fell — safe, quiet, and free. Lesson One in entrepreneurship, as Robert Sr. would later tell his son: you do whatever it takes.
While Robert pursued his MBA at Harvard, Grant Holt went to Sweden for his own graduate degree — and it was there that he encountered a traditional Christmas Angel Chimes. He reached out to the manufacturer. The owner was eager to find American distribution, and Grant told him he knew exactly the right organization. This was, as Robert Jr. puts it, “a little white lie.” The organization didn’t exist yet.
Grant contacted the Howard brothers. They met the Swedish factory owner at the New York docks and walked him up to 45th and 3rd for a meeting with the buyer at E.J. Korvette. They left with their first order. Holt-Howard Associates was born in 1949.
The company started in an apartment on East 35th Street in Manhattan, using 475 Fifth Avenue as a mail-drop address, then moved to a proper office at 126 East 28th Street, and eventually into a showroom at 225 Fifth Avenue — Manhattan’s prestigious Gift Center Building. In John Howard’s own words: “We persevered and were able to progress from an office in our apartment to a Fifth Avenue mail drop, and within two years a real office on E. 28th Street in Manhattan. Finally, within another couple of years we had our own showroom in the important 225 Fifth Avenue Trade Showroom Building.”
From that improbable beginning, Robert Sr. spent the next two decades as the creative engine of a company that would become one of the most prolific novelty ceramics importers in American history. Within the partnership, roles were clearly defined: Robert handled all product development and design; John managed sales; Grant oversaw financial affairs and office operations. Working with factories in Nagoya, Japan — and eventually sourcing from more than twenty countries — Robert designed products for the kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, and dining room in materials ranging from earthenware to porcelain, terra cotta, and bone china.
The company’s reach extended to England as well. Holt-Howard held a 45 percent ownership stake in John E. Buck & Co. Ltd., based in Colchester, England — a partnership that produced a licensed British version of the Pixieware line with distinctly different vessel forms and glazing, now among the rarest pieces in the collector market.
But perhaps his most consequential innovation had nothing to do with ceramics. Robert Sr. loved his coffee and had no patience for drinking it from a cup and saucer. For a time he drank from a beer stein, reheating it on a single-coil electric burner. The solution he arrived at was elegant: take the jiggering process used to make ceramic vases, shrink the form to four inches tall, cast a handle — what he called an “ear” — and attach it before firing. That was a coffee mug.
“Pop took the idea to Dunoon Ceramics in England. They laughed at him and said nobody will buy that. So he took his idea to Japan.”
— Robert Johnson Howard Jr.Dunoon Ceramics found the concept amusing. Nobody, they said, would buy that. Robert took his idea to Wado and Pearl Ceramics in Nagoya, where post-war Japan’s manufacturers were eager for American partnerships. For the next seventeen years, Holt-Howard dominated the coffee mug industry. Their production policy kept competitors perpetually behind: produce 800 pieces of a given design; if those sold, produce 1,600 more; if those sold, produce 3,600; then never produce that design again. Deliberate scarcity, built into the model from the start.
In the late 1960s, the partners sold Holt-Howard to General Housewares Corporation. By 1974, all three original partners had left. The business slowly deteriorated under new ownership, and in 1990, what remained of Holt-Howard was sold to Kay Dee Designs of Rhode Island. There is no longer a line carrying the Holt-Howard brand name.
Robert Sr. did not simply retire after the sale. He continued designing thousands more products for the gift and decorative accessories trade, travelling the world with his son Robert Jr. and passing on lessons earned over decades: how to design from a marketing perspective, how to act in partnership with factory owners, how to build the kind of long-term supplier relationships that create lasting relevance. The man who invented the coffee mug spent his later years ensuring those lessons would outlast him.
Robert J. Howard Sr. died in 1990, just as a collector community was beginning to organize around his work. He was surprised by it. He and his co-founders had built a successful import business; they had not set out to create future collectibles. But Robert Jr. believes that had his father lived to see what that community became — the Facebook groups, the annotated price guides, the decades-long hunts for a single rare piece — he would have been joyful. Not merely flattered. Joyful, because the work had brought sustained pleasure to people he would never meet.
“He was very talented in business,” Robert Jr. wrote to the collector community that loves his father’s work. “And he loved his family.”
The drawing, signed R.H. 1933, still exists. Robert Jr. has always held it very close to his heart.
