We know we are different from a lot of other wholesalers, we foster and celebrate our relationships with our makers and factories. We visit them twice a year (pre-covid - sob!), seeing the same faces, talking to the same people. We talk over email throughout the year, following up designs, orders and deliveries.
They laugh at us with our designs that push the boundaries of their skill or might be a design that makes them blush with embarrassment (hello, Boobs planter!) We are not a company that makes one product or SKU with one supplier only, it's just not how we do things. We design ranges specifically for each individual factory and their unique skills and talents based around their speciality and raw materials. Finding makers that are ethically aligned and hold the same company values that we do is very important to us, we could tell you some factories we have walked in and walked straight out of!
Of course our designs need to be trend focused and beautiful in their own right, but one factory in particular holds a special place in our hearts and we wanted to share their story with Jones & Co and how it evolved.
Some classic Have You Met Miss Jones designs
JJ's father John Jones and mother Millie Jones had an export business in the Philippines in the seventies and eighties - one of their factories in Manila was CSM. CSM would make very English looking and traditional bone china bathroom accessories and Christmas decorations for major UK department stores like John Lewis with John and Millie.
When JJ wanted to start her own business, John suggested going to the Philippines and visiting some of his old suppliers and seeing if she could find anything in the showrooms that could turn into a range. At CSM she discovered a humble family run business by it's patriarch Jun.
Early Have You Met Miss Jones made with CSM
With a showroom full or every conceivable item fashioned in bone china, like seashells, birds, palm leaves, Christmas decorations and A LOT of votives. JJ pulled together some samples and got creative with what else could be rendered in Bone China. Objects like telephone lamps, Cockatoo's, white mice, sneakers, robots and owls (oh, so many owls!) - and with that Have You Met Miss Jones was born. You name it, over the years pretty much everything you could think of has been captured in porcelain by Have You Met Miss Jones.
Finishing touches on our Cockatoo Lamp which is still in our range today!
Like any business, they have fallen under the strain of copy cats, no time more than in the 00's. We used to have a roaring business in Christmas decorations and votives with CSM, remember our feathers and keys for example? With China jumping on the white figurative porcelain bandwagon, cheap inferior white copies were popping up in all the major stores and CSM lost a lot of business.
Christmas 2011 Have You Met Miss Jones
Undeterred we persevered, designing lamps, boxes, bowls, mini bird feeders, hanging birds, dogs - anything and everything we could as we believed as did a lot of our customers in the unmatched beauty and quality of the Bone China items produced by CSM. We focused on designing highly detailed items that China could never replicate.
Incredible details in the work of CSM
In 2017 Jun lost his long battle with Cancer and now his daughter Erica runs the family business. Through some very sad years CSM have endured and now Erica is mother to two children - a working mum just like us.
Smiling workers in the factory outside of Manila
We strive season after season to think outside the box with CSM, push their limits and ours to keep ordering with them. They are our first and original supplier, from 2006 onwards (and at that time made up 100% of our portfolio).
Classic Paper Bags
We are so thrilled to have recent success with the nude range with CSM. Although Lito who is the head mould maker is a conservative Filipino man, he has endured every single object, animal and body part we have asked him to create over the last fourteen years with aplomb. It delights us to give them nice orders for these new items and to see them passionately and with divine detail creating them for us with the drive they showed creating those early orders for votives and hanging feathers.
Our latest range in the Nude collection pushing all the boundaries
