About Manufacture de Digoin
Manufacture de Digoin is a French stoneware workshop in Digoin, Burgundy, where everyday objects in grès – high-fired stoneware – have been made since 1875. The workshop stands on the Canal du Centre in Saône-et-Loire, in the area that around 1900 became known as the “ceramics valley” because the clay in the ground, the canal, the railway and the local coal had drawn a cluster of stoneware factories to it.
The company began as a small family business under the name Grès et Poteries de Digoin and grew into the leading producer in the area, with more than 600 employees at its peak. Its products were the everyday containers of kitchen, pantry and garden: vinegar jars with taps, terrines, salting pots, lard pots, mustard jars, jugs, cheese dishes and yoghurt cups. In the 1970s up to 100,000 cups left the factory every month, and for more than a century Digoin has supplied the stoneware jars for the mustard house Maille.
The spread of plastic from the 1950s onwards gradually took the market for stoneware packaging, and the workshop went through difficult decades with two liquidations and three changes of ownership. The craft survived. In 2014 Corinne Jourdain Gros, a former communications consultant in Paris, brought together a group of investors and restarted production with both the old models and new colours and shapes. In 2024 a new team led by Thierry Benhaim took over; it is reissuing models from the historical mould archive and working with contemporary artists and designers, with the ambition of making Digoin a genuine place of creation for ceramics.
Everything is still made at the address in Digoin. The stoneware body – grès de Bourgogne – is mixed in the workshop’s own premises from minerals of French origin, and every piece is formed, dried, glazed and stamped by hand before being fired at 1250 °C. The high firing makes the stoneware dense, frost-proof and odour-neutral, which is why it is as well suited to storing food as to garden pots that stay outside all year round. The design language is simple and functional, and many of the models made today date back to the workshop’s first decades.
Over the years Manufacture de Digoin has worked with Diptyque, Merci and the design school HEAD – Genève, among others, and has been featured in Le Monde, Gault&Millau and Elle Décoration. The workshop opens its doors to visitors from mid-April to the end of September. Read more about how the stoneware is made on the page About the making of Manufacture de Digoin.
