Every antique mall has some Azalea china, by Noritake. It’s a popular collectible, and I’d always heard that it was originally a premium from a tea company.
Doing a bit of research, I found that the “tea” company was the Larkin Soap Company of Buffalo, NY. Although they started out as a soap company, they did eventually sell tea and coffee, as well as spices, soup, and eventually, almost everything for the home!
Larkin was a powerful force, with a thriving premium plan that gave rewards for buying and selling their products, and one of the most popular premiums was china.
And probably the most popular china they gave out was Azalea. Made by Noritake of Japan, the pattern was described as “unbelievably dainty” in the Larkin catalog.
With the years, what was a freebie has become a sought-after collectible, neither so expensive as to interest Sotheby’s, nor so cheap as to be found at garage sales. In the comfortable middle range, you can replace a dinner plate for $25.00 or less, but a jam jar with lid and ladle might set you back $180.00.
In fact, this was probably part of the original appeal of the china, also. You could get almost anything as a Larkin premium, but china had a sort of luxurious affordability. You might not want to save up long enough to get a sofa, but you could get china in pieces, as you saved premium points, and wind up with a smaller or larger set, depending on how long you worked at it. And if by some chance you didn’t care for it, you hadn’t wasted huge amounts of time saving up.
You could buy your china either for cash, or for premiums gathered by spending roughly twice as much on Larkin products. So you could start out, say, with a set of six teacups and saucers, after you’d spent $4.00 on soap. If you liked them, you could get another six for $2.00, or continue to buy soap, or tea, until you gathered a complete set.
If you were really gung-ho, you could start a “Larkin Club” – sort of a predecessor of Avon and Tupperware. You got ten people together, and every month the ten of you sent in a $10.00 order. Perhaps no one could afford to spend $10.00 a month on Larkin products, but ten of you together could, and share the premiums, plus extra for the “secretary” who started the club and kept records.
Here’s a wild guess: I’d bet there were a lot of husbands who thought fancy china was a waste of money. This was a way to get the china without having to fit it in the household budget. You might be fooling yourself about the prices (you could get the soap and things cheaper without the premiums), but it was a way to buy a little at a time, without going into debt and without having to make multiple trips to a city store.
It’s pleasant, now, to think of the pleasure many women had in gradually accumulating the plates and cups, vegetable dishes and platters, that that we treasure, too.
