We are enormous fans of all things David Mellor, and the company’s heritage needs little introduction – how were you introduced to Monno and what attracted you to working with us?

We were introduced to Monno Ceramics by the late shape designer Martin Hunt. Martin had been working with Monno for some time and thought they might be a good fit for manufacturing our modern designs. We subsequently visited Monno’s stand at Ambiente Frankfurt where the relationship began. We always develop our designs with a long term aim and were please to find a company with a long tradition of manufacturing ceramics, particularly fine bone china, the material we were interested in developing our own range in.

Why did you decide to develop you own line of tableware (how does this echo the company’s ethos?) and how do you feel it has benefited your brand and helped to grow the business?

David Mellor is world famous for our cutlery and it seemed a logical step to expand the remit of our designs to cover related tabletop products. Over the last two decades we’ve been working with specialist manufacturers internationally to develop ceramics, glass, woodware and most recently a range of stainless steel tableware. David Mellor fine bone china was one of the first ranges of products we developed and is probably our most successful.

What is your favourite part of the design process?

I love all aspects of the design process; from the initial sketch, rapid prototype models, receiving the first samples, and perhaps the most exciting part which is receiving delivery of the finished production. For me as a designer and retailer the design process actually goes as far as to how the products are displayed in our shops.

David Mellor’s cutlery is popular both at home and in restaurants worldwide – have you also promoted your tableware to the Hospitality market.

We’ve only recently started offering our complete range of tableware designs, including the fine bone china, to the Hospitality market. We’ve successfully supplied a small number of high end restaurants and hope to grow this to a similar level to our Hospitality cutlery sales in future.

Do you have a favourite piece in the collection/what is the most popular item in the collection?

My favourite collection is our recent range of Deco tableware with my favourite piece being the Aqua Blue plate. This is the first time we have used decoration on any of our pieces and wanted to achieve a subtle but distinctive timeless design. The most popular pieces in our range are by far the British Standard Mugs – so popular that other designers have copied the idea of using these iconic British Standard Colour System colours.

What can we expect to see from David Mellor in the future, do you have any exciting developments you can share a glimpse of with us?

We’re continuously developing new products across our ranges and have a new cutlery design reaching its final stages. We have also developed a new range of British Standard Espresso Mugs which are currently in production at the Monno factory.