How Your Mug Is Made
How your mug is made.
We are as particular about the object as we are about the picture on it. Here is what that means in practice.
Porcelain, not ceramic
This is the part most mug shops would rather you did not think about, so we will put it first.
Almost every printed mug on the market is stoneware or earthenware — the trade calls it ceramic, and it is the cheaper body. It is fired at a lower temperature, it stays slightly porous, and its ground is a shade of cream or grey rather than white. Ours is fine porcelain, and every mug in the catalogue is, without exception.
Three things follow from that, and you can check all three yourself.
The white is a real white. The picture is printed onto the body of the mug, so the body is the paper. On a cream-grey stoneware ground, whites go dull and light colours turn milky — Dürer’s hare loses the light in its fur, a star chart loses the black of its sky. Porcelain gives an image back the white it was drawn on. For a shop that sells nothing but reproductions of art, that is not a detail. It is the entire product.
It does not take on the drink. Porcelain is vitrified — fired until the body no longer absorbs anything. A porous mug picks up tea and coffee over months and develops a brown shadow inside that no wash removes. Ours looks the same in five years as on the first morning.
You can hear it and feel it. Porcelain is stronger for its thickness, so the wall is thinner and the rim finer at the lip. Tap it and it rings rather than thuds. It is the difference between a cup and a mug, and you notice it within a second of picking one up.
Porcelain costs more to make and is harder to fire. We use it because a reproduction printed on the wrong white is not a reproduction. We tried the other kind once and stopped — that story is in Why We Discontinued the Ceramic Mug, and the full comparison is in The Difference Between a White Porcelain Slim Mug and a Ceramic Mug.
The mug
Fine porcelain, 10 oz — about 295 ml — with a glossy white glaze. Dishwasher and microwave safe. The image is fired into the glaze rather than laid on top of it, so it does not craze, peel or fade in the wash, and the edge of a drawn line stays sharp. Which matters, because most of what we print was drawn with a pen.
Where it is made
We work with a network of certified production houses across Europe, North America and Australia — among others the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Canada and Australia. Your mug is made in the house nearest to your delivery address wherever the network allows.
That is not a logistics detail. It is the reason three things are true: your order arrives in days rather than weeks, it usually never crosses a border and so attracts no customs charges, and the journey behind it is a van rather than a plane.
Every house works to one specification — the same porcelain, the same colour profile, the same placement geometry. A mug made in Ohio and the same mug made in Bavaria are the same object.
Nothing is made before you order it
There is no warehouse and no stock. A mug exists because someone asked for it. No overproduction, no pallets written off at the end of a season — and it is why the catalogue can follow the art rather than follow whatever happens to be sitting in a container.
The Masterpiece Guarantee
Free replacement. If a mug arrives damaged or defective, send a photo to info@tazzarte.com within 30 days of delivery and we send a replacement at no cost.
No return shipment. You keep the damaged one, or dispose of it locally. Shipping a broken mug back across a continent helps nobody and costs the planet a second journey.
Your statutory rights are untouched. This guarantee is in addition to consumer protection law in the EU, the UK and elsewhere, not instead of it.
Why replacement rather than return
A returned mug cannot be resold and will not be repaired. Sending it back would mean a second parcel, a second journey and a longer wait for you, to recover an object that ends up in the same place either way. So we skip that step: you get a new mug faster, and we carry the cost of the one that failed. It is the correct incentive — it makes it our problem to ensure it does not happen twice.
Our commitment
Every mug carries a work chosen by hand and reproduced with care, on a body chosen so that the reproduction is worth having. The picture is the point; the porcelain exists to keep the picture in your hand every morning for years. Both parts have to be right.