Description

On a cold December morning in 1895, Harald Bing – director of the renowned Danish Bing & Grøndahl porcelain house – ordered his astonished workers to destroy the mould for a small blue-and-white plate produced to commemorate Christmas, so ensuring that the price for the plate would naturally increase should demand exceed supply. The piece, entitled ‘Behind The Frozen Window’, has been revered ever since as the world’s very first limited edition collector plate, and Bing unwittingly coined the popular phrase ‘breaking the mould’. Despite the concept of the limited edition plate being developed toward the end of the 19th century in Scandinavia and Europe, it took 50 years further for the plate-trading market to evolve. As the popularity of limited edition plate trading increased across the globe, the need for an organised market became apparent. This necessity led to the birth in 1973 of the famed plate exchange facilitator and collectables company, The Bradford Exchange, founded by the entrepreneurial J. Roderick MacArthur. The Bradford Exchange’s pioneering mission to locate the finest collectable plates from around the world and deliver news of them directly to the homes of collectors proved incredibly successful – so much so that today The Bradford Exchange has developed into an international company to satisfy the intense demand from individual national markets.