Pottery Barn
United States-based upscale home furnishing store chain
Pottery Barn is an American upscale home furnishing store chain and e-commerce company, with retail stores in the United States, Canada, Mexico and Australia. Pottery Barn is a wholly owned subsidiary of Williams-Sonoma, Inc.
The company is headquartered in San Francisco, California. Pottery Barn also operates several specialty stores such as Pottery Barn Kids and Pottery Barn Teen. It has three retail catalogues: the traditional Pottery Barn catalogue; Pottery Barn Bed + Bath to focus on its bed and bath lines; and one for outdoor furniture. Pottery Barn paper catalogs were discontinued at the end of 2024.
Early history
The Pottery Barn was co-founded in 1949 by Paul Secon and his brother Morris after Morris's wife purchased some Glidden Pottery pieces at a yard sale in their native Rochester, New York. Morris thought there would be a strong market for the pottery and contacted its founder, Glidden Parker, who told Secon that he had three barns full of second-run pieces in Alfred, New York. Secon agreed to buy 2,500 pieces of stoneware for $2,500 and the brothers drove the inventory to their small rented storefront in Chelsea, Manhattan, which they named the Pottery Barn after Glidden's sheds. After their store was mentioned in a 1952 The New Yorker article the business experienced a rush.
“Pottery Barn” enters the record as united States-based upscale home furnishing store chain. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Pottery, Barn and United can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3400126. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2024, 1949 and 1952.
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This entry incorporates text from “Pottery Barn” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.