Rosanna Bowles

The holiday season is a magical time for many, and Rosanna Bowles is no exception. This internationally-acclaimed tableware designer delights in sharing long-held traditions with family and friends.

Her Seattle-based tableware and gift company, Rosanna Inc., encourages just that – it provides the backdrop for shared meals, festive gatherings and happy moments…moments as grand as a holiday party or as simple as sharing a cup of tea with a neighbor.

When you learn about Rosanna’s life, its direction seems almost inevitable.

Baby Rosanna with her mother and two sisters

Her parents ran a gift and tableware company in her hometown of Portland. Rosanna’s own passion for dishes began at age five when she first started collecting fine china. “Every summer, we’d go antiquing on the Oregon Coast and I was allowed to pick one piece of Limoges for my collection.”

The love of a well-set table took an even firmer hold on her while spending a year as a teen studying in Perugia, Italy – a hub of ceramics production. There she became proficient in the language, and later earned her Master’s Degree in Italian Language and Literature from the University of Oregon.

After finishing her Master’s, Rosanna was struggling to find a career path that would combine her love of Italian literature and the fine arts. She went to a fair where she took a class on how to be an entrepreneur.

Inspiration struck – she decided to import Italian ceramics. She wrote a business plan, took out a $15,000 loan using her house as collateral and, in 1982, she started her one-woman home-based tableware design company.

Rosanna began by traveling to Perugia, Italy and worked with local artisans to develop ceramics based on her own designs. “When I sat with the artists and painted with them, I had a sensibility and a knowledge for the craft,” she remembers. But she is the first to admit she hadn’t yet mastered the operations end of the business.

There’s the now oft-told tale of how a 20-foot container filled with her first order of hand-painted Italian ceramics pulled up to her 1920s bungalow in Seattle and the driver informed her she had to unload the goods herself.

“I started to cry,” admits Rosanna. “Oh, all right, lady,” the driver said and helped her unload the crates. “Just don't tell anybody.” But a bigger surprise awaited when Rosanna unpacked the boxes to discover wet wooden shavings stuck to 10,000 pieces of tableware. “It was like an I Love Lucy episode with me washing mountains of shavings off thousands of plates,” she recalls.

Her first order was to Meier & Frank, where she worked while in college – before serendipitously stumbling onto a nascent coffeehouse operation called Starbucks. They were just starting to grow and had hired Howard Schultz as merchandise manager. Rosanna took her suitcase with her samples wrapped in newspaper and showed them to Howard. He wiped out her entire inventory with one order.

For the first five years, Rosanna relied on a roster of specialty stores, working her way west to east, growing one store at a time. Her “big break” came in 1988, when Pottery Barn placed a major order. Since then, Rosanna products have appeared in stores and gift shops around the world. More than three decades and millions of dishes later, Rosanna has emerged as an innovative leader in the homewares industry.

Rosanna is proud to think that her products may play a part in her customers’ traditions. Since the time she was young, Rosanna has felt a connection between tradition and tableware. “My mother taught me about traditions and how dishes play a big part in our lives.”

Rosanna Bowles’ book, “Coming Home: A Seasonal Guide to Creating Family Traditions,” shares a year-round plan for establishing traditions and making memories that will restore home to its central place in family life. And because the table is where family and beloved friends most often come together, she provides more than fifty favorite recipes for season’s character.

Rosanna is a strong believer in tradition and ritual, which she is passing down to her daughters, Alessandra and Francesca. This photo was taken years ago at the Oregon coast, which has been host to many family celebrations

She describes the value of tradition in her book, Coming Home: A Seasonal Guide to Creating Family Traditions. “When I was growing up, our family life revolved around traditions and rituals passed down through the generations. The values my sisters and I learned were based on life lessons that our parents, grandparents and neighborhood friends learned during their lives.” And she is passing down these same lessons to her own two daughters, Alessandra, 28, and Francesca, 19.

But she sees these traditions as falling away in today’s hectic world, and wrote her book to help others recapture family traditions throughout the year and to “take pleasure in life’s small moments of happiness.”

Reflecting those small pleasures has led Rosanna’s company to grow into a veritable empire of tableware, décor, handbags and gifts that are sold around the globe. Rosanna Inc. is known for its lines of “fashion tableware” with products that can be mixed and mingled. Twice yearly, Rosanna launches her new collections of festive porcelain dishes, plates, glassware and trays, as well as ornaments, textiles and other “giftables.”

Rosanna and her company have been featured in Oprah Winfrey magazines, the New York Times, Vogue, Better Homes and Gardens, Bon Appetit, Sunset and many others. Earlier this year, Rosanna graced the cover of Seattle Business Magazine along with other top Seattle business women.

She has also received many awards. In 2005, Rosanna Inc. became the first American company to win the prestigious Gift of the Year Award in the U.K. “It is the gift industry’s equivalent of an Oscar!”

Earlier this year, Rosanna was chosen as the lead designer to create a historic collection of memorabilia for the influential White House Historical Association. “The White House Historical Association, founded by Jackie Kennedy in 1961, approached the company to design for them after seeing Rosanna product at the 9/11 Memorial Museum in New York,” says Rosanna. “It was a very exciting surprise and huge honor for us. We created product that honored past presidents and first ladies, as well as a 3D ornament of the White House, complete with a little flag on top.”

Despite Rosanne’s many successes, home and family remain at the center of her heart. Her motto could well be: savor life, create traditions and cherish family.

“Growing up, I felt abundantly loved by my parents and two sisters. To this day, their love inspires me to infuse every Rosanna product we design with that feeling. As an entrepreneur, I'm also proud to be a role model for my two daughters. I feel that through my career I've been able to show them that they, too, can achieve any and all of their dreams.”

MORE INFORMATION

The Rosanna Inc. outlet store is located at 6755 East Marginal Way South in Seattle, and is open Fridays from noon to 4pm. The annual Warehouse Sale is December 3, 2016 from 9am to 2pm – find specials on everything from current collections to one-of-a-kind pieces from their archives. For more information about the outlet store, call 206-264-7882 or email outlet@rosannainc.com.

You can also find Rosanna products at stores around the world, including local retailers such as Macy's, Starbucks, Nordstrom and many more. Enter your zip code into Rosanna’s location finder to discover the many places to shop for Rosanna products: www.rosannainc.com/locations/

Rosanna offers these holiday entertaining tips:

• A key savvy tip for entertaining for the holidays is to keep things simple. Do what you do best and don't do things outside of your comfort zone. Use your go-to recipes. Decorate the home simply; candles are fabulous. Greenery is great. Basic dishes with decorated salad plates to change it up. Express who you are in the way you decorate and entertain.

• Take and tweak something you can do. My mother made 12 kinds of cookies at Christmas. I can’t do that. I make two.

• Four elements of a good party include enlightening conversation, fascinating people, great food and plenty of it, good wine and an interesting venue.

• What Rosanna appreciates in a party host: Someone who makes you feel welcome and introduces you to other guests.