While we always do our best when working with a prospective customer who is trying to match and expand their existing majolica collection, we often find it very difficult to help.

What many people do not realize is that there are hundreds of majolica factories in Italy, some of whom have been producing majolica for over 50 years!

Take a dinner plate as an example; with many different sizes, shapes, and rim treatments (we ourselves now carry five different variations of dinner plates), combined with the number of possible suppliers, then complicated by regional variations in design execution–you can see that the disparity in the execution of the traditional patterns can be mind-boggling!

Additionally, much of the older majolica is painted with lead paint (our dinnerware is lead-free) and therefore not only constitutes possible health concerns, but is difficult to match exactly.

Our first priority when trying to match majolica is to try to match our own products, shipment after shipment, and year after year.

What do we mean by this? Because we have been selling the classic Deruta patterns since 1995, we have shipped literally thousands of items to our American customers. It is therefore very important to us to be able to match and ship as “exactly” as possible (the custom nature of our products means no two items are ever 100% alike), an object that we may have shipped to one of our valued customers several years ago. As a first-time Deruta Imports.com customer, this policy could become important to you if you wish to add to a collection, replace broken items in the future, or send a gift.

Lastly, probably the best and simplest way to maximize the chances that your majolica dinnerware pieces match each other closely is to buy it all together, at the same time. This strategy will maximize the chances that all your pieces were produced in the same lot, by the same artist, thus minimizing some variation from piece to piece. And as Deruta Imports.com provides a 10% discount for orders over $250 there is a financial incentive to follow this strategy as well.