Buyer Education
Why Boutique Beats Ubiquitous: Annamis vs. the Big Tableware Brands
Walk into a restaurant in Athens, a hotel in Frankfurt, a diner in Ohio, and turn a plate over. There is a decent chance you will find a Churchill or Steelite mark underneath. Both have been making tableware in Stoke-on-Trent for over a century, and both are built to supply hospitality at global scale — that scale is the whole point of their business, and it is worth naming plainly, because it is also the thing they cannot offer a restaurant that wants to look and feel different from the place next door.
Ubiquity Has a Cost
There is nothing wrong with a plate that has proven itself across thousands of kitchens. But that same proof is what makes it common. If your dining room is built around a distinct identity, a plate your guest has already seen at three other restaurants this month works against you, not for you.
We are a boutique supplier, and we intend to stay one. For at least the next five years, we are not chasing the scale Churchill and Steelite operate at. We handpick the projects we take on, and every client gets a dedicated team rather than an account number.
| Churchill & Steelite | Annamis | |
|---|---|---|
| Scale | Core manufacturing in Stoke-on-Trent, with warehouses and distribution reaching hospitality chains worldwide | Small batch, handcrafted in Vietnam |
| Where you will see it | The same collections across thousands of restaurants and hotels globally | A limited number of handpicked projects — never mass-distributed |
| Customization | Standard collections, selected from a fixed catalogue | Bespoke shapes and finishes developed with each client |
| Relationship | Catalogue and account-rep based | A dedicated team, with samples shipped from our UK, EU, or Vietnam warehouses, and face-to-face visits when it counts |
| Reach | Global, by scale | Global, by design — despite being small, we supply and support anywhere in the world |
| Price | Category benchmark for mass hospitality tableware | Very competitive on many items, sometimes higher on large pieces, where handcrafted kiln production is harder to run without loss |
Premium, Handcrafted, and Still Affordable
Being small does not mean being expensive. On many items we are well below normal market prices. On some larger pieces we can run higher, because handcrafted production in the kiln is less forgiving at scale — bigger items are more prone to breaking during firing, and that difficulty shows up in the price. Handcrafted does not have to mean a luxury markup — it means the piece was made by a person, not a production line, at a price a working restaurant can plan around.
Annamis has two tiers to suit different budgets: our porcelain core range, handcrafted in Hanoi in the north of Vietnam, and a more affordable stoneware line, made in Saigon in the south, for restaurants that want the same design sensibility at a lower price point.
Shapes You Won't Find Anywhere Else
Because our shapes and finishes are developed with individual clients rather than pulled from a shared catalogue, they don't turn up on someone else's table. What Manor Row or the Glenroyal Hotel choose with us stays theirs.
Vipeso: New Shapes, Made to Order
When a chef designs a dish that no existing plate suits, we can make the plate. Through Vipeso, our custom-mold service, we develop entirely new shapes from a chef's own sketches or imagination — built for one specific menu item, not adapted from a shape we already had.
We produce these in small batches of 150–200 units, enough for a working kitchen without the tooling commitment of a mass-manufactured run. It is the kind of shape you will not find in anyone else's catalogue, because it did not exist until your chef asked for it.
Small, on Purpose
Being small is also what lets us be fast and flexible: no minimum order queues behind a factory schedule, no waiting for a rep to escalate a custom request. We can ship a handpicked sample set, fly to a kitchen, or host a chef at our own studio — whichever gets a restaurant to the right decision.
Ubiquitous has its place. So does being the plate no one else has.
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