About Rosanna

I bought my first Limoges porcelain plate when I was five years old.

I don't know what a five-year-old understands about porcelain. But I understood that it was beautiful, and that it mattered. My parents were sales representatives in the gift and dinnerware industry — so beautiful tableware was always part of my world growing up. I grew up knowing that the objects you eat from are not an afterthought.

What I didn't know yet was where that feeling would take me.

Perugia, Italy - studying abroad in the hill towns of Umbria, where everything changed.

Italy

In my early twenties, I went to Italy to study — art history and Italian, in the medieval hill town of Perugia. I wasn't looking for a business idea. I was studying European culture.

Just outside Perugia is a small ceramic town called Deruta. It's been making handpainted pottery for centuries — the same patterns, the same techniques, passed down through families. I wandered into the workshops and couldn't leave. I bought pieces to bring home as gifts. Then I bought more. I kept buying them until I had to figure out how to get them all home.

That was the moment. I didn't know it then. But that was it.

Rome — at the Trevi Fountain. You throw a coin in if you want to come back. I came back.

Rome

Italy gets into your blood differently when you live there. It's not a vacation. You start to understand why Italians argue about olive oil, why Sunday lunch takes three hours, why even an ordinary ceramic bowl deserves to be beautiful. The table is not a decoration. It's where life actually happens.

I came home from that year abroad with a completely different understanding of what I wanted to do — and why it mattered.

Perugia — the city that started it all.

The Long Way Home

After Italy, I returned to Portland and finished my degree — art history and Italian — at Portland State University. Then I went further: graduate school at the University of Oregon, where I taught Italian to undergraduates and earned my master's degree in Italian literature.

I spent years immersed in the language and the culture. What I was really doing, I think, was building the foundation for something I hadn't yet figured out how to build.

At the Italian pottery workshop — with the artisans behind the first Rosanna Inc. collections.

1982

In the summer of 1982, a 20-foot shipping container of Italian ceramics pulled up to my Seattle home.

The driver refused to unload. Not his job, he said. I cried. He caved.

When he left, I discovered packing material stuck to every single piece — all 30,000 of them. So I filled bucket after bucket of water and washed them by hand. That was Rosanna Inc., day one. No salary for three years. A $15,000 loan against my house, packing every order by hand, and more ceramics than I could count.

I wouldn't have had it any other way.

Rosanna Inc. has been many things over forty-plus years — a one-woman trade show operation, a Pottery Barn supplier, a Seattle institution, a global brand. But it has always been the same thing at its core: beautiful objects for the table, designed with the conviction that everyday life deserves to be celebrated.

That's what a five-year-old understood about a Limoges porcelain plate. It took a few decades and a shipping container full of Italian ceramics to figure out what to do with it.

Internationally Acclaimed Brand

With a distinctive signature design aesthetic, Rosanna has won numerous awards and honors in design. The company was honored for “Best New Product for NY NOW’s 2014 Table Top Housewares”, as well as being a 2013-2016 Finalist for NY NOW’s Tabletop Category. Rosanna is also the first American company to win the prestigious Gift of the Year Award in the UK.

Founder Rosanna Bowles is recognized as a leader in the industry and community. O Magazine featured Rosanna Bowles in “Women Who Make Beautiful Things” as well as numerous other features over the years. In June 2016, Rosanna Bowles, along with Seattle’s most enterprising women, graced the cover of Seattle Business Magazine, discussing their trajectories to the top of the competitive, male-dominated business market.

With tableware distributed in more than fifteen countries, Rosanna also works with some of the world’s largest companies, including Starbucks, Nordstrom, Macy’s, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Smithsonian Institute, The National September 11 Memorial & Museum, and The White House Historical Association.

Our Awards

Woman Owned

Award Winning

Giving Back

Brand Recognition

Rosanna has developed proprietary design work for many notable companies.
To purchase her products, you can shop online or find a store near you.