INTERNATIONALLY-RENOWNED pottery firm Lorna Bailey Artware is closing down with the loss of seven jobs.

For more than 13 years, co-founder and sole designer Lorna Bailey has been one of the highest-profile ceramic artists working in the city.

The former Stoke-on-Trent College student’s Art Deco-inspired pieces have prompted comparisons with Clarice Cliff, but now the 30-year-old has decided to retire to spend more time with her family.

She said: “It has been a very difficult decision to make, but it is important for me personally to concentrate on my family.

“I would just like to say thank you to all of the people of Stoke-on-Trent for all of their support.”

The doors of the Wedgwood Street plant in Burslem will be closed by the end of March when current orders have been fulfilled, and seven jobs will go.

The company has written to about 200 Lorna Bailey Collectors Club members informing them of the closure.

Mrs Bailey said: “I have said to the club members that I have no ambition to do this again.

“Maybe I will do something totally different, but I have no plans and I’ve not even thought about it.

“Over the past 13 years a lot of things have made me proud, like being named North Staffordshire And South Cheshire Businesswoman Of The Year in 1998.

“I also received an honorary doctorate from Staffordshire University and I have been admitted as a Fellow Of The Royal Society Of Arts.”

Mrs Bailey’s father, Lionel Bailey, aged 59, is production director at the firm, which has an annual turnover of £300,000.

He said: “We have informed the staff and there will be seven redundancies in all. We had the last Collectors Club sale on Saturday. They were queuing down the street and round the corner and we sold out. But this is the problem when you build the business around a name – when that name has gone, do you have a business? We looked at other designers in the area, but the kind of money they want you couldn’t pass on to the customer. It’s very sad.”

Lorna Bailey Artware has an annual turnover of about £300,000.

It was set up in 1995 when Mrs Bailey was a design student at Stoke-on-Trent College.

Burslem South councillor Ted Owen said: “She has been a model of young entrepreneurship for art, and it will be a sad loss to the industry and to Burslem itself.”