Household Hints
The Dish Detectives Track Down Hard-to-Find China
By
Sep 13, 2005, 22:51

(ARA) – Is the set of dishes you inherited from your Grandmother missing a gravy boat? Or perhaps a plate from your wedding china was broken last Thanksgiving. Maybe you lost an entire place setting during your last move. Trying to track down those missing pieces can be aggravating and time consuming, especially if the china pattern is no longer made.
Freya Shaffer knows that frustration all too well. She spent an amazing 41 years looking for dishes from her wedding set. “My kids love my dishes and I wanted to pass a complete set of eight place settings on to both of my daughters,” says Shaffer. Little did she know how difficult tracking down the dishes would prove to be.

Shaffer, who lives in Johnstown, Penn., estimates that she has scoured antique stores and malls in 25 to 30 states looking for her dishes, “We’re retired, and our kids live all around the country, so we travel a lot,” she says. But despite her best efforts, Shaffer never came across any of the dishes she was searching for.

On one of her scouting trips, an antique dealer suggested Shaffer contact Replacements , Ltd., a company that specializes in locating hard to find tableware. Shaffer was skeptical until she logged on to www.replacements.com and almost immediately found her pattern.

“We have over 10 million pieces in stock,” says Replacements, Ltd. spokesperson Liam Sullivan. “It is like Christmas every day around here because we are locating pieces of history for families they thought were lost forever.”

The company uses a network of Dish Detectives to search missing pieces. “It’s like a giant scavenger hunt,” said Sullivan. “We take your request and put our team to work.”

Shaffer has just about completed one full set of dishes and is working on the second. She buys pieces as they become available and appreciates the e-mails she gets from Replacements whenever a new piece of her pattern is in stock.

Customers who are searching for a specific pattern can simply call (800) REPLACE (737-5223) or visit the company’s Web site, where they’ll find over 200,000 digital images that make it easy for people to identify their china. “If they know the manufacturer and the name of the pattern, that makes it really easy,” says Sullivan.

However, the experts at Replacements can also research china using a photo or a photocopy of the front and back of a dinner plate. “We have the world’s largest inventory of china, crystal, and silver so if uncle Fred dropped a fork down the garbage disposal or you dropped a piece of you wedding crystal we can help you out. We replace the irreplaceable,” says Sullivan.

In addition to looking for pieces from her wedding set, Shaffer has also turned to Replacements for help collecting pieces from her mother’s china pattern as well as completing sets of Seneca glasses to pass on to her sons. She and her husband purchased the glasses originally in West Virginia in the 1960s. Before discovering Replacements, they even took a trip back to West Virginia to see if they could purchase glasses from the original manufacturer, who was no longer in business. Shaffer also helped a friend find a piece she was looking for through Replacements.

Although she enjoys the thrill of the hunt, and still visits antique stores on her travels, Shaffer is glad to know that she can rely on Replacements to help find the pieces she needs.

For more information, or to find your china pattern, contact Replacements at (800) REPLACE (737-5223) or visit www.replacements.com.

Courtesy of ARA Content

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