The ceramic containers were heavy and expensive to ship, so stoneware potteries cropped up everywhere to serve local markets.
But after 1913, when refrigerators were introduced, the once-ubiquitous potteries sputtered and failed.
You could say, refrigerators had a chilling effect on the stoneware business.
Today's refrigerator is, of course, the smartphone, as this week's Mobile World Congress makes clear.
And, as the event makes clear, the business without a mobile strategy today is the stoneware pottery of tomorrow.
As ad agency exec Rishad Tobaccowala says, "The future doe not fit in the containers of the past."
What's your mobile strategy?
