If your first vase order arrives and the customer fills one with water, you find out in the worst way that “ceramic vase” covers two different products: decorative vases that are glazed for looks, and vessels that are actually watertight. The difference is a few dollars in tooling and a firing step most factories never mention. Here is what to specify before you order vases by the container.
What Importers Actually Order
The trade splits into four shapes: bud vases at 120-180 mm tall, table vases at 200-280 mm, floor vases at 350-450 mm, and wall-mount or hanging vessels at 100-150 mm. Body weights run from about 400 g for a bud vase to 1,500-2,400 g for anything above 350 mm, because the wall has to thicken as the form grows or the firing warps it. Mouth diameter matters more than height for retail: a 60-80 mm mouth displays single stems, 90-120 mm takes a bouquet. Buyers who order by height alone and ignore mouth diameter routinely get a vase that photographs badly, which is the entire product for this category.Watertight or Not: The Question to Ask First
Decorative and functional are two different specs. A decorative vase is glazed on the visible surfaces and often left raw inside, weighs 15-20% less, costs less to fire, and will seep water through the base within a day. A watertight vase needs full interior glaze or a slipped interior, a fired base rim flat enough to sit level, and a leak test. Ask for the leak test specification in words: we fill each piece with water for 24 hours before packing on any vase sold as functional. That single sentence separates a supplier who understands the category from one who is quoting a shape.Glaze, Firing and the Colour Drift Problem
Most vases sell on finish, and the finishes that sell best are the ones that drift most between batches. Reactive and speckled glazes are fired at 1,180-1,280C in a gas kiln, where the reduction atmosphere shifts shade from the top of the kiln to the bottom. Ask what Delta E the factory holds between batches; anything above 1.5 is obvious when two shipments sit on the same shelf, and in a decorative category that is a return, not a shrug. Matte and crackle finishes hide drift better but stain if the piece is used with water, so matte plus functional is a combination worth avoiding unless the interior is fully glazed.Packing: Where Vase Programmes Lose Their Margin
Tall forms pack badly. A 280 mm vase typically ships 6 pieces to a master carton of about 320 × 320 × 330 mm, or 0.034 CBM, with foam or moulded pulp separators. Drop that to a single-wall carton with paper interleaving and the breakage rate on LCL cargo runs 5-10%, because a vase is a lever: the height amplifies any side impact. A 20GP takes around 28 CBM of usable volume, which means roughly 820 cartons — about 4,900 vases at 6 per carton. Floor vases at 450 mm drop that to about 2,400 pieces per container, and that number, not the FOB price, is what decides your landed cost per unit.Cost Bands and Tooling
FOB pricing for 2026 sits roughly at $1.80-3.20 for bud and table vases in a plain glaze, $3.50-6.50 for reactive or hand-decorated finishes, and $6.00-12.00 for floor vases above 400 mm with a textured finish. A new shape requires a working mould at $300-900 plus a sample cycle of 10-15 days, and most factories set MOQ at 500 pieces per shape per finish. If your range is four shapes in three glazes, expect the factory to treat that as twelve SKUs, not four: MOQ applies per combination, and that is the number buyers forget when they plan a twelve-piece collection.Where Vase Orders Actually Go Wrong
First, ordering decorative spec and selling it as functional, which produces leaks and refunds within the first month. Second, accepting “handmade” as an excuse for a ±5% height spread: handmade means a reactive surface, not dimensions that let a retail box not close. Third, skipping the base check, where a 0.5 mm bow in the fired base makes a tall vase wobble and the customer returns it. Fourth, colour drift across reorders, which is invisible in the sample and obvious in a shop display. All four are solved by writing the four specs — interior glaze, base flatness, height tolerance and Delta E — into the PO before the deposit.Sell the Finish, Spec the Function
Vases are a finish-driven product with a functional failure mode, which is exactly the combination that produces returns. Decide whether the piece is decorative or watertight, write height tolerance and Delta E into the order, and budget for proper separators rather than trusting a single-wall carton. Our vase range runs from bud to floor scale in reactive and matte glazes, or send us the shape you need and we will quote tooling and MOQ separately.