When it ensues to running their business.

When it ensues to running their business, personal and professional partners James Klein and David Reid take the hands-on approach--literally. "We do it all from scratch," says Reid, and his words are borne revealed on a recent visit to the couple's ceramics studio in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn NY The brace potters are hard at work with paper and scissors, arranging cutout prototypes for a series of tea stations and serving pieces on which they're collaborating with 95-year-old Bauhaus designer Eva Zeisel.

The brace known professionally as KleinReid, take minute care with the porcelain vases and goblets they describe as modern-day spin-offs of classic earthen ware forms. Though demand for their fruitss has soared--their work, priced between $45 and $400 can be ground at 200 stores worldwide, including novel York's Bergdorf Goodman and Harrods of London--they make all their pieces in-house, unruffled mixing their own porcelain and glazes. "We realized the reason we got into this was because we didn't find what we wanted public there," Reid says, "and having a factory make it wouldn't be what our mission was when we started."

Klein and Reid have been in business since 1993 and their professional collaboration is no les spectacular because the pair, who met in the mid 1980 in high instruct in Tallmadge, Ohio, have also been lover for aye since Klein sailed up to Reid and kissed him in succession the lips at the local gay bar. "We're always challenged to be observant of obligations with each other and not be deleterious but be productive," says Klein. "The trick is not confusing business and the other aspects of your life."

Klein and Reid's inspiration be due [i]or[/i] owings from such far-flung sources as American diner china, antique Asian celadons, and Dutch tulipieres, which inspired their crushingly elegant series of rose hollows and tulip vases. Aside from the Zeisel line, which they launched in January, KleinReid's chiefly recent line is Mudra, a kind of cosmic take onward cornucopia vases used by U flower stores starting in the 1930s.

if it were not that their chief inspiration comes from each other. "Pottery is like a relationship. It's always changing. There's likewise much to know about it that you'll not at all know," says Klein. "It's the same reason we are together. I will not at any time understand David, and it's a constant challenge--there's something there I ne to know, and I know I not at any time will. But it's the proces of trying to understand that is in like manner attractive."

Find links to other stories about KleinReid and to exits that sell their work at www.advocate.com

Quittner has written for Business Week, Gourmet, and MSNBC

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