The Trent and Mersey was Wedgwood's idea as much as anyone's. He had pushed for the canal in the 1760s, knowing that pottery was heavy and that road transport across the Midlands shattered as much as it carried. The new site at Ridgehouse Estate sat directly on the canal's route. Wedgwood built his house, Etruria Hall, on one bank, and the factory directly across the water on the other. Pickford's design for the works was unusually systematic for its time: long parallel ranges of brick buildings with separate sections for each stage of production. Wedgwood ran the factory by division of labour, breaking each pot's making into specialised hands. Workers were timed and supervised. Quality was uniform. It was the first time anyone had built a pottery factory as something resembling a modern industrial plant, and the way Wedgwood organised his workforce later became the subject of a famous 1961 study by the economic historian Neil McKendrick.

When Hamilton's collection was published, the term Etruscan covered most painted pottery from ancient Italy. Wedgwood absorbed every plate. He was drawn especially to the red-on-black figure painting and to the matte black stoneware of what we now recognise as Greek vases. His most authentically Etruscan-inspired body, the Black Basaltes that came on the market in 1768, did imitate the genuinely Etruscan bucchero pottery: black, burnished, unglazed, fired in a reducing atmosphere where closed vents starved the flames of oxygen and drew the colour deep into the clay. The colour was darkened further by adding manganese. Out of this body Wedgwood and his designer John Flaxman produced vases, plaques, and busts that found buyers from London to Saint Petersburg. Catherine the Great commissioned a vast Wedgwood dinner service. Some of Flaxman's designs are still in production.

It is Jasperware, more than anything else, that the Etruria Works is remembered for: the matte-finished pale blue (or sage green, or lilac) stoneware decorated with white classical reliefs in low relief, instantly recognisable as Wedgwood from the moment a tourist sees the first cameo brooch. Jasperware was Wedgwood's most original contribution to ceramic chemistry. He spent years perfecting the body, experimenting with thousands of small trials, finally arriving at a stoneware that could be coloured throughout rather than just on the surface and that took crisp, almost paper-thin applied decoration. The Victoria and Albert Museum holds a Jasperware vase and cover made at Etruria around 1790 (V&A no. 2416-1901) that shows what the works could produce at its peak. Wedgwood was selling neoclassicism to a Europe newly obsessed with the antique.

The works ran for 180 years, but the ground underneath them turned out to be a problem. Stoke-on-Trent sits on coal seams that were heavily mined through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and by the 1930s the Etruria site was suffering visible mining subsidence. J.B. Priestley, passing through on the journey that became English Journey (1934), wrote a description of Etruria already going quiet. The company built a new factory at Barlaston, some miles south on the same canal, between 1938 and 1940, and moved production there. Most of the old Etruria Works was demolished through the rest of the twentieth century. One structure survives as a listed building. From 1986 to 2013 the local newspaper The Sentinel was based on part of the cleared site, printing not just its own pages but the northern editions of the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday. The factory that gave its name to a whole district of Stoke is gone. The district kept the name.