Hall porcelain. The company was profitable for many years, reducing the cost of materials to the owning potters, and selling to other firms. Early Mintons porcelain was "decorated in the restrained Regency style", much of it just with edging patterns rather than fully painted scenes, thus keeping prices within the reach of a relatively large section of the middle class. Early porcelain Minton's two sons, Thomas and Herbert, were taken into partnership in 1817, but Thomas went in to the church and was ordained in 1825. Herbert had been working in the business since 1808, when he was 16, initially as a travelling salesman. On his death in 1836, Minton was succeeded by his son Herbert Minton (1793–1858), who took John Boyle as a partner to help him the same year, given the size of the business; by 1842 they had parted company. Herbert developed new production techniques and took the business into new fields, notably including decorative encaustic tile making, through his association with leading architects and designers including Augustus Pugin and, it is said, Prince Albert. Minton entered into partnership with Michael Hollins in 1845 and formed the tile making firm of Minton, Hollins & Company, which was at the forefront of a large newly developing market as suppliers of durable decorative finishes for walls and floors in churches, public buildings, grand palaces and simple domestic houses. The firm exhibited widely at trade exhibitions throughout the world and examples of its exhibition displays are held at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. where the company gained many prestigious contracts including tiled flooring for the United States Capitol. The "encaustic" technique allowed clays of different colours to be used in the same tile, allowing far greater decorative possibilities. Great numbers of new churches and public buildings were given floors in the tiles, and despite the protests of William Morris, many medieval church floors were "updated" with them. Hard white unglazed "statuary porcelain", later called Parian ware due to its resemblance to Parian marble, was first introduced by Spode in the 1840s. It was further developed by Minton who employed John Bell, Hiram Powers and other famous sculptors to produce figures for reproduction. Mintons had already been making some figures in the more demanding medium of biscuit porcelain, and reused some of these moulds in Parian. In the year ended 1842, the sales of the main company Minton & Co