A consortium led by Thomas R. Wedgwood, a direct descendant of the 18th-century industrialist who founded the Stoke-on-Trent ceramics maker, is mounting an “all or nothing” bid to buy back the family company.

The proposed deal, expected to be tendered early this week and understood to be backed by financing from the Middle East, could lead to the Wedgwood brand ending its 22-year merger with Waterford Crystal.

The bid, under which members of the founding family would run Wedgwood as an independent, high-end brand, is designed to scupper a series of other offers that have been made for all or part of Waterford Wedgwood, the debt-laden group that was put into administration this month. Other bids may emerge this week for the Waterford part of the business.

Last week KPS Capital, an American fund, emerged as the most likely buyer of the whole group: a life-raft for Wedgwood in the short-term, perhaps, but one that left the Wedgwood family “ignited with worry” for British jobs and the long-term future of the brand.

Thomas Wedgwood, the last family member to work for the company. and until last week its Asia director, told The Times that the KPS bid was fraught with the risk that KPS would take the same view of the business as the previous owners and see Asia more as a cheap manufacturing base than as a sophisticated, wealthy customer base. That strategy, he said, had failed for other ceramics makers and was “a one-way route to oblivion”.

“Speaking as the last Wedgwood in the company, I know it's now or never, or a great British brand is going to be extinct within a couple of years,” he said, adding that Wedgwood's 250th anniversary would be its most triumphant or the most dismal year in its long history. “The Wedgwoods are not the kind of family that will let that happen, and Britain should not be the kind of country that lets its best brands die so cheaply.”

While the company's collapse might seem like the perfect opportunity to wrestle back control and revive its fortunes independently of Waterford, the odds against him are substantial. Mr Wedgwood dismisses the analysis of the company's collapse, which perceives Wedgwood as no longer relevant in a changing world with shifting demographics. It missed the point, he said, and ignored the “glaringly obvious” potential in Asia.

“The business logic that has driven Wedgwood, as part of Waterford Wedgwood, over the last ten years has been crazy. Everyone has been fretting about the question of how a company like ours is going to compete with cheaper foreign imports. That question alone is killing us. The question should be: ‘Who the hell wants to compete with cheaper imports?'”

Mr Wedgwood, with other family members, wants to engineer the managerial independence of Wedgwood and bring it back under the control of people who believe that they are running a luxury goods brand and are not making tableware for supermarkets.

“Whoever is running this company has to behave like they are running a luxury brand: dictating tastes and making ourselves just inaccessible enough to be aspirational. The overwhelming mistake that our previous owners made was that we just produced way, way too much stuff.”

The second battlefront involves a seismic shift in attitudes towards Asian markets - a move that, Mr Wedgwood insisted, fundamentally depends on keeping manufacturing in the UK and reversing the transfer of production to Indonesia.

At present 37 per cent of Wedgwood sales are generated in Asia: Mr Wedgwood believes that, freed from the shackles of Waterford, the company should set itself a target of nearer to 60 per cent.

He emphasised the value of the Made in England reputation for sales in Asia: “ These are lucrative, growing markets with huge potential, where the customers care very deeply that they are buying something that came out of a kiln in Stoke-on-Trent.”

A marine biologist, Mr Wedgwood was busy filming manta rays in Hawaii in 1991 and joined the company that year only in answer to a “help wanted” sign at a franchise store in Honolulu. The company was no longer under family control and he worked his way up from the factory floor.

What would Josiah, the founder, have made of the prospects for his business in the present economic climate? “He'd relish the challenge,” Mr Wedgwood said. “I think that a sense of permanency is going to come back into people's decisions about what they own. If there is one good thing about this terrible economy, it is that the world might finally shake itself out of the madness of constantly replacing one bit of rubbish with another.”

Final break in family chain

In his pocket during Thomas R.Wedgwood's interview with The Times was the resignation letter making him the very last Wedgwood to leave the family firm. Handing it over, he said, was a “shattering” moment.

It broke a chain of family association with the firm that has continued - with occasional gaps here and there - for 250 years. It was Wedgwood's wealth that allowed Charles Darwin, the founder's grandson, to pursue his research and his company which briefly employed the poet William Blake as an engraver.

At the top of that chain is the imposing figure of Josiah Wedgwood - the potter, scientist and industrialist who created one of the world's first luxury brands in 1759 and with it a device for measuring the heat inside ovens. Royal families of Europe were demanding his stuff long before it became the staple of wedding lists and golden wedding anniversaries.

The transformational moment was when the company became the first British pottery to perfectly imitate bone china of the sort that was being shipped over in vast quantities from the Far East to keep up with Britain's then burgeoning taste for tea.

Times Recommends

• Lies and cover-up at MG Rover exposed by report
• High oil prices push manufacturing costs up
• Primark founder steps down as chief executive