By 1889, he had moved his business to Zanesville and by 1895 had turned to producing fancier wares, influenced by the success of the art potteries around him. By 1905, his plant employed over 500 people and shipped an astonishing three railroad cars of pottery per day! In 10 years, Weller had become the largest maker of art pottery in the world.
In 1893, Weller traveled to Chicago's Columbian Exposition, where he first encountered Laura Fry's Rookwood, Lonhuda, and others. He was also exposed to new art nouveau stylings and the associated incorporation of nature themes into art pottery. Weller foresaw that mass production of molded pottery in fanciful styles could be more profitable than the hand-made art pottery of Rookwood and Lonhuda.
Weller became acquainted with Lonhuda's founder, William Long. Long and Weller joined forces in Zanesville and began joint production, but the partnership was not to last. Weller nevertheless continued making pottery in the style of Lonhuda, and he renamed his line Louwelsa which was an aggregation of 'lou" (his daughter Louise), "wel" (Weller), and "sa" (Sam's initials). Louwelsa was an immediate market success.
The early successes of Weller art pottery centered on portraiture of American Indians, animals and characters from popular Dickens novels. This line came to be known as Dickensware, and is characterized by a high-gloss glaze over dark tones with cream and ivory skin tones in the portraits. Other successful lines followed, as Weller pursued the goal of combining relatively high-quality artistic design with more efficient and less costly manufacturing processes. His ability to focus the company's energies in these two disparate directions made Weller a very profitable firm, while maintaining a reputation for innovation. In 1904, at the St. Louis Exposition, Weller set up a working pottery for the public's view, and exhibited what was then the world's largest vase, a 7-foot tall Aurelian masterpiece. (See Maine Antique Digest, August 1997.)
Although many potteries scaled back production during WWI, Weller continued innovating with both the production process and new design and glaze techniques, and remained profitable. Many of Weller's most popular designs were embossed into the molds, with polychrome glazes, resembling hand-built and decorated art pottery but actually mass-produced. Often influenced by competitors' best selling lines, Weller followed Roseville's popular lines with their own, and today it is often difficult to distinguish between them.
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