April Hershberger is not the only collector of Le Creuset cookware who owns so many pieces that she can’t count them. But she may be the only one who built an entire house around one: the deep-red, 9-quart oval Dutch oven she received as a gift for her 2006 wedding.

It sparked an obsession.

She had her kitchen stove, the centerpiece of her home in a restored barn in southeastern Pennsylvania, custom-made to match her collection of Le Creuset cherry-red pots, baking dishes, pitchers, plates and more. Hershberger, 42, also has pieces in mustard yellow and sunflower yellow, Mediterranean blue and Caribbean blue, forest green and lime green, which she frequently arranges and rearranges into stripes, swirls and rainbows, documenting it all on Instagram.

“I could never commit to one color,” she said.

Like Hermès and Chanel, Le Creuset (luh cruh-SAY, according to the official video, meaning French for crucible) is a Gallic legacy brand that has flourished in the modern global marketplace by becoming collectible while also remaining functional. And collectors have turned what was once a niche brand into a near-cult, perpetually entranced by new lines, colors and shapes.

Some stick to a color family, such as pastels; others focus on a single item across the spectrum, such as trivets or pie birds.

“As an Aries, fire and flames speak to me,” said Arlene Robillard, a purist who has one of the world’s largest collections of the company’s original color: Volcanique, an orange-red ombre sold in the United States as Flame.

Last week, to celebrate its 100th anniversary, Le Creuset released its latest color, Flamme Dorée (golden flame). It’s close to the original hue, with a gold shimmer added, like expensive makeup or a shot of Goldschläger. Months ago, a sighting of the new hue at an unspecified Williams Sonoma store sent the Le Creuset Lovers group on Facebook, which has 97,000 members, into a frenzy of speculation.

“I have a good relationship with the staff and one showed me a DO in the new sparkle flame!” an anonymous member posted. (DO is the collectors’ shorthand for Dutch oven.)

Before Le Creuset, most cookware came in shades of gray, black and brown. But in 1925, two Belgian entrepreneurs — one an expert in cast iron, the other in vitreous enamel, made of heat-fired glass — built a foundry in the industrial northeastern corner of France to deploy their new technology: coating cast iron with colorful enamel. (The enameled cast-iron pots are all still made in the foundry, but other cookware and tableware are produced in Portugal, Thailand, China and elsewhere.)

Their Le Creuset pots quickly caught on in Europe thanks to their bright colors, durability and kitchen performance. The cookware began trickling into the United States in the 1950s, but sales swelled in this century as new items were introduced, making it clear that fans can be tempted into buying far more cookware than they actually need.

By expanding the company’s color palette from basics into pastels, neons and neutrals, and expanding the line from cookware into tableware, utensils and storage, Le Creuset has become a kitchen marketing powerhouse, with 90 stores in North America. (In 1988, five years after the first U.S. store opened, the company was bought from French owners by Paul van Zuydam, a South African entrepreneur who pushed for the new strategy. Since the company is privately held, its revenues are not made public.)

The company has produced collaborations with artists such as Sheila Bridges, using her black Harlem Toile de Jouy pattern, and with brands such as “Star Wars,” “Harry Potter” and Hello Kitty. (The United States is its largest market, and Japan is not far behind.) It has also staged strategic drops of limited-run items including a black heart-shaped Dutch oven that sells out as soon as it reappears, then shows up on resale sites such as Etsy and eBay.

After baker Jim Lahey’s recipe for no-knead bread baked in a Dutch oven went viral in the early 2000s (and reemerged during the pandemic), Le Creuset produced a dedicated bread oven in 2022 that has become its most popular new piece in decades, said Sara Whitaker, a director of U.S. marketing for the company.

Pop-up factory sales, like a three-day event held last week in San Jose, California, generate huge lines and feverish social media posts, especially among buyers of VIP tickets that come with the opportunity to buy a $50 “mystery box” that can be opened only after exiting the sale. Each box contains at least $350 (but sometimes up to $1,000) worth of overstocked and discontinued merchandise, and fans film suspenseful unboxing videos in the parking lots to post on TikTok.

Outside the factory sales and outlet stores, the pots can be very expensive: Retail prices go up to $750 for the biggest, a Dutch oven called the “goose pot,” large enough to roast a 15-pound bird.

Last month, when Netflix debuted a new lifestyle show starring Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, among the many reasons some viewers called her “unrelatable” were the white Le Creuset pots she used. Her cookware was singled out as being too expensive and too pristine, a criticism that some Black women said was based in racist and dated assumptions. Many of them, such as Sharzaè Cameron of Atlanta, made a point of showing off their collections on social media.

“We have had these for years now — this isn’t new,” said Cameron, 42, citing wedding registries, outlet stores and holiday gifts as opportunities to build a collection. (In an interview at her home last month, Meghan said it was absurd that anyone would think that modern Black women use only traditional cast-iron skillets.) Culinary historian, cooking teacher and retired podcast host Lynne Rossetto Kasper, 82, said she started using the pots as soon as they arrived in the United States, because their weight made it possible to deeply brown ingredients without scorching and to cook at a low simmer.

“Finding something that you could braise in or build a slow saute and get the right kind of fond wasn’t easy,” she said, because even top American-made cookware, such as Farberware, was mostly lightweight aluminum. Two of her well-used Le Creuset Dutch ovens will be up for sale next week in an auction of her culinary collection, but, she said, “they are only a few of the many that have passed through my life.” Robillard, the Flame collector, has well over 1,000 pieces in the original color, including rarities like a 1955 Tostador, a kind of George Foreman Grill prototype by Raymond Loewy, the French American industrial designer who also created the original Coca-Cola can, the Barcalounger and the Shell logo.

Robillard, 73, has a contact in the Netherlands who scours flea markets for her and a dedicated room in her home in Apopka, Florida, for the collection, stored on industrial shelving that has to be bolted to the walls to support its weight.

Factory sales and new pieces hold no interest; her current fixation is a vintage sangria pitcher that she once spotted on a resale site in South America. “The hunt is always fun.”