[1] The Workshop was "dedicated to the artistic production of utilitarian items in a wide range of media, including metalwork, leatherwork, bookbinding, woodworking, ceramics, postcards and graphic art, and jewelry.

From the start, the Secession had placed special emphasis on the applied arts, and its 1900 exhibition surveying the work of contemporary European design workshops prompted the young architect Josef Hoffmann and his artist friend Koloman Moser to consider establishing a similar enterprise.

[4][2] Finally in 1903, with backing from the industrialist Fritz Wärndorfer, the Wiener Werkstätte began operations in three small rooms; it soon expanded to fill a three-story building with separate, specially designed facilities for metalwork, leatherwork, bookbinding, furniture and a paint shop.

The range of product lines also included leather goods, enamel, jewellery, textiles, millinery fashion, lace, postcards and ceramics.

[2] The Workshop "derived inspiration from the rich tradition of the glorious past" with fine workmanship and high attention to detail, hearkening back to a more civilized, and secure, time.

Some of the earliest productions of the fashion workshop were artists smocks for Klimt and sculptor Anton Hanack[4] Josef Hoffman wrote in a 1928 retrospective on the 25th anniversary of the Workshop that: "The Wiener Werkstatte...is an undertaking that furthers and nurtures all artistic and qualitative endeavors in the field of modern craftsmanship....Our main achievement has been to give practical and appropriate forms to all objects and then to make these unique and valuable through pleasing proportions and harmonious shapes.

The circle of customers of the Wiener Werkstatte and Josef Hoffmann mainly consisted of artists and Jewish upper middle class supporters of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

In architectural commissions such as the Sanatorium Purkersdorf and the Stoclet Palace in Brussels, the Wiener Werkstätte was able to realize its ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk (total artwork), a coordinated environment in which everything down to the last detail was consciously designed as an integral part of the whole project.

After a close brush with bankruptcy in 1913, Wärndorfer left for America and the following year Otto Primavesi, a banker from Moravia, took over as chief financier and patron.

"[9] Attempts to expand the workshop's scope—adding such items as wallpaper to its limited program of industrial licenses, and establishing branches in Berlin, New York and Zurich—were not particularly successful.