Portrait/Interview:
Michael-George Hemus, from Plumen
Michael-George Hemus is one of the founders of Plumen, a company that designs and manufactures low energy lightbulbs that are as attractive to the eye as they are energy efficient. Since their launch in 2010, Plumen has won many prestigious awards for their design and the Plumen 001 is in the permanent collection of both MoMA in NY
and the V&A in London.
I went to meet and photograph Michael-George in the Plumen studio while he spoke
to Anna Stewart.
Let’s start with your role at Plumen, what’s your job here?
I am one of the founders at Plumen, there are two of us, myself and a guy called Nik Roope, and we have a third business partner called Ronnie Renton, who is our chairman. Nik is the creative director and he comes up with the creative ideas, it’s my role to run the company
on a day-to-day basis and bring the overall vision to life.
What’s most surprising to you about what you are doing now as opposed to what you expected when you were first starting out?
When we started out, we very much saw ourselves as designers and manufacturers of light bulbs and while we still focus on that, we quickly realised that we really offer decorative lighting solutions in general. We naively thought that we would make light bulbs and that people will start using them and putting them in different shades and designing around them, and it actually doesn’t work like that. We’ve needed to learn how to present the product in
the right way, so by making pendants that were designed specifically for the bulb, we now understand how these are used in the house and the same with [light] shades.
We’d never sold a light bulb before when we launched it in September 2010 so it was all very new to us. It’s been about getting feedback from stores and retailers and watching people.
All of those things lead you to further thoughts and from there we developed much more into lighting, but with still a large focus on the light source.
In terms of the designers you work with, is there anyone that you would like to work with? How does it happen, are you approaching people or do they come to you?
The way it works is that by the time we are ready to approach someone, we will already have been developing the idea for about a year, a year and a half. We will already have a very fixed idea of the design direction to take. At this point, we think about designers we know and like and whose style would be most suitable for the design challenges of the brief.
For the first bulb we knew we had two repeating forms, that they were going to be organic shapes and that we needed to work in a very tight space. Sam Wilkinson’s work was for perfect for that. Similarly for the second bulb, it was much more sculptural so we needed to work with someone who came from that angle, which is why we worked with Bertrand Clerc.
For us, a lot of the design thinking and technical work has been done already and it’s about getting the right person to help us realise the final form.
Can you say who you are working with in your future project?
We are working with a designer called Claire Norcross, who has designed a lot of lighting projects. She has created some beautiful organic folding shades, that you can see in a lot at the EAT restaurants, and she also created the beautiful ‘Ribbon’ lamp for Habitat.
One of the themes that we talk about a lot on our blog is collaboration and cross-disciplinary collaboration, is that something that is important to you as a company?
Yes definitely. For the third bulb that we are working on, there is a part on which we are working with a jeweller to help us develop the prototypes, and also because jewellers have a particular eye for light and understanding of faceting. And we have worked with lots of people from different areas, when we were producing the Hulger Phones (Plumen’s big-sister company and maker of phones used for Skype) we worked a lot with textile designers, trying to work out the patination for the holes on the mouth-piece of the phone, hence we worked with textile designers that we were sharing an office with at the time.
Obviously, we have worked with glass-blowers a lot and photographers and videographers,
to present the product. It sounds like a really basic, obvious thing but we have worked with engineers from lots of different fields to help us not just with the lighting and electronic side
of the product but with glass, with machinery and they’re not necessarily affiliated with our supplier partner.
What’s next, apart from Plumen 003?
There are other things. We have just launched light shades with made.com and we have also created our own collection, which launched roughly at the same time, called the Drop Top.
We are also looking at the world of Smart Bulbs. The idea is that via the internet of things and smart phones, all the lights in your house, or clusters of lights, can be switched on and off with the touch of a button. It allows opportunities for lighting control, which is a very big area to work with. It is an area we are exploring, and it offers a lot of opportunities for collaboration with technical and hardware experts, which then allows us to propose new approaches.