It has been a long time since Nob and Dick were alive and Eek and Ruijgrok had regular dinners with the Frozen Fountain to discuss business between the companies and, above all, to maintain our friendship. There was always plenty to discuss. I can remember Cok trying to get me to design certain things. Often another table or chair, or something we were already selling a lot of. I didn’t think that made sense, because one more table selling well meant selling another design less. So I told them I was going to focus more on lighting. We had very little lighting, so hardly any sales there either. Dick made a somewhat disparaging comment that we’d better keep it that way, because my lamps were certainly not that great. We had the tie lamps and a metal table lamp. Both quite intelligent and beautiful designs, but sales never really materialised. By the way, Dick was never vicious and always positive about what we were all doing, so I wasn’t offended, but went on to design lamps regardless.
We bought a huge amount of punch nibbling tools at an auction for the punching machine we had and got another machine to go with it. The cost of repairing that machine was disastrous, but in the end we had two machines and lots of tools. I came up with the “hand folded lamps” so we could use the maximum capacity of the punching machines and not need the folding machine, and the “mesh lamp” which was conceived entirely around the shape of the punching tool (lasering this lamp would be exponentially more expensive).
For the ceramics workshop where we needed more products, I first came up with the “one mould lamp” where we could make a wall, desk, standing and stand-alone lamp with one mould. Ceramics turned out to be a fine material for lamps and as I was sketching a bit, I figured out that the simplest lamp does not yet exist and the small ceramic lamp saw the light of day. For our own showroom, we had previously made an extremely simple aluminium spotlight after a trade where we had received lots of LED spotlights. These could also be in brass or copper. For several projects, in the absence of decent simple systems, we also made our own lighting rails from which the spotlights and lamps could hang. For the master bedroom in the mill in Mavaleix, I wanted to make shiny strip lights for the ridge. So the stripe lamp also became a reality! More recently, the Goevaerts family (owner of a huge old Philips industrial estate next door) gave us a large quantity of glass and a glass sawing machine from what was once the Philips glass laboratory. We made a whole series of sawn glass lamps, the chandeliers of which turned out to be very sought-after. Fortunately, the old glass is still available. All in all, this created a complete collection of lighting! Sales and turnover rose considerably.
We are not a lighting brand and we present my lighting designs at the Salone in Milan and during DDW together with furniture and objects. With that, we reach our existing target group and customers, but not the architects and lighting experts who apply lighting.
If we are not interested in a particular thing, it is to be at even more trade shows.
Arno, Dennis and Erwin of the company VanMokum, with which we developed and marketed watches, have a lighting branch that they sell all over the world. They are real sales tigers that we always enjoy working with! The Piet Hein Eek lighting will therefore henceforth be produced and marketed by VanMokum as an independent brand. Surely it would be fantastic if, thanks to Dick’s remark, we finally achieve a huge sales success!
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