The Next Wave
Piero Gandini | Flos

The first wave of “Made in Italy” saw a fantastic generation of Italian designers creating products for our companies. Italian companies are still in the forefront. But the designers come from all over the world, with Italian companies managing the process through their own creativity and industrial capacity. In our Kelvin LED lamp, for example, we didn’t try to retrofit new technology to an existing product. We decided to run with the tiger, to find the best function and aesthetic for that new technology. Like most of our industry, we’re small and family owned. The same group makes decisions all along the way. This concentration of power—along with a very talented, sophisticated workforce—gives us great flexibility. We don’t have a market-research department. We’re not a market-oriented company. We’re a product-oriented company. The business today is more complicated and in-tense than it was 20 or 30 years ago. Decisions have more immediate consequences, and we no longer have the chance to repair our mistakes. But companies like ours are good at just a few things: they are rich in ideas, and they are brave enough to run with those ideas in a way that might seem crazy to a larger and more compartmentalized company. And in the end, the difference between crazy and brave is the result.