Making a commotion…with technology:

Lighten up, people! That seemed to be the message at Commocean, the high-end product division of Brit designer Richard Hinton’s 14-year-old giftware company. “Funny/funky” is how he describes his whimsical mood lighting, which included a surreal umbrella-shaped “fixture” and a table lamp bedecked with the Pudong skyline. I grilled Richard about the challenges of designing for the Chinese market: “There’s so much copying here,” he sighs. “That’s why I’m targeting commissions like hotels, rather than the retail market; you put a product in a store, and it immediately gets copied.” (He mentioned a notorious Shanghai thoroughfare called something like “Copy Light Street” where vendors unapologetically knock off others’ designs.) So how does he stay outwit the competition? “We change our product over quite fast, and rely heavily on technology—which takes longer to copy.” At the show, for instance, Commocean unveiled a proprietary metal-coating system, Lux, which can be applied to any material, from carved-wood picture frames to MDF—the substrate of this giant gold-bar bench.

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