Reflections on London Design Week

We’ve just about recovered from a hectic and wonderfully exciting London Design Festival week.

Exhibiting at Design Junction marked our first trade show on home turf. Over the past two years we’ve exhibited at Maison et Objet (Paris), Light and Building (Frankfurt), LFI (San Diego), and ICFF (New York). So having our fifth exhibition in our hometown was a very special occasion and the perfect setting to launch our new Voronoi collection.

London Design Festival is MASSIVE. Comprised of four different shows (100 percent design, Tent, Design Junction, and Clerkenwell Design) and almost every design company doing in house events all over London, it is a huge event.

For those of you who’ve followed Tala for a while, you probably know by now how important conservation is to us. The Voronoi collection’s design is truly inspired by nature, celebrating our ethos of “conservation through beauty”. These hand blown bulbs take shape from the naturally occurring mathematical Voronoi pattern. You can recognise the shape from a giraffe’s coat, a turtle’s shell, and also in the organisation of trees within a canopy. The inner filament design is taken from the Italian mathematician Fibonacci’s golden spiral. The spiral of light within the organically shaped Voronoi glass creates a unique reflection of light within the bulb.

Our installation at Design Junction revolved completely around this Voronoi pattern. Set in the iconic Granary Square location home to Central St Martins, with 15m high vaulted ceilings and natural light pouring in, we finally had the perfect setting to realise our ambitious installation designs. The whole Tala team (plus a few extra saviours) poured blood, sweat, and tears (literally) into constructing an 8m high structure representing a forest canopy, from which we hung our new pendants and sparkling bulbs, along with copious amounts of vines.

Exhibiting in the entrance/registration area was a great opportunity for us to engage with members of the public – our end consumers with whom we normally only engage through our retailers. A highlight for families was our interactive “touch my bulb” display where our lightbulbs became a soundscape of nature sounds, demonstrating the “touchability” of our zero-heat bulbs.

A local trade show also meant that we could throw a big launch party to celebrate our success with friends and families. In collaboration with our German pals at Sygns and hosted by our old home at the Collective Temperance, we all got the chance to let down our hair to some groovy tunes.

A big thanks to everyone that made the week so memorable, we met some amazing people and we’re feeling very proud to call ourselves a British design company!

Big love,
The Tala Team