Ian Yang saw a business opportunity sitting on the table of a restaurant.
In the darkness of the room, a small portable light meant to make it easier to read a menu jumped out to him as just the kind of product his lighting company, Gantri, should be making. The challenge was that these common restaurant lights are all wireless. “They’re very dim, they’re very small, they’re not really fully fledged, like residential full-power products,” Yang says. But, he thought, they could be.
That instinct led to three new wireless lighting product lines being released this week by Gantri, alongside a new digital manufacturing platform that will make it easier for other designers to create their own take on the wireless light.
Designed in collaboration with the design studio Ammunition, the three product lines are the first wireless lights to use Gantri’s Helia system, a modular approach to the components inside a wireless light. Also designed by Ammunition, this system consists of a battery, customizable LED modules, a touch-sensitive control, and a charging puck. The guts of the system can be tucked inside almost any shell a designer can imagine.
“All these components get assembled into a 3D printed enclosure, and everything is routed where it needs to be,” says Achille Biteau, director of industrial design at Ammunition. “It simplifies things a lot because all of a sudden you have that same platform that can be used on a range of designs. It could be in the hundreds or the thousands of designs.”
Gantri and Ammunition have worked together since about 2018, and first started thinking about wireless lighting design three years ago. “We were just talking a lot about mobility and portable lighting and this idea that, well, people are very used to mobile things and charging has become just part of lifestyle,” says Robert Brunner, founding partner of Ammunition.
Lighting, on the other hand, has been stubbornly stuck in place, tethered by a cord or wired directly into walls and ceilings. “What if you allowed lighting to go where you need it, and then take the friction out of the idea of having to maintain and charge these things in a way you normally don’t do with lighting,” says Brunner. “As we dove into it more and more, it became more compelling as a product concept.”
Ammunition’s design team started prototyping, and eventually came up with the modular Helia system that can be slotted into the kinds of 3D printed designs Gantri has specialized in for the past decade. To stress test the concept, Ammunition developed 10 lamps in three product lines that show the flexibility of the system, from task lamps to reading lamps to a taller floor lamp to, yes, a restaurant-style tabletop lamp for reading menus in the dark.
One key element of the system is how the wireless lights get their charge. Rather than relying on USB-C or other plug-in formats, Ammunition used a pin-based contact approach that allows for the battery part of the Helia system to be placed directly on top of a small puck-shaped charging interface, like putting a glass on a coaster. With up to 10 hours of battery life, the idea is that a lamp could be moved around the house throughout a day or evening before settling back into its charging place overnight.
The Helia system is being made available to other designers through Gantri Made, its newly launched digital manufacturing platform, where the specs for the system can be integrated into new designs that Gantri can manufacture on behalf of their designers. “It creates this sort of very flexible, fluid, and unique platform for people to create around,” says Brunner. “A lot of the preliminary work’s done.”
Gantri Made charges designers a flat fee for using the service, and takes a cut from every sale.
For many small designers, the cost may be worth it. Using Gantri’s established manufacturing approach, new designs can quickly translate into products. “The time from conception to having an actual product is of course dramatically less,” Brunner says. “So now you can literally turn out lights in a few months rather than spending a year.”
“The whole purpose of Gantri as a company is really all about making design relevant to every person and helping designers and design brands realize their ideas,” says Yang. “In order for that to happen, we need a lot of product innovation, we need a lot of different types of design ideas that can be created and manifested in a very short amount of time at minimal cost.”