Three people and a garage in Ersboda.
Ljusverk was registered in March 2019 by a designer who was tired of tooling costs and an engineer who had built a printer tall enough to be useful. Marit joined in 2021 and the material stopped being an off-the-shelf compromise.
Elin Sundqvist
b. 1988, Skellefteå
Umeå Institute of Design, 2014. Four years drawing shades for a manufacturer that would not let her change the tooling, because tooling costs 400 000 kronor and a shape has to sell 6 000 units before it earns it back. Left when she realised a printer has no tooling to change, and that the first SPIRA cost eleven kronor of material to get wrong.
Jonas Vikström
b. 1984, Umeå
Eleven years in forestry-machine control systems, which is a field where a bug is a 24-tonne object in the wrong place. Built the first STAV over the winter of 2018 in a garage in Ersboda, because nothing on the market would print 1 100 mm tall and nothing on the market was meant to run for fourteen hours without a single retraction. Machine 01 is still in the row and has printed 1 906 shades.
Marit Öhrn
b. 1991, Vilhelmina
Wood chemistry at Umeå universitet, then eight years in a Norrland pulp mill's R&D lab looking for something to do with the fines. The spruce fraction is hers: 22 % microfibrillated cellulose, which is enough to scatter the light and not enough to block the nozzle. She will tell you the second number took two years.
What happened, in order
- 2018
The garage
Jonas builds the first delta over a winter. It is 1 100 mm tall because that is the height of the garage door minus the frame.
- 2019
Registered
Elin leaves the manufacturer. The first RIMFROST is printed in March and sold to a shop on Storgatan in April for 1 400 kronor, which was less than it cost to make.
- 2020
Four machines, a basement in Teg
The year everybody was at home looking at their own ceiling turns out to be a good year to sell lamps.
- 2021
Marit, and the spruce
The first cellulose-loaded batch blocks nine nozzles in a week. The second one, eleven months later, does not.
- 2022
Torkhuset
The sawmill's drying shed at Sävar, empty since 2009. Sixteen machines by December.
- 2024
KRONA
Twelve shades, three tiers, and the first thing we make that needs a drawing to assemble. Also the first contract order: forty of them, over a restaurant in Oslo.
- 2026
Now
38 machines, 14 people, 34 stockists, and 1 940 kg of shade back through the granulator.
We would rather be exact about six things than vague about sixty.
There is no configurator here with four hundred permutations, no seasonal colour, no collaboration and no journal. There are ten forms, five grades and a dimmer, and every number on this site is computed from the object rather than written by somebody in marketing.
What we will not do: sell a sealed luminaire, print a shade thinner than 0.8 mm to save forty minutes, put a light source in something you cannot change, or tell you a bio-polymer is compostable in a way that means anything in a Swedish municipality. It is recyclable, by us, and that is a smaller and truer claim.