Forty-Two Years On The Same Street

How it started

The original business was repair: re-lamping, re-wiring and re-lensing fixtures for houses around Lyon and Saint-Étienne. Manufacturing came four years later and for the same reason repairs had — a lens the founders needed did not exist, so they made one.

That order of events explains a great deal about the company. A firm that begins by repairing other people's fixtures designs its own to be repairable.

The catalogue stays small

Fifteen fixtures across six series is a short list by industry standards, and it is a deliberate one. Every fixture we add is a fixture we must hold parts for until 2046 or later. A catalogue of sixty models would make the twenty-year guarantee an empty promise, and that guarantee is the main reason houses choose us.

The people

Sixty-two staff: nine in the lens workshop, eighteen in metal and paint, twenty on assembly benches, four in the photometric room and on test, five in repair, and the rest in the office and the drawing room. The average time served is eleven years, which in optical polishing is roughly how long it takes for someone to become genuinely good.

What we turn down

• Moving heads. Asked for constantly. It is a different engineering discipline with a different service model, and doing it badly would damage what we do well.
• Sealed, unserviceable fixtures. A luminaire that cannot be opened by a crew with a screwdriver is not something we will put our name on.
• Rush orders that displace framework commitments. A house that agreed a four-year framework gets its year-three delivery on time, even when a larger order arrives.
• Specification-matching on price alone. If a competitor's fixture is right for the room, we will say so. It happens perhaps twice a year and it is always remembered.

Standards work

Two of our engineers sit on national and European committees covering luminaire safety and photometric reporting. Useful to clients mainly because when a specification cites a clause, someone here has usually argued about that clause in a meeting.

Where the name comes from

Augustin-Jean Fresnel worked out the stepped lens for lighthouses in the 1820s. Every fresnel spotlight in every theatre in the world is a descendant of a French lighthouse lens, which the founders considered a reasonable thing to name a Lyon company after.