Best known for lighting, Tom Dixon is a luxury design brand that manufactures and sells hundreds of products ranging from furniture and accessories to fragrances and body care products. British designer Tom Dixon founded the brand in 2002 in London, launching Fresh Fat, a collection of extruded plastic products. Tom Dixon's furniture, lamps, fragrances and accessories are currently sold in ninety countries with hubs in London, Milan, Hong Kong, London, Los Angeles, New York, Tokyo and Beijing. The brand employs over one hundred professionals from all over the world.
From self-production to the Tom Dixon brand
Tom Dixon's multi-faceted career brought him to design almost by chance, after his experience in music and advertising. His S Chair from the 1980s was noticed and subsequently produced by Giulio Cappellini. Parallel to his work for Cappellini and his long experience as creative director of Habitat and Artek, Dixon worked in self-production, developing such events as the Great Chair Grab or Great Light Giveaway, eliminating intermediaries. In projects like the Etch lamp, he explored the digital industrial revolution as a new means of production that would allow people to create and produce their own projects - locally and economically. These initiatives were driven by the attempt to overcome and modernise the difficulties of a complex and obsolete distribution system. The natural continuation of this idea could only lead to the creation of his personal design brand. His clear objectives were to balance risk and design ambition with the economics of production and sales; to combine aesthetics with utility and sustainability; to promote durable rather than disposable products; to experiment with advanced technologies and unorthodox materials; and shape objects that could respond to people's needs. The brand's approach is closely linked to the personal history of Tom Dixon himself. The self-taught designer never separated design from production, nor production from marketing, promoting a contemporary version of crafts that responds to market speed and no longer separates the manual from the digital.
Tom Dixon Icons
Today, Tom Dixon is one of Britain's best-known luxury design brands, with over six hundred products in its catalogue, including iconic pieces like the Mirror Ball lamp, a perfectly spherical and fully mirrored lighting object created to disappear into space but which instead became an ultra-visible star; the Copper Shade lamp, an oversized mirrored copper-coloured globe made through a complex injection-blowing technique; Beat Light, sculptural lamps welded, wrought and shaped to reflect a golden light; the Wingback chair with its large, sinuous forms inspired by 17th-century English armchairs; the Fan chairs and tables, a dramatic, sculptural version of a British design classic; and the S-Chair, still produced by Cappellini and now in the permanent collections of the Milan Triennale, the Victoria and Albert Museum in Londa and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 2012, alongside lighting (the brand's core business) and furnishings, Cappellini also launched the Eclectic by Tom Dixon line of home accessories made from resilient materials like copper, aluminium, cast iron and wood. The Mathematician Tool, the Cast Factory Moneybox, the sculptural Cast Shoe, the Form brass tea set and the Bash Vessel in gold-plated brass belong to this collection.
AI Search