The designers Marc Sadler and Alessandro Vecchiato met on a vaporetto in Venice in the late nineties and thought about the future.

With Carlo Urbinati, Vecchiato had founded the Foscarini company in Murano a few years earlier, which initially mainly offered lamps made of glass.

Sadler, who lived in nearby Asolo at the time, specialized in sporting goods and sportswear.

This resulted in his in-depth knowledge of plastics and their material properties.

Vecchiato told him that his glass products must be expensive.

Regardless of whether it is a prototype or a mass-produced object: every hand-blown glass is a unique, handcrafted item.

For Foscarini, Sadler should now design an object made of a different material.

However, the craftsmanship and individual malleability of the material should be related to glass.

At the same time, it should at least partially be able to be processed industrially.

Marc Sadler is primarily interested in products in the undecorated raw state.

In the case of sporting goods in particular, their structure differs greatly from the end product, which is colored in further operations and provided with dynamic symbols and brand emblems.

What counts are shape, quality and innovation

When Sadler realized a tennis racket in Taiwan - soon after the encounter in Venice - he had a raw product that was “mythical” for him. To check the manufacturing quality, he held the glass and carbon fiber racket up to the light. He noticed the shimmering effect of the material and said to himself: "Oh, there is my lamp!" Sadler brought fiberglass samples with him to Venice. But the material has special challenges. As light and stable as it is, there are narrow limits to its deformation and processing.

An experimental approach was necessary, which also had to include experienced manufacturers.

The designer knew from experience: If you want to manufacture a competitive product from a carbon and fiberglass composite, you usually have to purchase large quantities of material.

This is not a problem in the sports segment.

There are large numbers of items, manufactured in Asia and then sold all over the world.

It is different in the upscale furnishing segment.

Subsequent decoration, lettering or loud marketing do not play a role there.

The only things that count are shape, quality and sometimes innovation.

So how do you proceed?

Design requires "people who act together"

Foscarini follows the publisher principle. Instead of setting up and running our own production facility, we work with suitable suppliers for each project, preferably from the region. This enables the greatest flexibility and increases the versatility of the entire portfolio. After a long search with many rejections, an accomplished company was finally found in Faps in Fiume Veneto, which helped develop the Mite lamp and still produces it today. Faps specializes in composite materials and manufactures corresponding products and components for bicycle construction, fishing and sailing - always with the highest demands on performance.

Composite materials have also penetrated the interior design sector since the late 1990s.

Faps boss Maurizio Onofri was enthusiastic about the project, which also meant new territory for him.

Today a fiberglass mat is first stretched and cut to size on a metal cylinder called a calender.

In the next step, a yarn made of either black carbon fiber or golden-yellow Kevlar is machine-wound around the fiberglass.

Both plastics are then baked together in large ovens, creating a self-supporting lighting fixture.

Design, says Marc Sadler, needs “people who act together”.

Living is about calming down

While Onofri chose a particularly fine thread to wrap around the body of the lights, Sadler was enthusiastic about a thread that was less regular. It corresponded more closely to the uniqueness of the craft, linked to the basic idea that was once developed on the vaporetto and was ultimately used. Extensive series of tests with many prototypes ultimately led to a result in which the luminaire itself is also its diffuser for the first time. In order to achieve something new, says Sadler, a “maximum degree of irrationality” is necessary during the development process, so that the possibilities of material and technology can be optimally exploited.

Nevertheless, the rationality of the brand is required, which recaptures this process economically and leads to a marketable product. This is still a hallmark of Italian design: the interaction of designer, brand and producer who jointly open up new paths, away from existing conventions, and often celebrate surprising successes in the process. The designer, says Sadler, is not a “superhero who delivers everything turnkey”, he needs teammates and opponents: “A continuous challenge in which you find problems and solve them together.”

When he talked to journalist Laura Traldi about the development process of the Mite lamp that was more than 20 years ago in the Foscarini showroom during the Milan Design Week, he distinguished the design world of sport, which initially shaped him, from the sphere of lamps and furniture.

While a certain loudness is required in sports, living is more about calming down.

Hardly on the market, the Mite floor lamp received the coveted Italian design prize “Compasso d'Oro” (“golden circle”), awarded by the ADI design association, which was given with a certain reluctance.

On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the award