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Magis Design
Magis is the brand that has given a novel twist to domestic design, building its identity on incorporating leading edge technology into mass production.
Founded in 1976 in the bustling north eastern corner of Italy by a newcomer to the furniture business, Eugenio Perazza, Magis is today a giant international design laboratory that constantly puts itself to the test, seeking technological sophistication and employing a highly diversified workforce.
Magis seizes the day. It embraces the creativity of leading global designers (Richard Sapper, Jasper Morrison, Stefano Giovannoni, Marc Newson, James Irvine, Konstantin Grcic, Ron Arad, the Bouroullecs and many others)and channels it towards objects perched on the cutting edge.
The company even earned kudos from the trendsetter’s bible, Wallpaper, which placed Perazza on top of its list of “Ten who will change the way we live”.
The company catalogue is heterogeneous, often divided into technology families entrusted with a clearcut strategy to different designers. Magis’ pace setting reinterpretation of mundane household plastic articles is a case in point: “Step” (1984) is a folding stepladder designed by Andries and Hiroko van Onck. “Bombo” (1997) is Stefano Giovannoni’s playful bar stool – a product that reaped massive revenues for the company.
Magis is a Factory-free organization: in order to enhance the flexibility of its R&D activities, the company opted to outsource its manufacturing and relies on a local area teeming with skilled contractors.
For example, the “Air-Chair” (2000) by Jasper Morrison combines deceivingly simple design with a sophisticated gas-assisted injection moulding process. “Chair_One” (2003) is a die-cast aluminium chair_cum_frame_cum_skeleton born of the talent of Konstantin Grcic, a design that propels the brand towards new manufacturing goals, and decrees “the end of the dictatorship of plastic”. One of the latest additions to the company’s classic collections is a new line called “Fuoritema”, which forms a creative bridge into new worlds, such as products for pets; Michael Young “Magis Dog House” (2002) is an example. The challenge lying ahead of Magis is perhaps that of returning to simplicity, through the complexity of advanced technology.
In 2004 Magis also launched a new collection of objects and furniture for children between two and six years old, called Me Too Collection. Nine designers for twenty-some objects. It’s not a scale reduction of the adult world. It’s more of an intermediate station, emotive equipment that stimulates the little ones’ perceptions and helps them to take stock of what the adult dimension will be like. It’s a token of love and an intelligent welcome to the smiles of tomorrow.
Me Too: I’m here too and I deserve my place among everything else.
Behind it all is an idea born from Eugenio Perazza’s impassioned curiosity, and also from careful research. Because you can play with children, but you can’t fool them. A project needs its rules too, and Me Too’s were dictated by the experience of pedagogue Edward Melhuish, the Londoner who participated from the start in the definition of the themes and who subsequently evaluated each proposal, approving only those that carried positive and educational values.
Magis and plastic
Magis is 30 years old. Until a short while ago Magis was one of the few companies that manufactured objects in plastic. Today the number has increased considerably. Still, Magis uses the most advanced moulding technologies and techniques; it was the first company in the world to apply air moulding to aesthetical goods.
Plastic will remain Magis’ reference material, although it is now experimenting with others such as die-cast aluminium, aluminium metal sheet and wood.
Magis’s good qualities
Magis is a company in perfect health because it has good projects to develop as well as good intellectual capital, which is the distinguishing feature of the company. Excellent designers, a good design team and an extraordinary supply chain. Magis is characterised by the multiplicity of its expressive languages, its search for a deep meaning of the project, and its ethics instead of aesthetics.
Magis takes three/four years to turn the idea of a project into a finished product. Magis faces projects, both difficult and complex, taking high risks. Projects are completed as long as they are supported by a high spirit of experimentation and elevated technical cleverness.
Magis and designers
Magis works with very well-known designers, but it has always been open to work with young designers, even at the outset of their careers. Jean-Marie Massaud and Jerszy Seymour made their debut on the design scene thanks to the opportunities Magis gave them. Now Magis discovers new passions and punctually chases former design glories, adding them to the mix. There was the interlude with Charlotte Perriand, and new design chapters are being written with Robin Day, a genius of English design, Eero Aarnio, a genius of Finnish design and Pierre Paulin, a genius of French design.
Copies and imitations
It is the price to pay for success. To reduce the possibility to be copied the entrance barrier needs to be elevated greatly. One will have to do complex projects with inventive loftiness and considerable engineering investments, and make moulds and equipment with high technical performance (technique is the ability of a company to make technology work). A qualitative distribution should too play an important role against copies selecting design-oriented companies and keeping me-too-oriented ones out.
1976. Magis was founded.
1984. was the year of the ladder called Step, a project by Andries and Hiroko van Onck. It was snubbed when it first came out, because the furniture store circuit was not a place for ladders; they were supposed to be sold in hardware stores. Then things went the way they did, and Step met with enormous success, especially in furniture stores. It was the first product to light Magis’ fire – with regards to design as well as cash flow. In twenty years a million of them have been produced. It is super-imitated, and by high-lineage companies, too.
1994. was the year of Bottle, Jasper Morrison’s first project for Magis, an object that gave lustre to Magis by our being awarded an enormous number of design prizes and earning a place in the permanent collections of many contemporary art museums, such as the MoMa of New York and the Victoria and Albert Museum of London.
1994. was also the year of the Lyra stool by Design Group Italia. Lyra did not receive the Compasso D’Oro or any other design awards, nor did it become part of the permanent collection of any museums, but it passed the most stringent test of all with flying colours: sales proclaimed it Magis’ longest-lived bestseller.
1996. was the year of Stefano Giovannoni’s Bombo, an extraordinary commercial success of international dimensions, and still going strong. Today Bombo is an icon; it created a style. It is super-copied and super-imitated. But Bombo remains Bombo. Its copies are another story, a different chapter, and it is not a chapter about creativity and design.
2000. was the year of Air-Chair by Jasper Morrison, a technologically advanced product, and the first single-shell chair in the world to be conceived in air moulding. It will doubtlessly be one of tomorrow’s classics.
2001. was the year of Magis Dog House by Michael Young. A success. But not so much from a commercial point of view as from a media coverage point of view. The attention Magis Dog House received was overwhelming and came from all directions.
2003. was the year of Chair_One by Konstantin Grcic. A hugely innovative project. It is an example of modern use of die-cast aluminium. Its design is left more to the void than to the solid, resulting in the most product with the least material. Excellent critical and commercial acclaim.
2004. was the year of Me Too, a collection of objects and furniture for children between two and six years old. Me Too was conducted and managed by designers that think with the mind of a child.
2005. was the year of the Striped family by the Bouroullec brothers, in transparent polyamide, but it was the year also for Déjà-vu stool by Naoto Fukasawa, in polished die-cast aluminium. Both of the projects prove the constant research in different materials and shapes.
2006. Magis has presented twenty-one new products at the Milan Furniture Fair, perhaps the best annual harvest that Magis has ever reaped in its 30-year existence, concluding a three-year design cycle. Of these, the chair “First” by Stefano Giovannoni needs to be mentioned. Chair First’s name comes from it being the first example of a chair made by air moulding in which the emptying of the frame is not simply applied to the volumes with a small tubular section, but throughout the extensive and complex volumes of the chair and its backrest.
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