House of MiCha

... Light relief

Breaking away from the constraints of the ad industry, Les Télécréateurs executive producer Arno Moria and narrative artists Olivier Kuntzel and Florence Deygas have started their own business making and selling luxury, limited-edition lamps. The trio shed light on the Micha project to Joe Lancaster.

When the going gets tough, some people get angry, some people give up and some people do something about it. It was on a trip back to Paris after another maddening pitch to an agency in Amsterdam recently when Arno Moria, executive producer at Paris-based Les Télécréateurs, and long-time friends Olivier Kuntzel and Florence Deygas reached breaking point. “We were discussing all the frustrations of working in advertising,” says Moria. “You have more or less no control. You can propose, but other people dispose of your ideas. It’s very difficult to achieve something completely creative. We all work for clients and in the end we’re all hired guns.”

Kuntzel and Deygas are narrative artists who have worked on myriad projects ranging from music videos for Carla Bruni to movie titles for Steven Spielberg (Catch Me If You Can) since they formed a partnership, called Kuntzel+Deygas, in 1990. On the trip in question, Moria recalled a prototype of a lamp the couple had designed and shown at an exhibition the previous year. He suggested that the trio start their own business, manufacturing and selling the lamps, retaining complete control throughout the process. “We all said that, before criticising and having grand ideas about many things, before reorganising the whole world, let’s start with ourselves,” he explains.

The lamps are based on a drawing of a feline character – now known as Micha – originally sketched two years ago. “A lamp is designed to be functional, but our idea was to hide the function of the lamp in a character,” says Kuntzel. Currently, there are four models available for ‘adoption’, each one made from a single flat sheet of metal with Micha in a different position, evoking a sense of movement while omitting a soft prism of light that customers have compared to the glow of a fire.

While the creative decisions tend to be handled by Kuntzel and Deygas, Moria is equally involved in everything else, from PR and distribution to website and order management. The project seems to have brought some stress relief, a welcome distraction from the daily trials of the ad industry as well as a sense of achievement for the trio, whose enthusiasm for – and pride in – the project is obvious.

“It’s good to have three pairs of shoulders for all the problems because it’s for real,” says Moria. “It’s the real world; it’s not just FTPs and QuickTime and what has become the world of production. It’s a pretty big object.” Determined to offer a quality product, they carefully designed the production system and every single unit that is shipped first goes through their hands to be checked, numbered and signed. Anything they’re not happy with is discarded.

With prices hovering between €1,500 and €1,600 for what is essentially a luxury, one might not expect business to be booming, but Micha isn’t a hobby for any of the people involved and to date more than 60 lamps have been ‘adopted’ since going on sale in October last year. The limited-edition run of 250 lamps in each position won’t last forever, but they won’t be stopping there. They already have plans for Micha to grow – literally – according to Deygas. “We’re making designs for new variations of Micha positions. We’d love to have a giant Micha for the garden, like a tiger.”

Moria won’t even stop there. “It’s pretty tricky to develop objects with electricity. We’ve started [the business] with a project that’s not very easy because there are a lot of regulations worldwide with craftsmanship and electricity. But we’d like to make super-monumental lamps. You’d do that for the garden of a museum or a public garden, like a Jeff Koons. The final objective is that Micha lights the whole of the Versaille gardens!” That’s a pretty big dream, but something tells you that ambition will never be in short supply with Moria, Kuntzel and Deygas.

houseofmicha.com