Light Switch

In Consumed: Candela: How a niche product lit up consumers, and found its way to the mass market.

Vessel, a design company based in Boston, offers a surprisingly wide range of products for a small firm that’s been around for only six years — tableware, furniture, lighting and the occasional curiosity that fits none of those categories. But from early on, one product stood out: a lamp called the Candela.

Since it first appeared on store shelves in 2002, the Candela inspired a string of spinoffs and variations, and eventually these became popular enough that Vessel’s owners had to decide whether they were an industrial-design firm that happened to make some lighting products or whether they were a lighting-products company that made some other stuff, too. Lately, they have found a solution, which offers an interesting capsule story of how a niche product becomes a line, and then, step by step, reaches a mass market….

Continue reading at the NYT Magazine site.