Some of the most innovative companies in the world began because someone couldn’t find what they were looking for, so they decided to make it themselves.
Such is the case at architectural glass company Pulp Studio, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary in 2016. And the Los Angeles based company indeed has a lot to celebrate; it will enter 2016 with a splash in a brand new facility that will enable the Pulp Studio team to do some things that haven’t before been possible with glass.
Bernard Lax and his wife and business partner Lynda Nishimoto founded Pulp Studio in 1996, when they were working in the clothing and textile industry, manufacturing and selling woven and knit fabrics and garments to national retailers. While drawing up plans for a new home, Mr. Lax wanted to honor his wife Lynda’s Japanese heritage by installing a shoji screen appearance on the exterior. If the rice paper could be encased in the glass, he thought, the glass would be much more durable. Unable to find a fabricator to properly produce such a thing, he figured out how to do it himself and hired a local company with the right equipment to facilitate it.
“We knew less than nothing about glass,” noted Mr. Lax, in a press release announcing the company 20th anniversary. “But I had always wanted to be an architect when I was younger (although I ended up at business school), and I was drawn to the visual aspects of construction and design which seems to be in my DNA.”
The couple’s previous business in textiles for the fashion industry might seem distant to glass manufacturing, but Mr. Lax said he now sees the connection between the two:
“We had no fear of creating and manufacturing something because we’d done it before,” said Mr. Lax, in an interview. “From a business point of view, it doesn’t matter what you’re making; the variables in the manufacturing process might differ, but the process itself is generally the same.”
In this way, the couple continued to work in the material development business: “…albeit on a larger scale, and for buildings rather than bodies.”
They were, however, pioneering a new type of product that hadn’t been out there before. Decorative glass had previously almost always referred to more artisanal, craft-oriented blown or stained glass.
“We wanted to take that decorative glass category and give it a more commercial life, as a material within the core palette available to an architect,” said Mr. Lax.
Since its beginnings as a small studio with a tiny team of people doing much of its work manually, Pulp Studio has expanded to become a leader in custom architectural glass development and manufacturing by investing in an in-depth knowledge of glass engineering.
“There are many variables that go into making different types of architectural glass,” said Mr. Lax. “We were always focused on our ability to facilitate our own expansion by automating our processes with machinery.”
Mr. Lax notes that Pulp Studio, which now employs 160 people, built its business over the past two decades by working hard to constantly push past what was currently possible in glass. The company now produces site-specific installations in a wide range of projects around the U.S. and abroad, and Mr. Lax credits the company’s willingness, or more accurately, its eagerness to experiment.
“We’re open to trying almost anything once, if it makes sense to us,” said Mr. Lax. “When we began, a lot of people were saying, ‘That won’t work,’ or ‘We just don’t do that.’ We listened to that for a while, because we were new to working with glass, but we found it to be too conservative. We worked hard to overcome those draconian standards in the glass industry with our skills and talents.”
Throughout its 20-year history, Pulp Studio has steadily expanded its capabilities in glass production by investing in new technologies and equipment, and by building new facilities and acquiring competitors. Mr. Lax noted that it’s Pulp Studio‘s role to be prepared for evolving trends that architects and designers are paying attention to.
“We try to create products that then lend themselves well to those trends.”
One of its biggest contributions to the architectural glass market is its investment in technology that captures substrate material between glass sheets. The company prides itself on being one of the first companies to be able to encapsulate things in laminate, delivering it reliably and with a high quality standard. Mr. Lax notes Pulp Studio was the first company to create water-based back-painted glass.
Pulp Studio is also fiercely proud of its commitment to sustainable living and working. Its sustainable initiatives are admirable:
>Pulp Studio paint systems are all water based.
>A water recycling system reduces the facilities’ consumption of water.
>Glass cutoff scraps are sold to a company that grinds it into cullet (a road base)
>Aluminum oxide, used for surfacing glass, is recycled.
>All laminating goes through a recycling process.
>The Pulp Studio offices use a recycling system that, among other things, shreds paper for reuse as packaging material.
Now, over the course of its 20th year, Pulp will merge all three of its facilities into one property in Gardena California, encompassing roughly 145,000 square feet of manufacturing space. The facility will feature Pulp’s $3.5 million dollar investment in new state of the art machinery, including one of the largest chemical tempering tanks in the world (a process required to temper special types of bent glass); high speed digital graphic printing equipment that will improve printing quality and speed as well as increase size capacity in its digital printing division; and a new oversized bent tempering furnace.
“…We will have the only facility in the world where, under one roof, you will be able to print, bend and temper glass of all shapes and sizes on this large scale,” noted Mr. Lax in the 20th anniversary announcement.
The new facility is a huge achievement for Pulp Studio, but it takes second place behind an arguably greater success:
“Our greatest achievement was that we never laid anybody off during the recession,” said Mr. Lax. “We knew the economy would eventually recover, and we recognized that our people and their talent and skills were very important to us. That is our greatest achievement.”
So where is the future of the glass market heading?
“We see our market in the next five years exploding with unique architectural projects – iconic building projects that will demand it. And the market will actually find that only a few firms will be able to service those demands. We’re one of those firms. Our goal is to come out of the shadow of that small specialty glass market and into a larger, more mainstream space.”
Consolidating its manufacturing under one roof will certainly make that goal easier; Pulp’s new facility now offers arguably the widest range of fabrication capabilities to include state of the art bending, laminating, coating and digital printing.
“We stand for a higher level of quality, and for pushing new technologies as well as enhancing older techniques.”