More Than An Act Of Magis

Leading Italian manufacturer works with world's top designers to create unique products

Rule number one for successful Italian furniture companies seems to be this: have a charismatic president. It worked for Cappellini for more than a decade (until company president Giulio Cappellini was forced to sell to competitor Poltrona Frau two months ago) and it continues to work for Magis, a plastics specialist led by founder Eugenio Perazza.
When it comes to having top designers work for Magis, Perazza, it seems, doesn't take no for an answer. His persistence has been rewarded. Recent Magis products have been designed by a who's who of the world's most sought-after designers, including (take a deep breath, this is a long list) Werner Aisslinger, Ron Arad, the Bouroullec brothers, the Campana brothers, Stefano Giovannoni, Konstantin Grcic, James Irvine, Jasper Morrison, Karim Rashid and Marcel Wanders. It's enough to make a competitor jealous, but Magis has some formidable challengers in the marketplace, including like-minded design-driven companies such as Alias, Edra, Kartell and Zanotta.
Magis distinguishes itself mostly because of its (relatively) cheap and cheerful plastic designs, but like any good Italian design innovator worth its salt, the company is not afraid to take a risk here and there. Such was the case with German designer Konstantin Grcic's Chair One design, which was as much loathed as loved when it debuted at the Milan furniture fair two years ago. The seat is a skeletal-like die cast aluminum and in one version it sits on a concrete base. To paraphrase an old Monty Python sketch, Chair One is not a chair for sitting, it is a chair to avoid sitting on for any serious length of time. Grcic had this in mind - the chair was designed for transitional public spaces.
At the other end of the Magis product spectrum stands Stefano Giovannoni's Bombo stool. Deftly retro and futuristic at the same time, the organic Bombo design has proved to be wildly popular in bars, restaurants and homes. Milan designer Giovannoni has produced subsequent seating versions of the original, as well as a Bombo table, and the inevitable imitations have also entered the marketplace, lacking of course any of Giovannoni's nuance in design detail.
Australian designer Marc Newson contributed to the Magis accessories line with two products released in the late 90s. The polypropylene Dish Doctor makes dishwashing a less tedious task and Newson's Rock door stop adds an anthropomorphic presence to any household. More recently, expat Canadian and New York-based designer Karim Rashid designed the sensuous Butterfly chair, which consists of an ABS seat and a chromed steel tube frame.
Magis is located in the bucolic setting of Motta di Livenza, northeast of Venice, and the company contracts out its manufacturing to neighbouring factories in the craftsman-rich region of Treviso. Chair One manufacturer Zin, for example, also makes aluminum engine blocks for cars and chair parts for high end Swiss furniture company Vitra.
Despite his drive to work with big name designers, Eugenio Perazza realizes that in the end it is only the product that matters. "We want people to buy the product because it's good," Perazza says, "not just because it's Magis".

Publication Date: 2004-06-06
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=4038