Baking a lamp

There’s a gentle burbling at Crème Atelier’s miniature factory on the island of Södermalm in Stockholm. A bit like rain on a metal roof. But the sound is coming from a series of 3D printers lined up along the walls. Much like ice cream machines, they’re melting and layering thin strips to create the brand’s flagship product, the Soft Serve lamp.

– It’s funny that it looks like that, since soft-serve ice cream is exactly what inspired the lamp, says Lucas Lind. Founders Jacqueline Kessidis and Lucas Lind met and started dating ten years ago. He was a UX designer; she was a marketer at a pharmaceutical company. They started to decorate homes, build furniture together, and renovate flats. Until one fine day, during the pandemic, they both realised they’d had enough of their jobs. Why not start a design company together?

Jacqueline: – We wanted to do something small in scale and local. Our first idea was to make a piece of furniture, but it felt weird to have it produced in China on the other side of the world.

Lucas: – Then we started to wonder what the materials of the future could be for furniture design; winding up at 3D printing and totally nerding out was inevitable. And that’s how the Soft Serve lamp was born. The rest is an almost unbelievable success story, since the couple had no contacts or background in the design industry.