Mathmos
 |
|
| UK Limited Company | |
| Industry | Lighting |
| Founded | 1963 |
| Founder | Edward Craven Walker |
| Headquarters | Poole, Dorset, UK |
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Key people
|
Cressida Granger (CEO) |
| Products |
Lava lamps Ambient Lights Sensory Lights |
| Website | www.mathmos.com |
Mathmos is a British company that sells lighting products, most famously the lava lamp invented by its founder Edward Craven Walker. It is headquartered in its factory in Poole, Dorset.
The Astro lamp, or lava lamp, was invented around 1963 by Edward Craven Walker. It was adapted from a design for an egg timer spotted in a pub in Dorset, England. Edward and Christine Craven-Walker licensed the product to a number of overseas markets whilst continuing to manufacture for the European market themselves under the original name of the company, Crestworth. The rights to produce and sell the lamp on the American market for the duration of the patent were sold to Lava Simplex International, in 1966. The American company has now closed the American factory and has the lava lamps made in China.
In Europe Craven-Walker’s original lava lamp designs have been in continuous production since the early 1960s and are still made today by Mathmos in Poole, Dorset, UK. The Mathmos lava lamp formula developed initially by Craven-Walker in the 1960s and then improved with his help in the 1990s is still used.
Mathmos’ lava lamp sales have been through a number of ups and downs. After selling millions of lamps worldwide in the 1960s and 70s they did not revive until the 1990s. In 1989 Cressida Granger and David Mulley took over the running of Walker's original company, Crestworth, situated in Poole, Dorset, and changed the name to Mathmos in 1992.
The name comes from the 1968 film Barbarella. Mathmos (or matmos) refers to a seething lake of lava beneath the city Sogo.
The 1990s re-launch of the original lava lamps saw sales grow strongly for Mathmos again from 10,000 lamps a year in 1989 to 800,000 lamps a year in 1999. Mathmos won two Queens Awards for Export and a number of other business awards. Edward Craven-Walker remained a consultant and company director at Mathmos until his death in 2000.
Since 1999 under the sole ownership of Cressida Granger, Mathmos widened its product range whilst maintaining and building on the classic Mathmos lava lamp range. Mathmos developed new products both in house with the Mathmos Design Studio and with a number of external designers such as Ross Lovegrove and El Ultimo Grito.
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Wikipedia