The Truth about illumination Physics Europe
(About quality, delivery time and freight costs… and other baseless arguments)
The arrival of illumination Physics’ European office 2 years ago, was unlikely to be welcomed by our established competitors. Martin Opolka and our German team offer full technical and logistic support, plus installation and testing and programming.
We provide a higher level of service than is typical.
All of our products sold in Europe come with accredited independent full laboratory testing such as CE, IK, and Ingress protection.
illumination Physics provides custom lighting products that are often delivered in less time than off the shelf equipment on the market. Actually, we don’t believe in ‘off the shelf’ catalogue marketing as our only business model.
Delivery
Customers in Europe are told our delivery time is too long because we produce outside Europe. This is as interesting as it is incorrect.
Many European manufacturers have standard delivery times of 12 weeks.
illumination Physics
typically delivers in
two months.
Even custom products
are delivered in
60 days.
As it is with all of the leading manufactures, illumination Physics sources high-quality components, e.g. LEDs from American companies such as Cree Inc., power supplies from Meanwell, and so on.
We are simply more agile than our competitors.
Below are the details of six recent projects from our European office:
- The Inverted Forest Chandelier at the Radisson Blu Hotel, Larnaca, Cyprus – completed: A vast and completely custom decorative indoor lighting feature, designed and manufactured and delivered in 60 days.
- Façade Lighting of the Radisson Blu, Larnaca, Cyprus – completed: The external façade lighting uses both IP Circular Wash and IP Rectangular Wash luminaires, delivered in 60 days.
- Tower One, a residential high-rise tower in Limassol, Cyprus – under construction. The custom IP Linear Wash luminaires were designed, manufactured and delivered in 60 days.
Photo by: UNSEEN VIEWSÂ (Charis Solomou Architectural Photography)
Photo by: Linus Lintner
- UCI Luxe Cineplex in Berlin, ‘Light Cloud’ Chandelier, designed by Kardoff Engineers – completed: A large custom indoor decorative lighting feature, designed, manufactured and delivered in 60 days.
- UCI Luxe Cineplex in Potsdam, ‘Light Cloud’ Chandelier, designed by Kardoff Engineers – completed: A large custom indoor decorative lighting feature, designed, manufactured and delivered in 60 days.
- The Orbit, Urban Office Campus, Athens – nearing completion. A highly significant architectural lighting project requiring a custom-designed family of IP Linear Wash lights created especially for the project. Months of design, prototyping and mock-ups have taken place. illumination Physics manufactured and delivered 1500 luminaires in 60 days.
Value
Customers are told that the shipment costs make the product more expensive: The reverse is the case. Here’s why.
Firstly, we use the same high-quality components utilised by the top European brands (such as LEDs from Cree, Inc. USA; electronics from Japan), and we all share the same cost in procurement of components. However, our assembly is far more efficient, which more than compensates for the cost of shipment outside Europe. Freight within Europe is also relatively expensive when factoring warehousing and distribution.
Our distribution does not have to support an expensive infrastructure. illumination Physics can design, tool and assemble a new product or an established product and deliver it directly to the project from our factory loading dock, avoiding the overheads of local infrastructure.
Many European brands also manufacture outside Europe.
Their pricing advantage is lost because they carry high local overheads or high domestic margins.
‘Custom is expensive and hard to support in future.’
Most manufacturers resist custom work and discourage it with loaded pricing. illumination Physics has the opposite attitude.
The real cost of a custom product is minimally different, tooling is not expensive, and the price outcome is driven by attitude more than any other factor. Support is often another myth. LED technology evolves rapidly. Is a 5-year warranty on a product useful when it is obsolete in half that time? illumination Physics has supported custom projects for more than a decade. We make future maintenance support planning a part of every project.
Quality
European manufacturers have been telling the customer the same thing for years – that the product quality is superior in Europe, and products from other countries, like China, are not as good.
We only speak for illumination Physics and the products we supply. It does not matter where a product is manufactured; if the commitment to quality is absolute, the quality will be the same, or better. This is our choice.
Recently, during the installation of the UCI Luxe Berlin project, our installer dealt with products from 12 other manufacturers, not just illumination Physics. There were quality problems with three local manufacturers.
The illumination Physics products functioned perfectly.
This tells us that it matters less where you make a product; what matters most is how you make it and how efficient you are.