Chris Miller

Making Design Circular with Katie Treggiden

This season is all about repair and in this episode, we’re talking to Chris Miller the co-founder of Skinflint – Europe’s leading vintage industrial lighting website. Skinflint scours locations across the world to source historic vintage lights, which are restored with a gentle touch by UK-based lighting experts, ensuring their stories shine through.

We discuss:

- How a life-changing experience in Sri Lanka set his life on a new path

- How his company, Skinflint, got its start

- The interesting places he sources lights from and why.

- His ‘Full Circle’ buy-back program and how it’s helping his clients.

- How his approach relates to the circular economy.

- How he is aiming to be carbon-free by 2025.

… and more!

Here are some highlights.

What Inspired him to start his company Skinflint.

“I’d become disillusioned with the manufacturing side of the industry. This constant loop of production, consumption, a reinvention of the wheel. I was also rapidly becoming disillusioned with producing lighting schemes for predominantly second homes, both in London and Cornwall. However, the project in Primrose Hill, which was back in 2007, offered a completely different perspective and it was, excuse the pun, a ‘light bulb moment.’ The whole building fabric was to be designed around reusing existing materials, not just from an environmental perspective, but in order to create what they wanted, which was a well-worn interior. We're used to seeing that with floorboards, and this, that and the other, but every single item in the property, this is an extensive property, had to be in existence. The end result was magnificent. Over those two years, it became apparent that there were a number of respectable salvage companies throughout the UK selling lighting, but there weren't any lighting companies selling salvage, if that makes sense. So we recognised the gap and a growing trend toward sustainability, more importantly, provenance and a return to well-made items being built to last or to be repaired and as such we built a company from the product up.”

Why they source from the 1920s-1970s.

“It’s bookend by the widespread adoption of electricity in the 1920s and the advent of plastics in the 1970s, because you start to see documentation coming into the language there of planned obsolescence and valued engineering, and effectively engineers were handling a material they didn't fully understand. Yes, it [plastic] was seen as the be all and end all at that point and I think we know where we've gone with that, but effectively, we can't refurbish products from that period because we can't do anything with the plastic. It does end there but we've restored somewhere around 50,000 products, and we have about 5000 products in stock at any one time. I'd like to think we can cover any of those styles from antique to art deco to industrial right up to the retro period or early 1970s. In fact, many of the pieces, especially the early ones, they’re massively over-engineered rather than value-engineered. I liken it to the Victorian railway bridges, they'll still be there in another 100 years without any problem and they're pretty indestructible, so they're a pleasure to refurbish and to handle the materials are magnificent.”

Carbon neutral by 2025

“The carbon-neutral piece I struggle with a little bit because for me, it's become something that's been green-washed by larger companies. I don't really care if Heathrow airport is carbon-neutral. That kind of ignores the elephant in the corner there, the building may very well be carbon neutral, but...yeah. From our perspective, we're doing a lot of things right, but there's always areas to improve upon. Our company emissions for the calendar year 2018 were actually relatively low. They may not sound low, but they equated to 16 tons of carbon dioxide, which roughly translates to two tons per employee. That is an extremely low per capita footprint for a UK retail company. The embodied carbon of our product is very low because they're being reused and going into the circular economy rather than going for disposal or to recycling. The bulk of our carbon footprint, and this is a challenge 'cause it's about 70% from scope-1 is from diesel emissions used in transportation of goods in the operation. So although all of our contractors are obviously based in the South West, we are bringing products predominantly from the UK, but from Europe and further afield. We’re trying to reduce this within the UK by switching over to electric vehicles. But again, it’s a challenge. It’s not black and white.”

Learn more about Skinflint here.

Follow Skinflint on Instagram here.

About Katie Treggiden

Katie Treggiden is a purpose-driven journalist, author, podcaster and keynote speaker championing a circular approach to design – because Planet Earth needs better stories. With 20 years' experience in the creative industries, she regularly contributes to publications such as The Guardian, Crafts Magazine, Design Milk and Monocle24. Following research during her recent Masters at the University of Oxford, she is currently exploring the question ‘can craft save the world?’ through an emerging body of work that includes her fifth book, Wasted: When Trash Becomes Treasure (Ludion, 2020), and this podcast.

You can find Katie on Instagram @katietreggiden.1, sign up for her e-newsletter here and if you’re a designer-maker interested in becoming more sustainable, sign up for her free Facebook Group here. If you’d like to support more fantastic content like this, you can buy Katie a ‘virtual coffee’ here in exchange for behind-the-scenes content and a shout-out in Season Three.