Eight to twelve weeks is the number that gives people pause, and it is the point at which a certain kind of buyer walks away. That is a reasonable response to a figure presented without explanation. It is a less reasonable response once you know what is happening in those weeks, because almost none of it is waiting.
Made to order means what it says. At the moment an order is placed the piece does not exist in any form. There is no shelf it is lifted from, no crate sitting somewhere with its name on it. There is a drawing, a specification and a workshop that now has to make the thing. The lead time is the manufacturing, and it is worth walking through it, because understanding where the weeks go tells you which of them can be moved and which cannot.
The queue comes first, and it is the variable
The most misunderstood part of a lead time is that the largest single block of it is often not making. It is the position in the book.
A workshop of the kind that makes this sort of lighting runs a production schedule weeks deep. Furnace time is allocated. The metalworkers are on other commissions. An order joins a queue, and the queue is what moves most between a quiet February and the run-up to a Salone year or a Christmas completion. The making itself may be a matter of weeks. The wait to start can be as long again.
This is also why 'can it be expedited' has an unsatisfying answer. Expediting a piece almost never means making it faster. It means moving it up the book, which moves somebody else down. Good workshops will do it occasionally, for a real reason, and they are right to be sparing about it.
Then the making, which has physical minimums
Once a commission starts, several stages take the time they take, and no amount of money compresses them.
Glass elements are made at the furnace and then annealed, cooled slowly and under control so the material releases its internal stress rather than carrying it. Rush the anneal and the piece cracks, if not on the bench then in a crate or, worse, on a ceiling. The cool-down is measured in hours or days depending on the mass of the piece, and it is not negotiable.
Metalwork is cut, formed, brazed or welded, cleaned up and then finished. Finishing is where the hours concentrate. A hand-applied patina is worked, then it has to cure, then it is usually sealed and that has to cure too. Lacquer needs time and a clean environment. These are chemical processes with their own clock.
Then the piece is assembled for the first time, which is frequently the first moment anyone sees it whole. It is wired, lamped and tested, and it is at this stage that problems surface: an arm sitting a degree out, a glass element that reads differently to its neighbours under light, a finish that has gone further than intended. Fixing any of those is normal and it is much of the reason the schedule carries slack.
Getting it here, and getting it in
A finished piece is dismantled to the extent it safely can be, packed into custom crating and put on a lorry. Most of our commissions are made in Italy, and the transit itself is a matter of days rather than weeks, though it is the stage most exposed to things outside anybody's control.
Crates come in to us rather than going straight to the client, in the great majority of cases. There is a reason for that, and it is not logistics. It is that somebody who knows what the piece is supposed to look like should open it in a workshop, on a bench, with time and light, rather than in a hallway in front of the person who commissioned it. If something has moved in transit, that is the moment to find out.
Delivery and installation then run to the client's programme rather than the workshop's. We deliver the piece and we can install it, which on a large commission is usually the sensible arrangement, since the people fitting it have generally handled that model before.
What this means for a project programme
The practical consequence is straightforward and it is the thing most often got wrong. Long lead items are ordered against the build programme, not against the readiness of the room.
A decorative piece that is chosen when the room is plastered and ready for it will arrive two to three months after the room was ready. On a house where the client is moving back in, that is a very visible gap. The same piece specified at the point the ceiling design is fixed arrives comfortably, and the money left the account no earlier in real terms because a made-to-order commission commits at order in any case.
There is a second consequence for anyone specifying. The commitment happens early and it is not casually reversible, which is an argument for resolving the piece properly at the front end, at drawing stage, rather than adjusting it later. It is also an argument for getting the ceiling structure and the dimming decided in the same conversation, since both of those have to be built in at first fix.
Whether it is worth the wait
Not always, and it is worth being direct about that. If a room needs a light in three weeks, or if the piece is doing a modest job in a secondary space, a good stocked fitting from a good maker is the right answer and there is no virtue in waiting for the sake of it.
The wait earns its keep when the piece has to be a particular size, or a particular drop for a particular ceiling, or has to relate to something else in the room that no catalogue was designed around. It earns its keep when the finish and the glass have to be worked by hand to look the way the scheme needs them to look. What you are buying with those weeks is the absence of compromise on dimensions and materials, and on a piece that will hang in the same place for twenty years, twelve weeks is a rounding error.
The thing to avoid is discovering the lead time late. If you are working to a completion date, the lighting conversation belongs near the start of the programme. Our design team is happy to have it at concept stage, well before anything is ordered. Start a conversation.
Words by Julian Reeve