Products of unsurpassed quality made in a sustainable environment
THE REMAINS LIGHTING ANTIQUE COLLECTION
We take great time and effort to source beautiful, unique items that embody a high degree of craft, and have traceable history (attributable to a certain maker, or associational history, e.g. from the home of a noteworthy person). Traveling across the United States, especially along the East coast we search for the finest examples of the glass and metalsmith's art as expressed in lighting, uncovering new antiques almost every day of the year.
We have built a library of over 600 original documents, catalogs, and artwork related to the craft and business of lighting fixture fabrication, glasswork, metalwork and the allied arts. This allows us to accurately attribute, date, and describe (in terms of style, materials and craft-process) all of our antique fixtures.
On top of this academic background, the handling of thousands of period antiques allows us to direct the restoration of our objects with accuracy and sensitivity in an aesthetically and technically correct manner. We employ eight full time staff in registration, documentation, and restoration. Our restorations strive to be undetectable and reversible, so that future restorers and conservators have every option open to them.
THE REMAINS LIGHTING PERMANENT COLLECTION
Our fixtures are crafted of the highest quality materials and with the most sophisticated construction techniques today, ensuring they will last for generations and become our grandchildren’s treasured antiques.
The Remains Lighting Permanent Collection is composed of unique products. There is nothing on the market comparable in style or quality of execution.
Not only do we build and wire all our own fixtures, we design and fabricate our own unique, custom, specific parts.
We invest in proprietary engineering for common fixture parts when the off-the-shelf solution is not up to our standards.
LOCAL AND IN-HOUSE MANUFACTURING
We are dedicated to maintaining and expanding US manufacturing jobs and the web of related jobs they create, and want to keep the knowledge of craft in industry alive in the US. Over the past 40 years, and at an alarmingly accelerated pace in the past decade, the United States has lost millions of manufacturing jobs and the craft-knowledge these industries require. We rely on the services of stateside artisanal and industrial glassbenders, foundries, chasers, machinists, metal spinners, brazers, patternmakers, glass blowers and glass engravers, shade-makers, wire-formers, and chain-makers, to name just a few. Many of the firms we have worked with have gone out business and no one has risen up in their place. In some cases, these industries are now extinct in the US. We strive to support not only the history and knowledge of these crafts, but their continuation as viable commercial enterprises. When the necessary craft or technology is no longer existent commercially, we try to bring these various aspects of the work in-house and do them ourselves.
We believe that it is crucial to our country’s well-being that the US make world-leading products.
Manufacturing locally allows us to monitor quality closely and to have a personal relationship with the artisan or factory.
Manufacturing locally minimizes transportation burdens, including fuel consumption and environmental pollution, and saves money.
Our country's child labor, environmental, worker health and safety laws (while they could be strengthened greatly) provide a base-line measure of security that the people who make our products are treated fairly and the environment is not negatively impacted by our actions. We believe the price "savings" of buying outsourced products is a false economy, and that each human on the planet has to pay that bill. When a product is made in an unregulated venue, the real cost of that product does not show up on its price tag. It shows up in the polluted environment, the underage and/or injured worker, and in the loss of jobs in places that do enforce wage, safety and environmental protections. Products are cheaper to manufacture overseas not because foreign workers are magically better and more productive than their US counterparts, but because there are few-and-far-between restraints on companies to provide a safe workplace, to pay fair wages (or pay at all), to avoid pollution and to eschew child labor. Companies that outsource to unregulated venues profit from this because they only pay a minute fraction of the global costs for which they are responsible. Large, well-funded companies with market moving economic clout and publicized “corporate responsibility” programs have demonstrated a failure to effectively protect their outsourced supply chains from slave labor or serious environmental degradation. How could a comparatively tiny Remains Lighting be secure that any overseas, remote business relationship could match our high standards? We choose to not make that gamble.
PROVIDING SAFE AND REWARDING EMPLOYMENT
We foster an environment in which employees are recognized for their contributions and encouraged to take ownership of their responsibilities.
We invest in our employees, training in new skills and offering out-of-house educational opportunities.
We provide a safe workplace and encourage employees' participation in its maintenance.
We encourage open dialogue between all levels and departments in daily company-wide meetings as well as truly open-door management.
ENVIRONMENTAL PRESERVATION
We manufacture locally as much as is feasible, lessening the fuel consumption and pollution produced by transportation.
We buy wind power wherever available (currently for our flagship office/showroom/workshops) and will incorporate renewable power sources like solar, geothermal and wind into the building of our next factory. We want to minimize our reliance on the polluting and dangerous nuclear and fossil-fuel industries.
Though it is more complicated and expensive than traditional electroplating, we run a "closed-loop" plating system with no discharges to municipal water sources.
We promote the efficient use of raw materials to limit the impact of mining/refining/manufacturing these items (mainly metals and chemicals), and we promote this efficiency with a range of practices, from the complicated, like cleaning rinse-water with state of the art filtration, to the simple and obvious, like recycling scrap metal and reusing plastic bags and cardboard boxes.
We offer an incentive to our clients to specify re-used cartons and packing material.
We package most of our products with corn-starch “peanuts” and 100% recycled kraft and tissue paper with the space-efficient Geami packaging system. This system expands flat rolls of paper into high quality protection for shipping.
We have given up bottled water delivery and installed tap water filtration to minimize the external transportation, extraction, and pollution associated with delivery of water and production of plastic bottles.
We enthusiastically recycle whatever our local municipalities allow.
We are bicycle-friendly (providing inside bike parking) and encourage people to walk, carpool, and take mass transit.
We are continually seeking ways to improve our relationship with and minimize our disruption of the natural world, and we incorporate this wish into our future plans.
