Fancy Lamps

The average car-buyer never contemplates the challenge of getting properly machined front left-side doors to the Ford assembly line, just as few lamp buyers think about the hidden achievement of Cooper Lamp which isn't the burnishing and working of the materials that go into their products but the less romantic challenge of getting the finished lamps to their destinations. 'One of those things you never think about is how important the packing is,' said Lauren. 'If it can't get there in good shape...'

If a lamp isn't packed properly—and sometimes even if it is—it will break en route, and the customer will send it back. Floor lamps are particularly problematic, because they are long and less robust and customers have a tendency to half unpack them and then tug, hard, throwing them permanently out of alignment. Every floor lamp leaves Cooper with a bright, yellow sticker on the box reading, DO NOT PULL ON ANY PART OF THIS LAMP TO REMOVE IT FROM BOX. It doesn't always help.

Just as welding robots have revolutionized car assembly, technology has come to the aid of packing lamps. Thirty-nine years ago, when head packer Ruby joined Cooper, the lamps were packed in excelsior, a material which she describes as something that 'looked a little like hay but it wasn't hay'. Then came Styrofoam popcorn, a substance that no one remembers fondly, due to its genius for spilling and getting everywhere. 'Everywhere,' says Lauren. 'We tried everything. Oh boy did we hate those—I don't know who hated those more, us or our customers.'

Now the packing material is contained within rolls of grey plastic bags that are filled with a beige polyurethane liquid—actually two liquids, shot from a pair of fifty-five-gallon drums, that, upon interacting with each other, undergo a chemical reaction and begin rising, like warm bread. Once filled, a bag is tossed inside its box, then a lamp is set on top of the bag as it slowly puffs upwards, and another bag is filled and set upon that. The foaming bags fit themselves perfectly to the contours of the lamp, protecting it from the rigours of shipping to—in this case—the Akane Lighting Company in Kawaguchi City, Japan.

There is one baroque, horror movie aspect to the rising foam packaging. Its uncontrolled growth would normally split apart the cardboard carton. To prevent this from happening, each freshly filled and sealed box is briefly slid into its own custom-made plywood vice—they look like little coffins—which keeps the cardboard carton intact in the thirty or so seconds it takes for the expanding to stop.