GERA: Hello Anne, hello Christoph. You have been running a high-quality, design focused glasses and jewellery business in Warendorf for a number of years. I have known you since I bought my first pair of reading glasses (face à face) and as a guest at your fantastic stage. You regularly present art in your displays and also channel your artistic passion into a small private stage in the town centre. How did you become aware of GERA’s light products? And how do you present them in these contexts?
Anne/Christoph: Glasses shops are usually dense forests, in which you can’t see "the wood for the trees". Our idea: To create rooms, in which only a few, well presented pairs of glasses are highlighted. Complemented by a bar, coffee aroma, harmonious colours, beautifully designed furniture.
We began the search and found GERA’s light furniture, without even knowing that this type of furniture existed, we found exactly what we’d been looking for. A light board, supporting lights – light furniture! That was new for us. But once we found it, it became obvious that we should also furnish our theatre rooms and our private rooms with GERA light. The beautiful GERA catalogue also proved extremely helpful and inspiring.
GERA: Your company philosophy positions you as provider of select brand products. You value artists and creative individuals, who take a different approach to creating beautiful products and who show courage for avant-garde. What positive experiences have you had with brands, courage, unconventional thinking and concepts, special designs. What does it mean to you personally, what does it mean for your customers and guests?
Anne/Christoph: For us courage means selling not only the established brands in our small town but also unknown, emerging labels. Experimenting, away from the masses, to the really innovative glasses designers, independent labels. We support innovators, producers with a different approach, for whom e.g. fair-trade and sustainability are also important. On the surface the market seems to work on the level that most people want what most people want, tried and tested mainstream. But enough exceptions fortunately confirm this rule. We therefore think and operate quite selectively – give precedence to quality and originality before quantity. We are interested in that something special – like GERA.
When customers come into our shop, they immediately sense whether it is right for them or not. Some may fall in love with the surprising individual details, such as e.g. the inner workings of Oscar Magnuson frames, which replicates a spring. We like artists and creative individuals, who develop special ideas with lots of imagination, we value those, who then skilfully bring these ideas to life and in general we feel like part of a cultural family with those, who discover the resulting products for themselves and embrace them with enthusiasm. As Goethe said: Thou art like the spirit thou canst comprehend.