Word: lam
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Creative genius allowed Izabel Lam to produce sensational dinnerware and cutlery designs. But to sell them successfully worldwide, she had to develop other qualities: a tough skin, a readiness to fight legal battles in country after country and a willingness to subordinate her artistic tastes to production considerations, though of a special sort. Her problem was one that bedevils many other American exporters and overseas manufacturers, big and small: design piracy...
...Lam arrived in the U.S. from Hong Kong in 1972 to study design. She stayed to work for Calvin Klein and Geoffrey Beene, then launched her own clothing line in the early 1980s. By 1988, however, she abandoned clothing design to concentrate on what seemed like an impossible artistic ambition: giving metal objects the look of some of the shifting and sinuous forms she saw in underwater visions while scuba diving. Somehow she brought it off: Lam can give steel the look of draped silk...
Aesthetically, the dinnerware and cutlery that her company, Izabel Lam International, began marketing in 1989 were an immediate success. Getting the line manufactured was a headache, however. Lam was then working in bronze, which had a beautiful soft luster, but American manufacturers could not seem to give it the special twist she wanted. The only factory that could was in Thailand...
...were the Thais persistently unable to turn out knives, spoons and dishes in the quantities Lam ordered? And why was the money from sales in Europe so much less than might have been expected, given the glowing reports Lam's aides got about buyer reaction? Tim McCarthy, then president of Izabel Lam International, visited Europe in the early 1990s and quickly solved the mystery. The Thais had not only pirated the designs but had also set up their own network of European agents who sold the cutlery and sent the money back to Thailand, not to Lam...
...Lam decided to fight. She got injunctions in Germany, Italy and France to stop the sale of pirated designs. McCarthy flew to Thailand and hired Pinkerton detectives to find and close down the pirates. They could not do so completely because metal can be cast in too many places: somebody's backyard or even an open field...