video: Portland Made: Lamp Designer Shannon Guirl

Monday, March 23, 2015

Kelley Roy, GoLocalPDX Contributor

Shannon Guirl making a lamp.

Portland is full of doers; we build, craft and create, we cut, weld and sew, we design, we manufacture, we work.

Portland Made is a collective of local makers across all industry sectors. From food, bikes, fashion and home goods, Portland Made represents over 500 makers who collectively create thousands of jobs and over a billion dollars in economic activity.

Portland Made is an online hub that tells the stories of these local makers and their products, with the goal of connecting consumers to all of the incredible things being made right here in our city. Every week we feature a different maker and provide information about where you can buy their products.

Shannon Guirl, Caravan Pacific

By Portland Made contributing writer Peggy Acott

Caravan Pacific owner Shannon Guirl, with her love of mid-century American design, had launched a successful Kickstarter campaign with her lamp designs that added a slightly modernized twist of color that complimented the classic proportions of the original style.

Even as her business grew, she was determined to maintain her original made-by-hand aesthetic for her lamps, even though some are constructed with as many as twenty-five individual pieces. She now has two part time assistants to help meet the challenge of going from making one lamp at a time to sometimes as many as two hundred in a single month.

She moved her operation into a 7000 square foot “creative studio collective” warehouse space in industrial North Portland – one of several maker-collectives that have sprung up in Portland in the last few years. Guirl knows how tough things can be for individual makers trying to get started in the marketplace. “Learning how to jump those hurdles is easier in a community” with which to share ideas and information.

“Portland’s maker community is so welcoming and nice,” Guirl said. From the beginning she found the Portland makers and small manufacturers to be generous with their knowledge and their time. She loves to tell the story of going to a manufacturer of hand-turned wood products, wanting even her lamps’ wooden pieces to have that handmade aesthetic.

“The wood turner community is pretty insular,” she said, because it is such a particular skill and a relatively small group. She had doubts about them being open to her ideas. But she needn’t have worried.

“Here’s these older guys who have been doing this for years, thinking it’s pretty cool that here’s this chick who is interested in what they do and appreciates their craft,” Guirl said.

Guirl’s future plans are to work on new lighting designs “to keep challenging [her]self.” She would also like to do more education – not only in teaching lamp making, but she also wants to start highlighting some of the stories of the mid-century designers that have inspired her on a blog, She believes it is important to share these stories with her own generation so that this important design movement doesn’t get completely lost to modernism.

“It’s like having a dialog with history,” said Guirl.

Kelley Roy is the founder of ADX, a 14,000 square foot Makerspace where artists and designers work along side each other to prototype and launch new product lines. ADX is also open to the general public and teaches people of all ages how to make. And if you don't want to do it yourself, you can hire them to do it for you. For more information check out adxportland.com.

For more information about Portland Made, watch the video below: