Meet Rohan Blacker – lovely lamps, happy accidents and ten years on from founding Pooky

Rohan Blacker reflects on a decade of Pooky…

“….I have a very inquisitive mind and I constantly look about, and frankly see almost everything as a potential light. That is the beauty of lighting – you can take virtually anything, whack a bulb on it and hey presto!...”

With his innate eye for design, deep love of traditional lighting and incorrigible fondess for playing round with new ideas, our founder Rohan Blacker is the spiritual heart of Pooky. 

He’s never been one for the limelight (perhaps the only kind of light he’s not keen on) and is far too modest to describe himself as any kind of design guru – let alone as the man who transformed British home lighting – but to mark Pooky’s tenth birthday celebrations we managed to coax him out from behind the scenes for a little Q&A session.

Here Rohan shares his memories and insights from a decade of Pooky – plus a little glimpse of what the future might hold…

How was Pooky born – and why lighting?
Lighting and lights had been bouncing around my brain for years. I always realised it was the most decorative, important and functional aspect of any design. 

I had often wondered if we could incorporate lighting into my last company, sofa.com, but for obvious reasons that was a stretch.

Anyhow, I firmly believed it had to be a dedicated specialist – focussed entirely on lighting and nothing else. There were plenty of homeware brands out there selling lighting as a sub category but very few micro-focused specialists. That's what we wanted to be. 

Can you remember the very first lamp you designed?
Our first collection was pretty small, and only contained a handful of table lamps and a few shades. But one light sticks out. 

I was at a brass foundry in Portugal, casting around for ideas. There was a length of brass on the floor, which apparently was a cast-off from another project. It was just over a foot long and very gradually tapered, with its thickest part at one end just shy of an inch. It was in a completely “raw” and unfinished state. I asked if they could put this on a rectangular brass base and drill a hole through it. I still have the original, which we called the Trafalgar. 

It’s been a bestseller for ten years. It’s absurdly simple, but very sleek and contemporary and just celebrates the beauty of brass. 

Where do your design ideas come from?
This is a pretty standard answer, but I have a very inquisitive mind and I constantly look about, and frankly see almost everything as a potential light. That is the beauty of lighting – you can take a crushed up old Coke can or a strange shaped log, whack a bulb on and hey presto…. It’s infinite.

I have quite a mathematical mind, and as such I like numbers, patterns and sequences, Fibonacci et cetera. So geometry thrills me… Symmetry and asymmetry. Colour, to a degree, works in the same way, with sequences. This is why some colours work together and others don’t – it’s mathematical in the end. 

I suppose that’s my inspiration. But that’s not to suggest I don’t soak up the design classics.

When did you realise Pooky was going to work? Did you know you’d tapped into something that people wanted in their homes?
It took several years until I felt that we were properly onto something. That said, what gave me confidence was that it never didn’t grow. Each month was always a reasonable improvement on the equivalent from a year back: step by step it moved in the right direction.

I never had any particular ambition, and never wrote a five year plan or somesuch. But I was focussed on the business becoming profitable, which it finally did. 

I was transfixed by certain key numbers: the number of new customers per day and the number of returning customers. And feedback. If those three showed the right results we were headed in the right direction.

What about your own home… How would you describe your interior style?
I’m not sure there’s a particular phrase to describe our style at home. It develops at its own pace, and like many things in our life was never necessarily planned out. 

From a lighting perspective we have lots of samples that I have taken back to try out, and often they've stayed. Our walls are covered with pictures - many by friends or relations - they nearly all have a story. Decoratively speaking, home is colourful and busy…some might call it Maximalist, but I wouldn’t because that suggests it is a deliberate style.

You live in the Cotswolds – what drew you there?
Again, not by design at all. My wife Katherine and I were from entirely different ends of the country and didn’t really know Gloucestershire from a bar of soap. But one day we saw a property for rent and enquired. The landlord said there was much interest and if we wanted it we had to commit that evening. And that was that. So we moved here almost by mistake, but we’ve been there for twenty years. 

Some people plan their lives to the minute - ours seem to just happen. Sometimes things work out well, sometimes the s*** hits the fan…

Has the Pooky experience changed the way you think about lighting and home interior design?
Yes, of course. I’m not sure what I thought before, but I feel I have developed much more of a sense. It’s not as though I ever had any training but I do feel that my eye has been educated, so to speak. It’s been an interesting journey – over the ten years we’ve been around we have launched thousands of lights and shades, and I’ve been involved in every one. Of course we still sometimes get it wildly wrong and misjudge it, but our hit rate has improved considerably.

But gradually you begin to develop a sense of what will or won't work. As I say, there are bear traps at every corner… perhaps that’s the thrill. 

Pooky has had some amazing collaborations… Matthew Williamson, Morris & Co., GP&J Baker… which ones have you enjoyed the most?
Truthfully, we never had a bad experience and have been lucky to work with some amazing people, and businesses.

Yes, Matthew Williamson has stood out – he’s a collaborator in the true sense, we do it entirely together – and have given birth to some wonderful lights and shades. We have another launch with him in the new year. Again, it’s been great fun. We share the same sense of fun, colour and irreverence.

So much has gone right with Pooky… but is there anything that’s gone amusingly wrong?
Yes, there have been numerous howlers, of course. The most memorable is probably one trade show, we had about 400 bulbs on our stand and unfortunately one was faulty, and blew the fuse for almost a quarter of the show about an hour before it opened!

We had to scramble frantically to find the culprit – which we did with bare minutes to spare and some rather nervous smiles at our fellow stallholders for a bullet dodged!

Pooky has recently started making a splash in the USA - how is that going? Are there any notable differences with the UK?
It’s going really well. The American design aesthetic is basically very neutral so the arrival of Pooky was either going to fall flat on its face or wake up some latent desire! 

They are loving our shades. They’re just not available there unless you pay eye watering sums of money. Also our rechargeable range is going down a storm. It looks promising, but a long way to go….

Read lots more about lighting and interiors – including interviews with some very talented designers – on Pooky's famous inspiration blog.

See also:

Lights as visual treats – 9 ways lighting can bring everyday joy to your life