
The exhibition installed at Toronto showroom Standard Shop this week has been no less than 10 years in the making. Last week, the lighting dealership cleared away its usual mix of designs for a full takeover by Vancouver manufacturer A-N-D, staged to commemorate the brand’s first decade in the lighting industry. And what a decade it has been. The retrospective, dubbed “10 Years Later” (a follow-up to a similar showcase displayed at Vancouver’s Inform last fall) retraces A-N-D’s trajectory from the early days of LED technology through to recent hits like the Iris floor lamp.
Founded in 2014 by designers Caine Heintzman and Lukas Peet alongside business director Matt Davis, A-N-D is an acronym for “A New Detail.” As that name might suggest, the beauty of the brand’s approach often lies in the attention that it pays to technical components. In turn, “10 Years Later” places special focus on the inner workings that power A-N-D’s creations, all of which are assembled in its home base of Vancouver.




While the end results are plenty sculptural, their forms are primarily driven by a quest to maximize quality of light and deliver intriguing illumination effects. The vision seems to be working. In 2023, two A-N-D designs (the eyeball-like Iris pendant and the architectural Column) were selected by our AZ Awards jury as Award of Merit recipients — a rare feat for a single manufacturer. Iris and Column are also two of the stars of “10 Years Later,” displayed in their finished form as well as dissected into their core components. But perhaps the real pièce de résistance is a glowing screen assembled from the modules that compose A-N-D’s Vale series.
A-N-D opened “10 Years Later” with a jam-packed IDS Toronto afterparty on a chilly Friday night, when the warm glow of its lights proved especially comforting. (To help everyone layer up for the walk home, the evening also included a custom party favour: a commemorative Reigning Champ T-shirt.) Before the party kicked off, we sat down with Heintzman, Peet and Davis to reflect on the milestone that had inspired the big bash.

1
Origins
How did the three of you initially connect?
- Matt Davis:
We’re all mountain boys. Caine and I know each other through snowboarding, and Lukas grew up in Canmore. So when we met him through other design connections in Vancouver, it was just an instant match.
- Lukas Peet:
We all come from pretty complimentary backgrounds for starting a design company — me and Caine from a design education background, and Matt, who had been working in the industry in sales, from a business background. And as we started talking, we found that we all had a shared idea about where we wanted to head and the level that we wanted a lighting company to be at when it came to aesthetics and quality and functionality.
Building off that, what were your initial ambitions when you started A-N-D 10 years ago?
- Caine Heintzman:
In the beginning, we really saw an opportunity based on how LEDs were developing. Before that, they had been used in a more technical way, but we recognized that we had this chance to create new form factors that took things a lot further.
- MD:
Instead of just designing an object and then putting a light bulb in it, we could go in a totally different direction.
- LP:
Our first few collections, Button and Slab that I designed and Pipeline by Caine, were not really possible with pre-existing illumination. In a weird, interesting way, we were kind of on the same level as a lot of more established brands in that one regard — we were all trying to figure out new ways to work in lighting and in our case, that gave us the chance to really push the boundaries.
What was the biggest challenge with starting your own company rather than trying to license your designs?
- CH:
It was very much a grassroots effort. We had to figure out how to actually make things and get them manufactured consistently in Vancouver, and it was a very steep learning curve.
- LP:
I think we’re stronger today because of that — we have a clear understanding of every part of the business, because we’ve done it ourselves. Beyond just figuring out the product, we have had to figure out the brand and what we stand for, and work to make sure that everything aligns.
- MD:
It’s been a slow burn. We didn’t want to blast off into being the number one brand — we want to be up there, but we want to earn it. One important thing that we’ve worked to ensure is that there is a certain level of professionalism all the way through — from when a light comes out of the box, through to installation and use.

2
Evolution
You’ve gained a lot of exposure from shows like Euroluce, ICFF, 3DaysofDesign and Alcova. How have those played into your strategy in terms of building a global brand?
- MD:
Choosing fairs like Euroluce in Milan and 3DaysofDesign in Copenhagen was a way to position us alongside our peers. At the same time, Lukas and Caine are designing in a bit of an isolated bubble in Vancouver, so when we do arrive at these shows, we bring these fresh viewpoints that have really catapulted.
- LP:
Also, we have a strong knowledge of our product and who our clientele are, and we try to reflect that by balancing industry trade shows with installations that satisfy a certain creative need. Together, the two give different types of customers the information they need to understand the brand and what our lights can be.
- CH:
Looking at Milan, Euroluce is comparatively a more commercial show than something like Alcova, which is a more artistic, installation-based way to present. So showing in both of them has given us room to explore different portrayals of our products, showing how they function in different spaces and allowing for sales, but also strong emotional responses.


How have you felt your approach evolve from your initial designs to some of your latest launches?
- CH:
It’s like exercise — we’ve been training for 10 years, and the more you do something, the more familiar you are with your own process and how to navigate ideas. You start to speed up some of the decision-making. Building off past design ideas that have worked definitely influences how you move forward — now you start off by thinking, “How do we push that and improve it?”
- LP:
As time goes by, technology has also evolved. We’ve been using dim-to-warm technology for a number of years now, which has a really nice effect, and that has also trickled back into the original designs, which we’ve updated to a certain extent. What’s cool is that if I look back at the early original products, I’m still proud of them, and they still have a place in the collection. But now I would say that we’re really utilizing a bigger R&D budget, and evolving further technically. After navigating the huge struggle of figuring out how to get things manufactured in Canada — especially in western Canada — our knowledge has progressed to a point where we’ve started to explore different materials, working with different vendors and constantly gaining more insight.
You source components from vendors in North America, Europe and Asia, and assemble everything in Vancouver. What have you learned from taking such a hands-on approach to production?
- MD:
Every single component we use — from the LED board to the wires — is made for us. Everything we’re doing is designed — it’s not just off the shelf, and that’s unique in our industry. The biggest thing that I have learned from that is that with any material — aluminum, steel, anything — you can be doing something the same way for years, and then all of a sudden, just because one tiny thing changes — the material is a slightly different consistency, maybe — the whole production becomes totally different.
- CH:
Some of the most beautiful parts of our design are actually the inside components and details that no one sees.
- LP:
For me, working with glass has been the biggest challenge. With a machined metal, someone can just follow your drawing and there’s easy ways of communicating the finished product. Whereas glass is a molten, moving, constantly changing material that you can’t touch while you’re making it. So communicating with the vendor who is the one actually creating it is a challenge, because you’re trying to talk through someone else’s hands. But that has also been amazing and rewarding, because each of our glass projects has given us so much more information and knowledge that carries over onto the next project. And it forces you to push the boundaries. A vendor might say, “No, it has to be like this.” But if you come at it from a different angle, sometimes it does ultimately work and everyone’s happier for it.


One of your latest launches is a floor lamp version of Iris, which originally debuted in 2021 as a pendant. How did you go about adapting the design into this new form?
- CH:
From my perspective as a designer, when the core form is strong, then it adapts well to different uses — but we’re never forcing it. If something doesn’t work as a floor lamp, then we’re not going to do it. In this case, it felt like the idea could be carried further, and a floor lamp was the next logical step. I think even if I didn’t have an Iris floor lamp in mind at the beginning, we tend to approach our designs as a set of components, which makes them fairly flexible. Iris already had a smaller version and a larger version that scales up the same core components.
Originally, Iris was building off of what I had learned while developing our Vale series, in terms of playing with materials to find an illumination effect that felt fascinating. The entire fixture is a bit of a mystery when you look at it — you don’t really understand where the power is coming from, or how the light source is just floating in the middle. There’s a lot of complex technical design making that work, and you have to work very accurately in terms of the assembly. But when it came time to adapt it into a floor lamp, it was just a matter of figuring out how it could function best through some drawings and testing.

3
Recognition
How did you plan what’s on view in your 10 Years Later installation?
- MD:
The goal when we did this installation (first at Inform and now here at Standard Shop) was not to necessarily show our products, but instead to show the change that has taken place over 10 years — the process, the development, and then the end results.
- CH:
It’s a show of what we’ve worked on, and we now have a good catalogue of parts to show how things have evolved. The boxes that we’re using to create the podiums are a reference to that — they’re the same boxes that we use in our design studio to archive all our prototypes. And we shipped some of those prototypes here so that people can see that rhythm of the development process.
- LP:
Ultimately, we also wanted to show the attention to detail that’s in all of our components. These lights are not just produced anywhere — every product that we have ever made and sold is assembled by hand by our team in Vancouver. So it’s a much bigger network than just the three of us.


What comes to mind as you look at some of the photos that you have included in the installation from your early days?
- LP:
It’s humbling and sometimes comical to look at those photos. We’ve come much further, much faster than we initially thought we would. But on the flip side, we’re there working every single day. It’s incremental — we become half a per cent better every day. So it’s cool when you have these moments where you’re forced to look back.
- CH:
When we started, it really was the three of us wearing a lot of hats. We’ve grown and more people are involved now, but the three of us are still super involved in everything. Things have just gotten smoother.
In 10 years, you’ve managed to become one of the rare Canadian brands that’s recognized by a large international audience. How has it felt to have your designs resonate with the global market as well as they have?
- MD:
It’s a massive compliment. All our design heroes ship their products from Italy or Denmark. Caine studied in Berlin [at ECUAD and Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin], Lukas studied at Design Academy Eindhoven, and I worked with a lot of European lighting brands before this, so it’s clear that there’s a sensibility in what we offer that has been understood in the European market. We now have agents and dealers in all the major cities and countries. Of course, there are logistical challenges with that, so we now have a warehouse in Denmark and a small office in Copenhagen to help.
- LP:
As our sales network and distribution grows, we have less contact with where the lights end up. Matt has seen some of our lights on TV shows, or we’ll just walk down the street in some city that we’re traveling to, and we’ll notice our product in some little restaurant or cafe that we didn’t know about. You can design a light fixture, but you have no idea where it will go — what the ceiling height or ambiance will be wherever it ends up. It exists in its own little world until people take it and use it.


Even though you have this global impact, you’re also a Vancouver brand at heart, and I’m sure that the fact that you do all your design and assembly in Canada resonates with Canadian customers. Do you see that contributing to A-N-D’s identity?
- CH:
I think it does matter where things are made, but to me it’s in a different sense. Our company is built with a mindset of employing local people to make our products and contribute to the quality of them. I think it’s fantastic that we’re able to do that while living in Vancouver — I mean, there’s a reason why we all live there — but I think that same mindset could also be applied in any other place.
- LP:
It’s not something that I personally focus on — I just rely on the fact that Caine and I were born here, and our upbringing and experience contribute to whatever might be Canadian about the designs. I’m definitely proud and happy that we have found a way to do this here, and hope that we can inspire others to find ways to create within Canada. But our outlook is global, so it is about finding that balance of the two.
On the design side, it might also give a certain amount of freedom, because there aren’t the same traditions to uphold. I’ve seen some European brands that create beautiful things, but they also feel a strong need to follow in a tradition — so they can maybe only take a half-step away from that tradition each year. Whereas we’ve done things that are quite different, because our approach is driven by function.
- MD:
I think being Canadian actually lends itself well to that global outlook, because we’re not scared to talk to people from different countries and cultures of people.
Can you share any teasers about the three new collections you’ll be launching in Milan this April?
- LP:
Each of our 2025 launches falls into a different target market or use. One of them is our first indirect light. Some of the designs are quite ambitious and starting off as pendants, but have room to grow over time, while one of them is launching as a complete collection right out of the gate — pendant, floor lamp, table lamp, ceiling and wall sconces, in three finishes and three sizes.


- CH:
We’ve been working with different materials and new processes. I was able to start experimenting with borosilicate glass, which I found really fascinating, and I’m really excited about the end results.

- MD:
We’ll be showing at Euroluce, and then also at another location in Milan — an almost 6,000 square foot space that’s an old bank. So again, we’re able to satisfy the contract side, and then also the more experimental, emotional side. We’re really excited.
Q&A: A-N-D Tours Us Through Its First 10 Years — and Teases Milan Launches
The Vancouver lighting manufacturer celebrates a major milestone at Standard Shop in Toronto — and shares the first images of what’s next.