Louis Poulsen

About

Louis Poulsen A/S is a Danish lighting manufacturer. Its head office and showroom are at Kuglegårdsvej 19-23 in Copenhagen K, and its factory is at Industrivej Vest 41 in Vejen, where the company also keeps its warehousing. It divides its catalogue into three product categories, decorative, outdoor and indoor architectural, covering pendants and table, floor and wall lamps as well as bollards, post-top luminaires and wall-mounted fixtures for exterior and public spaces. The company dates its establishment to 1874 in Copenhagen, though it did not begin in lighting. Ludvig Poulsen founded it as Kjøbenhavns Direkte Vin Import Kompagni, bringing fine wines to the Danish market, and it changed direction as electricity arrived in the city; by 1892 the focus had shifted to lighting. Ludvig R. Poulsen opened a shop in Istedgade in Copenhagen selling lighting and electrical supplies, and his nephew Louis Poulsen joined the family business as a shop assistant in 1896. By 1906 Louis Poulsen had taken over the business, and the head office was later moved to Nyhavn 11. In 1914 Sophus Kaastrup-Olsen became a partner and the company changed its name to Louis Poulsen & Co. The collaboration with the Danish writer, designer and architect Poul Henningsen (1894-1967) began in 1924 and still shapes much of the catalogue. A PH lamp won gold at the Paris Exposition in 1925, and the PH Luminaire was designed for the Forum building in Copenhagen. Henningsen's three-shade system, which layers shades so that the light source is not seen directly, underlies the PH 5 pendant he created in 1958 in response to the changing shapes of incandescent bulbs and the glare they caused. The PH Artichoke followed the same year, designed for the Langelinie Pavillonen restaurant in Copenhagen, where it still hangs; it carries 72 leaves on twelve tiers, much of its production is still carried out by hand, and each leaf is hand-assembled in Denmark. Since 2014 the company has issued one limited edition lamp a year, each available for three months and drawing on the same three-shade principle. Other Danish architects followed. The fixtures Vilhelm Lauritzen designed for Radiohuset entered the Louis Poulsen line in the middle of the 1940s, and more of his designs were added in the 1950s; the VL Studio collection, launched in 2022, reinterprets that work. Arne Jacobsen designed the AJ lamps in 1957 for the SAS Royal Hotel in Copenhagen: a table lamp, a smaller table lamp, a floor lamp, a wall lamp and a table-mounted lamp were all in the hotel after its inauguration in 1960, part of an overall design concept Jacobsen created for the building. Work with Verner Panton started in 1959 with the Topan lamp and went on to the Panthella table lamp, whose hemispherical top shade directs light down onto a trumpet-shaped base that reflects it. Alfred Homann has designed more than ten product lines for the company, among them the Nyhavn and Kipp families, and Louis Poulsen is the only lighting manufacturer he has worked with. Jens Møller-Jensen's Satellit post-top outdoor luminaires have been in use for four decades. Louis Poulsen established subsidiaries in West Germany and beyond during the 1960s and was listed on the Copenhagen Stock Exchange in 1977. The designers it lists on its own site also include Louise Campbell, Olafur Eliasson, GamFratesi, nendo (Oki Sato), Clara von Zweigbergk, Øivind Slaatto, Christian Flindt, Jakob Wagner, Mads Odgård, KiBiSi, Peter Bysted, Anu Moser, Shoichi Uchiyama, Vilhelm Wohlert, Mikkel Beedholm of KHR Arkitekter, Bystrup Arkitekter & Designere, Carsten Fischer of Henning Larsen, and Jakob Lange of BIG Ideas, the product division of the architecture practice BIG. Anne Boysen won the Next Danish Design Classic competition in 2020 with her Moonsetter design, which Louis Poulsen launched the following year. The company has marked its 150th anniversary with an anniversary collection and a book, Louis Poulsen: First House of Light. Production and warehousing are in Vejen. In its 2024 sustainability report the company recorded 416 full-time-equivalent employees, 95 of them in subsidiaries abroad and 321 in Denmark, with the majority of the Danish staff working at the production facility; raw materials, finished goods and components sourced from 39 strategic suppliers in Denmark, southern Europe and Asia; in-house production of components and assembly of finished goods; sales-channel revenue of EUR 119 million; and 2,049 distribution points. The same report puts a typical product lifetime at around 20 years and output at roughly 500,000 products a year. It sets out an eco-design framework, life-cycle assessments of product carbon footprints prepared with the Product Environmental Footprint methodology and the ISO 14067 standard, a take-back scheme it describes as being piloted, and a Care & Repair service for restoring older fixtures. Environmental product specifications are published as downloads on individual product pages. Louis Poulsen has been owned by Flos B&B Italia Group S.p.A. since December 2018; the group, which was called Design Holding until May 2024, is jointly controlled by the Carlyle Group and funds managed by Investindustrial. On 11 June 2026 the Danish foundation-owned investment company Chr. Augustinus Fabrikker announced an agreement to acquire the entire shareholding in Luminous Designs Investments ApS, the parent company of the Louis Poulsen group, subject to customary closing conditions including regulatory approvals and with completion expected in the second half of 2026. The Danish Competition and Consumer Authority's public merger register listed the case on 24 June 2026 with no decision recorded as of 3 August 2026, and Flos B&B Italia Group still lists Louis Poulsen among its brands. Louis Poulsen products are sold through the company's own website and through distributors and dealers. The company reports showrooms in Copenhagen, Oslo, Tokyo, Singapore and New York, directly operated stores in New York, Miami and Tokyo, a North American head office in New York City, and regional hubs in Copenhagen, Singapore and Tokyo. Its fixtures are made for both consumer and commercial markets, indoors and outdoors.