PLASA 2011 will see the announcement of a new presence in the global lighting industry – the Alderamin Group. Specialising in the provision of project solutions for the entertainment, leisure, architectural and retail lighting sectors, Alderamin Group comprises four companies: Ptarmigan Integration, Artistic Licence Integration, Artistic Licence Engineering and Ten Thousand Things.
The Ptarmigan and Artistic Licence brands are already well known in the industry. Now, their respective founders, Simon Fraser and Wayne Howell, have joined forces to create the Alderamin Group, an organisation that says it will reshape the lighting industry landscape.
“We believe we have a winning formula,” said Howell (pictured). “Ptarmigan and Artistic Licence complement each other fantastically well, as Simon and I have proved working together on various projects over the years. The Group represents a new breed of business entity – one with world-class, broad spectrum expertise and international presence, but swift on its feet, innovative and flexible.”
“Our new product distribution company, Ten Thousand Things, completes Alderamin Group’s portfolio,” added Fraser. “We are a collection of like-minded thinkers who actively support public domain protocols and client choice — and we share a belief that installations should reflect their designer’s creative vision, uncompromised by proprietary or outdated technology.”
Ptarmigan has extensive experience in projects integration, encompassing lighting, lasers, show control and projection. With offices in Hong Kong, Macau and Singapore, the company provides a strategic presence in this highly active region — not to mention the insight of its staff on the ground.
In the UK, Artistic Licence Engineering has developed control, lighting and test equipment for over 20 years. In parallel, Artistic Licence Integration caters for the growing projects market, with many high-profile clients in Europe and the Middle East.
Finally, the newly created Ten Thousand Things (a phrase found in Chinese literature referring to the material diversity of the universe) offers sales and support for a wide range of lighting products. These range from consumable items such as power and data cables to the latest in lighting technology. The company, based in Hong Kong, has its own growing product range and operates three internationally respected franchises — City Theatrical and Green Hippo (which distribute in Hong Kong and Macau) and Artistic Licence Engineering (which distributes more widely across Asia). Ten Thousand Things thus provides the Group with a highly versatile sales arm.
Speaking in his role as Artistic Licence Integration MD, Howell explained the factors driving the decision to create an alliance of companies: “Increasingly, I am spending my time on big budget architectural installations,” he said. “Having worked on a number of blockbuster projects with Ptarmigan, it’s clear that there is a growing need to define the state-of-the art as we go along. Off-the-shelf technology doesn’t cut it for many of these jobs; custom-build solutions are becoming the norm, and we no longer consider data volumes of several hundred DMX Universes as unusual.”
“We realised that the best way to stay ahead of the game was to create a group structure, enabling us to offer our project clients all the necessary expertise in-house,” concluded Fraser. “From our experience working on large installations, we also realised that we could greatly improve efficiency by creating our own supplies company. Ten Thousand Things now fulfils that role, although it is, of course, also a strong trading entity in its own right. This is the vision that led to our combined organisation – Alderamin Group.”
