orluna
A New Manufacturing Model for Premium Lighting Systems
A New Manufacturing Model for Premium Lighting Systems
Orluna LED Technologies and Hymid partnered to redesign and injection mould key components for Orluna’s world-leading architectural lighting range, combining material innovation with precision engineering and adopting circular economy principles.
Components were re-engineered to improve their design flexibility, allow easy installation and enable disassembly/repair at the end of their life.
The result is a UK-based, scalable manufacturing model that dramatically reduces Orluna’s environmental impact, strengthens their supply chain resilience and demonstrates that recycled plastic injection moulding can meet the demands of premium, design-led manufacturing.
The Challenge
Orluna LED Technologies are a global-leading designer and manufacturer of premium, high-performance, architectural lighting.
In common with much of the UK lighting industry, Orluna relied on aluminium components for its light fittings, manufactured in the Far East and shipped over to the UK.
Environmental impact is a material point as Orluna has invested heavily in improving sustainability by moving away from single-use manufacturing and virgin materials towards product circularity - creating products that can be repaired and reused over a 20-year lifecycle.
Additionally, aluminium has limited design flexibility, restricting the designer’s ability to develop more complex and finely engineered component geometries.
The project objectives were therefore to:
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replace the metal with an alternative material without compromising performance
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enable product circularity to improve environmental sustainability
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localise production to reduce lead times and improve supply chain certainty
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ensure the final product enhanced the reputation of a premium global brand
"Precision, surface quality and material integrity are non-negotiable at Orluna. They're what our customers demand of us, and what sets our products apart in a crowded market. The challenge was holding that standard while using European-sourced, 90% recycled material, manufactured in the UK, within a circular business model. Making it work meant finding a partner who shared that ambition."
Joseph Broadhead
Design Engineer, Orluna
The Development Partnership in Action
The two companies came together as development partners, with both parties fully invested in, and embedded within, the redesign and engineering process. Orluna retained design authority throughout, setting the vision and defining the performance requirements, while Hymid was tasked with translating Orluna’s vision into a manufacturing reality.
The new plastic mouldings within the Midi Downlight needed to fit together easily and remain firmly in place through a normal product lifecycle. However, at the end of the product’s life, they had to be easy to take apart to be recycled into new products. The precision required to achieve the required aesthetic and operational standard was exacting, with just a few degrees of mismatch considered unacceptable.
Hymid’s design engineers worked closely with Orluna’s team to re-engineer each component for form, fit and function, ensuring that performance matched or exceeded their original metal counterparts. Key to achieving this was the additional design freedom afforded by the plastic which allowed the designers to better integrate each component’s intricate shape and pattern.
Initially, it was believed the only option would be to use virgin plastic because of the requirement for a V0 fire rating while also meeting UL certification requirements; standards which are typically beyond the specification of recycled plastics. However, working with Hymid’s extensive supplier base, through diligent research and experimentation, Hymid managed to identify a recycled solution that would achieve the necessary ratings.
The next challenge for both teams was to manage the inherent variability of recycled polymers. Unlike virgin materials, recycled plastics behave unpredictably, shrinking differently and expanding under varying conditions, so tolerances are harder to control. Through extensive prototyping and a six-month trial period, components were refined to ensure repeatability and confirm their ease of assembly across real-world environments to ensure that contractors working on site could easily install the fittings.
Finally, the tooling had to be capable of managing high volume production requirements with the high level of accuracy required for these complex products and could do so at scale.
"Working with Hymid felt less like briefing a supplier and more like extending our own design team. They were involved from early concept, which meant moulding and tooling knowledge shaped the geometry rather than just validating it afterwards.
Their input on draft angles, gate positions and wall sections meant the part and the tool were designed in parallel, not in sequence. Having that depth of expertise on hand throughout made the difficult problems feel solvable."
Joseph Broadhead
Design Engineer, Orluna
The Solution
The new lighting range now has circularity embedded within its modular construction to allow easy repair and replacement, in line with Orluna’s 20-year reuse guarantee and the company’s sustainability commitments.
The use of recycled plastic reduces the carbon footprint of each unit and lowers the company’s reliance on finite raw materials to deliver a more balanced use of resources. Meanwhile, reshoring production to the UK means that Orluna has lowered both its transport emissions, reduced production lead times and its exposure to global supply chain volatility.
Hymid has become an extension of Orluna’s development capability, and the partnership has demonstrated how the right technical development partner can translate a vision into commercially viable innovation.
Orluna had the courage to completely reinvent a product range to become a circular economy business so that all of its lights come with a 20-year repair and reuse guarantee.
Together, Orluna and Hymid have established a new model for how lighting products can be conceived and manufactured in the future.
