Founder and Creative Director of Matter Made.

Since its inception in 2010, design house Matter Made has created unique and unexpected lighting, furniture and design objects, and represented some of the most innovative international design talents.

This month Founder and Creative Director Jamie Gray was included in Wallpaper* USA's 400 - a list of people shaping creative America in 2024. This inclusion is testament to Jamie's contribution to spotlighting contemporary design, makers and emerging talent to the world.

A recent addition to our lighting offering at Simon James, we admire Matter Made's considered aesthetic, and their unwavering commitment to quality craftsmanship.

We are thrilled to share our conversation with Jamie, to hear about his beginnings in the design industry and the ethos behind Matter Made.

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Matter Made was born of a desire to make very high quality design with a focus on exceptional craftsmanship and a real hand touch. In the very beginning it was with the intention of being an American brand through and through - from the designers I worked and collaborated with, to the workshops we partnered with.

As time went on, I realised this was limiting the end result of the products in our early collections. Sometimes I couldn’t get the product to the finish line because of limitations with production partners here in the US, sometimes they were just too expensive to produce at all, and sometimes it just felt like there might be more room to explore a broader design sensibility if I worked with designers and production partners internationally.

All that said, the desire is still the same - to make products that are timeless and with a laser focus on the execution. I set the bar quite high; I don’t want our collection to just look the part, I want it to feel like it’s made of the best materials, then finished and assembled to the very highest standards.

At its core, Matter Made is still an American brand but now we work with a stellar group of designers and production partners all over the world. The small community I’ve created around our mission is where it all began, and is still what it’s all about for me.

Like many people I’ve met in our industry, my love of design started with vintage - primarily mid-century modern and neo-vintage design. I began buying and selling furniture for a few years back in the '90s before I decided I wanted to do something different and leave some kind of mark in the design landscape.

I decided to go back to school when I was almost 30, so it was a kind of leap of faith to drop my past life and start over as a student with no real formal creative background. I finished my arts education in the early 2000s with a degree in sculpture, and I pretty quickly found myself working for a few artists in New York. I was also making the odd piece of furniture here and there.

I eventually landed on the idea of opening a shop to represent the underrepresented brands; creatives and designers I was coming across and admired. I opened the doors to Matter in 2003. Pretty soon after opening Matter, people were asking and encouraging me to make and manufacture products. I really wanted to but had zero experience, so it was a very slow process.

In the very early days I enlisted a few American designers to make the first collection of lighting and furniture - it was super exciting and while it was well received, it was also a bit problematic. Everything was so expensive to produce and consequently cost prohibitive to buy.

It was a steep learning curve and the collection has completely changed since our Matter Made launch in 2010. It also took me years to find my voice and to feel confident enough to add my name to our roster of designers. 

I’m currently focusing on slowness and expanding some of our collections. We’re developing a new thing or two but you’ll just have to wait and see what we’re cooking up. As we’ve transitioned to primarily manufacturing lighting, it’s extra important to me that we continue to do our best to make unique work, and avoid bringing redundancy to the market.

I love to work slow and to really consider what becomes part of our output. When I started manufacturing I felt like we had to constantly be adding more to the collection but that’s just not the way I work. It wasn’t easy to settle into a slower pace but I’ve found it to be really rewarding giving time and space to product development, and to building relationships with the people I work with.