I Am The Brand

Lee Broom is one of today’s most celebrated product designers and marketers. We quizzed him about his many-faceted creative journey, storytelling and the importance of showmanship.

Opposite: Lee Broom photographed at the Space Furniture showroom in Singapore. In the foreground is the Fulcrum Chandelier in a gold finish, which was installed for the Park Life exhibition preview.

“Every creator has a muse. Who is yours?” Kelley Cheng asked British designer Lee Broom during his Australasian tour in March at Space Furniture Singapore. “Oh, I’m so self-obsessed,” he answered. “It would be me. Sounds terrible, right?”

Actually, not really – it makes sense, and Broom’s candidness has been well received by the new generation of consumers who appreciate a good hustle. Broom’s vision has made him an international name. “I design from an emotional space, not a practical space. But at the same time, I am not afraid of commercialism,” he shared. He combines opposites, adds an edge to the classic, and presents something familiar in a new way. “When people see my products, I like to make them say, ‘I’ve seen something like this before, but not like this.’ I think that’s why my products are so well received,” he said.

Broom’s creative career evolved organically. It started with acting. From the age of seven, he was a professional child actor and a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company who dreamed of becoming an adult actor. Then at 16, Broom designed a couple of stage looks for Madonna in a competition. (“One was a power suit with fishnets and the other a rhinestone hotpants suit – classic Madonna.”) He won the first prize: a two-day studio experience with fashion designer Vivienne Westwood.

Impressed with teenaged Broom, Westwood offered him an internship. “It was the height of the supermodel age in the ’90s. I got to dress Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell,” he recalled fondly. After the glamorous ten-month internship, Broom decided to pursue fashion design and took a three-year fashion design course at

Central Saint Martins. He started making frames and mirrors and selling them at Portobello Market to make extra cash in his final year in school. Then he and a Japanese college friend, Maki Aoki, started offering decorating services to restaurants and bars, which became a side business. And business was good.

“At this point I was still going to be a fashion designer. I wanted to start my own brand. The interior design gigs just kind of happened, but then I thought, ‘Well actually, do I need a fashion empire? It’s a risky and expensive setup and here I am with a service-led business with no major start-up costs’,” Broom shared. “I was also designing these things that people used in real life, and that had always been important to me,” he added. Thus he made his second creative pivot, this time to interior design, by establishing interior practice Maki Lee in 2003. Four years later Aoki returned to Japan and Broom established his eponymous studio, doing mainly interior projects and bespoke products for clients.

“Then I went to Milan and saw the product design scene,” he said, explaining his studio’s shift in focus to product design. Broom had always had a lot of product ideas and at this point in time he had saved enough to take the risk to create a product line. He elaborated: “In a way, working as a product designer was more similar to fashion design than interior design was. You design the collection then you release it at a show and people buy it. That appealed to me.”

Broom has grown really adept at the ‘show’ part of the process. A Lee Broom showing in Milan has become a must-see in recent years. In 2015 he presented Salone del Automobile – a travelling installation that saw the back of a delivery van decked out like a palazzo. In 2017, celebrating the tenth anniversary of the brand, he turned a derelict vault under Milano Centrale station into a contemporary version of a fairground, complete with a life-sized carousel that displayed his products. In 2018, catering to the audience’s thirst for immediate gratification, he made sure that the products displayed in his presentation were available to purchase online at the same time they were unveiled to the public. The show was his biggest commercial hit.

He skipped Milan this year in favour of showing more in Australasia. His biggest showing this year was in March in

Sydney. The Park Life exhibition converted 4,500 square feet of the underground car park at Space Furniture Sydney into a maze inspired by eighteenth-century Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens in London. Visitors were taken on a journey of discovery through hidden passageways dotted with tableaus and vignettes showcasing Lee Broom products in a new light.

Broom’s colourful creative journey has made him a great storyteller who knows how to pace and spread the love. Even in a brief sojourn in Singapore to introduce Park Life, he made sure he emphasised the importance of the event by making the worldwide debut of one of his products during the event.

Asked about how important he thinks showmanship is for designers today he said, “It is important to me to a certain extent, because I am the brand… Is it important to other brands? I don’t know. But certainly If you’re going to put your name on something, you have to be prepared to go out and talk about it.”

So what’s next for Broom? “We’re going to continue to expand the business. I’m at a point in my life where I can design anything with the right people,” he said.

“If you’re going to put your name on something, you have to be prepared to go out and talk about it.”

Lee Broom