I first met In Common With’s founders, Nick Ozemba and Felicia Hung, in 2023, in Milan. They were presenting their collaboration with Sophie Lou Jacobsen at Palinurobar, which had opened a year and a half prior and that night was incredibly crowded. (It’s still one of the most popular aperitivo spots in town, especially during the annual design weeks.) We had a brief exchange and never spoke again until last year, when they visited us in Paris and we began discussing a collaboration.
Ozemba had reached out to Marcantonio, asking to keep a stock of Laguna~B glassware in their showroom, Quarters. “He replied, That’s great. But you can’t sell online unless you do something custom. I said, Okay. Have you ever made lights before?” Our joint collection, which they named Lido, consists of modular lighting systems (sconces, chandeliers, and pendants), each featuring Laguna~B’s most iconic designs—like the Goto—or techniques—like the millefiori, which we are experimenting with in our collection MILLE.
In April, one month before our collaboration launched, I returned to Palinurobar to meet Hung and Ozemba. The counter and the tables—which Davide Coppo, founder and writer, had kindly opened for us the morning after a party—still bore the wet marks of the glasses left the night before. The bar was oddly quiet, and felt like a pleasant hideaway from the restless agenda of events unfolding at the design week. We discussed the Lido series—which was the duo’s first experimentation with Murano glass—and unpacked the unique approach that brought them from a two-person studio to a 30-people company in less than ten years.
Hung and Ozemba met at the Rhode Island School of Design and immediately realized they shared a similar “aesthetic sensitivity” and a “relentless work ethic.” After school, they moved to New York. Ozemba, who is a native New Yorker, says he can’t picture himself living anywhere else. (I can’t help but notice, in fact, that their design is very New Yorker: classic, modern, and rich.) For a brief time they worked separately—she for independent design firms, he as an interior designer—until, in 2018, they rented a portion of a 20 sqm shared workspace in Brooklyn, and launched In Common With.
Limited space contributed to their choice of focusing solely on lights. “Small space, small things.” Light, Ozemba notes, is an essential element in every interior project, as it generally “changes the space more than furniture does.” But making lighting fixtures also allowed them to work on large quantities, a goal the designers set from the start, and which has since shaped the direction of their business. “We launched with the intention of growing. We designed the products in a modular way. Our first collection had 30 pieces; it was a big catalog, with elements that people could mix and match. It made it seem like we were a much bigger company than we were,” he says.
This unique manufacturing model—that favors designing the individual components instead of fully building the product—allowed them to immediately secure bigger contracts, working for hospitality and large residential projects, which normally need dozens, sometimes hundreds of units. “Instead of having three designs and then figuring out how to make more, we already had the structure to produce in series. That set the tone for how we built our processes: in communications, customer services, and production,” Ozemba says.
Nick Ozemba, who’s 34 and leads brand creative, marketing, and all client-facing operations, says his background in interiors helps him anticipate the needs of their bespoke clients. “I was our customer, so I knew what interior designers needed. I was determined to be one step ahead of them. There’s so much variability to our product, different finishes and combinations: now people come back to us again and again, putting different versions of one design into different projects. We invented a recipe, and now we sort of shape it every single time. Instead of building an art practice, we built a brand.”
That’s the main difference between In Common With and the majority of independent businesses populating the contemporary design scene. In the past decade, design has shifted from an industrial past dominated by a few names and powerhouses manufacturing in series, towards a constellation of galleries and art-design practices making collectible, limited-edition, and one-off pieces. According to Hung, this has to do with the fact that, especially after the pandemic, “people sought a deeper connection with the things around them. Lighting and furnishing [the space you live in] is a way to have a relationship with it.” Social media played a role in the rise of collectible design, favoring storytelling and popularizing once niche finds with a larger audience willing to spend more on homeware that feels unique and irrepeatable.
In this scenario, as a designer, “having a small studio or your own individual art practice allows you to sustain yourself more easily.” While many embrace that, Ozemba says, “We don’t. We are intentionally trying to scale this company.” In order to be sustainable, he continues, you need “operational acumen,” which In Common With has proven capable of providing.
Their success is the product of an elaborate recipe, where scalability is just one of many factors at play. Their knowledge of production with “capital P,” as Hung calls it, allows In Common With to play with the processes. Felicia Hung, 35, oversees production. Her practice is driven by an obsession with craft, materials, and the often-invisible processes that bring objects to life. “Even in industrial production you can create variations that feel unique on the final piece,” she says. “We study each technique deeply, the constraints, the possibilities, and find the specific points where we can introduce something unexpected without starting from scratch every time. That tension between the industrial and the handmade is intentional. It’s what allows us to produce work at scale without losing what makes each piece feel considered,” Hung says. A good example is In Common With’s Flora collection, based on a technique called fazzoletto. “We developed a mold for the glass to form the base shape, but still use the traditional centrifugal motion to create the waves on the shade, each shade has its own natural variation.”
The Lido series was informed by a similar mindset. In the collection, Laguna~B’s Goto pattern—which follows a precise “recipe” but results in combinations of murrine and glass canes that are different every time—is applied to the essential shapes of the lampshades, hand-crafted in Murano and later assembled onto industrially manufactured structures.
In Common With sits at the intersection of two worlds, proving that a third way is possible where a thoughtful industrial design and a new craftsmanship can coexist and thrive on the market. Hung and Ozemba are inspired by the companies that have made the history of Italian design–which they feel carried “a sense of rock-and-roll” in its heyday. At the same time, they’re implementing their “scalable systems” by collaborating with multidisciplinary artists and craftspeople, like Brooklyn-based ceramist Danny Kaplan and painter Dylan Rose Rheingold. “We’re dedicated to craft and technique and reinterpreting it,” says Hung.
All along our conversation, their words resonate in my mind, echoing the exchanges I have with my colleagues at Laguna~B’s communications office. Our job is to make sure that people understand and are inspired by what we do; and that the company’s voice stays genuine and rooted in the present. At work, we debate everything. Animated by a spirit of impatience towards nostalgia, we look around, trying to learn what’s good and be inspired. We critique (a lot) and eventually settle on what we don’t want to be or do. We make mistakes and discuss them for hours, trying to figure out how to “correct the shot,” like Marcantonio says. “I think we’re doing something really similar,” Hung tells me. “Taking something old and making it contemporary.” It’s not an easy task, and accomplishing it calls for a commitment to take risks. To move away from pre-written paths and invent your own specific formula, test it and try it until it finally pops.