In Conversation With: Jakub Pollag
Jakub Pollag: The Maker Turning Craft Into Documentary
Jakub Pollag doesn't sit comfortably under one title. Designer, maker, engineer and now documentary film-maker, he runs zeitgeist.limited, a Central European studio specialising in bespoke lighting, hand-finished metalwork and unique glasswork, with manufacturing kept almost entirely in-house or within 150km of the studio. After years as co-creative director of a 300-employee glassworks, he stepped back toward the workshop floor, choosing hands-on problem-solving over abstraction. That instinct now extends to Why It Takes Time, his YouTube channel documenting the slow, skilled, largely unseen process behind genuinely well-made objects, a small rebellion, as he describes it, against a world built for instant consumption. In conversation with The Fluxx, Pollag talks glass, greenwashing, and why he'd rather own the entire process than hand off a single stage of it.
For readers meeting you for the first time, how do you introduce yourself, as a designer, a maker, a film-maker, or something that doesn't quite fit a single title?
In Conversation With: Jakub Pollag
zeitgeist.limited describes itself as a brand with an ever-changing portfolio, built to last and made to enjoy. Where did that philosophycome from, and was there a particular moment it crystallised for you?
I was working as a co-creative director of a 300-employee glassworks in Central Europe, and I felt I needed to go back to what I enjoy the most: coming up with solutions for how to bring something into reality. Creative direction at that point was too abstract for me. I like to get my hands dirty, spend time in the workshop, and rack my brain over impossible challenges in the R&D department.
Your work spans R&D and engineering, manufacturing, installation and even repair and restoration. Why was it important to own the whole process, from the napkin sketch to the final fitted piece?
I am obsessed with quality, and I believe you can achieve it only if you control the whole process. I would hate for a product we worked on to be installed in a way that doesn’t impress the client. I think the product is all of these bits from start to finish, including how it’s packed, delivered, and installed.
You specialise in bespoke lighting and tailored installations. What is it about light specifically that holds your attention as a material to design with?
We’ve worked with a huge array of materials on different types of assignments, and over time one thing really stood out as something we enjoy the most and have the greatest skill in: lighting. There are many great carpenters and metalworkers, but lighting requires you to work with multiple materials. It’s complex and challenging. It’s also one of the few areas of design that still innovates quite a bit. There are new components every few months that allow us to do something we couldn’t before, or simply deliver a higher quality of light, and I love that. It’s hard to innovate in seating. Most of the time, you’re just changing the form.
Hand-finished metalwork, unique glasswork, in-house engineering. Is there a technique or material you find yourself returning to, or one that still genuinely challenges you?
Glass is a material I’ve been working with for 15 years, and it can still surprise me at times. It’s quite a typical material for where I come from, so I had access to it from the start of my career, which isn’t that common.
You keep manufacturing either in-house or within 150km of the studio. How much of that is a sustainability decision, and how much is about control and quality?
It’s both. A 150km radius is a distance that allows me to get in the car and reach the factory within two hours if something goes wrong, which is a massive advantage. From time to time, we do produce something outside our radius, like the glass monkey sculptures we recently made for a pâtisserie in Prague. We produced them in Murano, Venice, which is famous for these figurative glass sculptures. It’s important to follow the rules when they make sense, but also to be able to break them when it serves the purpose and makes things better.
WITT is described as a small rebellion against a world where everything must be fast, perfect and packaged for instant consumption. What tipped you from making objects to making a documentary channel about making them?
Over the past five years, I realised I’d managed to gather around me a team of similarly obsessed people, and I thought that if we enjoy all these things, maybe somebody else would like to see them too. The process is usually very beautiful. Because we mostly do small-batch manufacturing, most of the processes we use are manual, carried out by people with a particular skill. There’s something intrinsically human about watching another person do something with a high level of skill and focus.
But it goes even further than that for me. As a kid, I loved watching Discovery Channel documentaries, and I wanted to become an inventor. Little did I know I’d end up coming up with technical solutions and documenting them in video format.
What do people most misunderstand about how long a genuinely good product takes to make, and what it costs?
I think part of it is the planning fallacy. We tend to hope things will take less time than they do. This happens even to us, despite all our experience. The second part of the problem is that most people are completely detached from how things are made. I like to compare it to food. Most of the time, when you have a burger, you forget to realise it used to be a cow. With products, we think they’ve somehow been pumped out of a factory. We don’t realise that somebody had to design and engineer them, that they passed through many hands during the making process, and that they come from materials like solid wood, which used to be a tree that grew for 30 years. It’s all extremely complex.
Has documenting the work changed the way you make it?
Not in the sense that we try to make things look better for the camera, but it does force me to visit all of our suppliers in person whenever I want to document the process. As a result, I often end up taking an even more hands-on approach than before.
Travel is often a source of creative renewal. Are there destinations you consistently return to, or recent discoveries you’d recommend to readers seeking culture, design and atmosphere?
I just came back from Hong Kong this week, which was incredibly inspiring, and I also visited Shenzhen in China, the mecca of manufacturing. That place is always a source of inspiration for me. But when it comes to culture and design, London is my biggest crush.
Hong Kong, Florian Wehde.
Beyond travel, are there restaurants, cafés or cocktail bars whose atmosphere, materiality or sense of style you find especially compelling, spaces you return to again and again?
We make a lot of products for the hospitality sector, so I also visit many venues as part of what I like to call my “pleasure research.” There are many. I love the Hi-Fi listening bar MOGO in Milan, Forbína Bar in Prague, and Brasserie Zédel in London.
What would you like to see more of in the design and craft world?
Honesty and quality. A lot of products are engineered to hit certain targets: price, manufacturing efficiency, and minimum material use. As a result, quality tends to decline over time as we prioritise buying products for less rather than buying products made from better materials. At the same time, we’re constantly being bombarded by media telling us we need all these products when we really don’t. I’d take a few high-quality products any day of the week over having more products of lower quality. I think we, as consumers, also need to drive this change by focusing on fewer things that bring joy and quality into our lives.
And finally, what would you like to see less of in the design and craft world?
Greenwashing through new “sustainable” materials. For me, the truly sustainable way to make products is simply to make products that last.
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