Steve Conant makes Cover Story of Business Monday, Burlington Free Press, 6/01/09 by John Briggs
Steve Conant, president and founder of Conant Metal & Light on Pine Street in Burlington, works in a small office behind the store, his dog, Josie, lying under the desk at his feet.
Conant transferred to the University of Vermont in 1976 from a Connecticut school, to earn a wildlife biology degree. He planned to get an art degree as well and become a medical illustrator.
That didn’t happen.
To support himself in school, he helped build the Deja Vu restaurant on Pearl Street (now Parima’s), doing metal work on railings and coat racks and the lighting. “I was always passionate about making things,” he said.
Other restaurateurs saw the work at Deja Vu and began calling Conant, who worked out of his garage for two years in the late 1970s, then in a rented space. In 1983 he bought the now spiffy 80-year-old Pine street storefront, formerly the office for the Burlington Venetian Blind company, for $50,000.
The price, on a “derelict” on Pine Street, took account of a foot of water in the basement and no plumbing. In 1989, he bought the rest of Pine Square, the complex of buildings rented partly these days to Recycle North, and renamed it The Soda Plant, in tribute to its history as a bottling company.
His office is Vermont plain, but Conant’s decorative metal and lighting products aren’t. He sells to “the mindful consumer,” a phrase he now uses often.
What lies ahead?
“Measured growth,” he hopes, “so long as it aligns with my values around creativity and sustainability.”
We may be on the brink of a new age, Conant says, of “mindful consumption,” with a company like his well-positioned to embed LED technology in restored or replicated or newly designed high quality and, importantly, “green” lighting fixtures.
The promise to the buyer is a product that has a history: an industrial steam gauge made into a light; the repurposed insulator, plus an array of locally designed indoor, outdoor, ceiling or table lamps and shades.
Where others might see a broad coarsening of culture and a generalized acceptance of mass-produced “junk,” as he puts it, Conant is counting on a “push-back” by mindful consumers against the commonplace.
He’s putting his money on the kids.
“I believe they will become the most mindful consumers of all,” he said.
Metal & Light 