Lighting multinational opens design center in Barcelona

Austrian multinational XAL, which makes lighting systems, has opened a design and development center in Barcelona. Named Barcelona Creative Lab, it is the company’s only design center outside Austria. The new 300-meter center cost a million euros and has created a dozen jobs.

Located in the city center, the Barcelona Creative Lab will design and engineer lighting products for large facilities, as well as decorative lighting for houses and hotels. XAL opened the new office with the help of Catalonia’s business promotion agency, ACCIÓ, and the city’s business development agency, Barcelona Activa.

The firm’s Barcelona head, Xavier Fernández, justified the move, saying that in the Catalan capital there is a “a very important series of companies in the lighting sector with a very interesting network of distributors, above all in the decorative area.” Along with its trained professionals and design schools, Fernández said Barcelona is the “ideal destination.”

XAL, whose headquarters are in the Austrian city of Graz, was founded in 1989 and currently employs more than 1,300 people. The multinational company has offices in some 30 countries, although all of its production is centralized from its head office, which employs a team of over 80 engineers.