Up and Comer of the Year

Flux arrives on the design scene

By Jennifer Pfaff

Flux Design Ltd., Milwaukee Owners Jesse Meyer and Jeremy Shamrowicz

Whether it’s an eye-catching trade-show display or a sophisticated bar, the staff of Flux Design Ltd. approaches its projects with unrelenting passion and perfectionism.
That commitment, according to Flux’s clients, is putting the firm on the map.

Owners Jeremy Shamrowicz and Jesse Meyer started the company in 2000. Now with 10 employees, the firm focuses on design, interiors, furniture and building and installing fixtures. Flux’s clients include Milwaukee homeowners, restaurants like Eve and Sauce and corporations like MasterLock, Starbucks and Ducati Motorcycles.

“I always tell Jeremy the reason he’ll never be rich is because he takes every project and treats it like it is his home where his children will live,” said David Larson, co-owner of Terrace Bar on Milwaukee’s Water Street. “... They have such an amount of pride. They will not turn out anything that isn’t up to their own high standards.”
Flux’s high standards, mixed with healthy doses of innovation and practicality, launched Larson’s bar into “100 of the Worlds Best Bars,” put out by Images Publishing Group in Melbourne, Australia. In fact, of the 18 U.S. bars to make the list, three — Eve, Terrace Bar and Vucciria — are in Milwaukee. The Flux team had its hands in all three.

The company’s international recognition from Images highlighted Flux’s creativity, ability to work with just about any material and willingness to try the untried. Those same virtues prompted Wisconsin Builder to name Flux Design the Up and Comer of the Year.

“The combination of their passion and knowledge will make them kings of the world,” Larson said.

Perhaps underlying every success story at Flux is the team’s willingness to listen to customers and find ways to meet their needs while pushing ideas to the extreme, said Robert Joseph of Joseph Properties, a Milwaukee-based residential developer.

Not only has he hired Flux to design his projects, but he hired the firm to design and manufacture distinctive components for his own house. There’s a staircase with amazingly few connection points, and a doorway that mimics the entrance to a vault. They’re just what Joseph wanted.

“I knew how I wanted the staircase,” he said. “I knew I wanted a grand front door. I can work with these guys. I can bounce ideas with them, and they will push them.”

But Flux’s knowledge has applications beyond materials and methods.

“A lot of ideas we, the owners, would have done would have been huge mistakes — business mistakes — and that didn’t happen only because of them,” Larson said of designing Terrace Bar.

For instance, Flux made a scale model of the bar that convinced the owners some of their ideas would obstruct sound traffic flow.

The 19-foot-wide bar would have become even narrower if traditional walls went up. Flux designers developed the exposed cinder-block concept that allowed the owners to maximize available space.

But the design team has no problem accepting ideas from other sources.

Take the firm’s work at Vucciria, where Flux designed and built fixtures while under contract with lead interior designer Jon Schlagenhaft. Nearly everything Flux did required a close working relationship with Schlagenhaft and Ann Kustner Lighting Design. Almost every fixture in the bar is tied to the lighting scheme, said Joe Megna, co-owner.

“They had a lot of input into the materials,” he said of Flux. “They execute everything — wood, glass, metal.”

With Flux’s samples, all the entities involved in Vucciria’s design could collaborate on important decisions, Megna said.

“They are very, very talented people, very innovative in their approach to creating the components of a design, whether it is their own or someone else’s,” he said.