Meet the Trio Behind Cerno: 15 Years of Innovative, Sustainable Lighting

Bret Englander (left) joined friends Daniel Wacholder (center) and Nick Sheridan (right) to start Cerno in 2009. The lighting fixture company creates sustainably made products that are designed and manufactured in its Aliso Viejo space. “I love to give people a tour so they can actually see that we’re making it,” Englander says. Guests may be lucky enough to watch handblown glass being made during their visit. Shop Cerno’s products at various O.C. locations, including Lightopia at SOCO, which was the fi rst company to carry the brand 15 years ago.

Why did you three come together to start Cerno?

It wasn’t about starting a business to make money. It was about doing something that we thought we’d love for a really long time. Daniel, Nick, and I have been good friends since early childhood. It felt natural when we decided to go into business together; there was just that inherent trust. We’d been in the trenches together in so many ways, such as being adrift in the ocean without an engine or wind. After high school, we all went our different ways for school; Nick studied architecture, Daniel studied engineering, and I studied journalism. We had a diverse but complementary skill set.

How was Laguna Beach an influence?

Laguna has always been a hub for creative and artistic people who had a dream to make a living doing what they loved, and that infl uenced all of us. We all grew up surfi ng and being on the beach, and that appreciation for nature becomes your teacher. It obviously brought us all together. Had our parents not moved there in the early ’70s, none of this (would have) ever happened.

Why lighting?

Lighting at the time was being disrupted by LEDs, but there were no high-end LED products in the marketplace. We walked a design fair, and there wasn’t one LED light fixture in it. And then we showed at our first design fair, and we were the only ones in the building showing high-end LED lighting. This new technology was really liberating for the design process; you’re no longer restricted to designing around a lightbulb. Now you can have this little module that produces quite a bit of light that can fit into these really thin profiles. Lighting design has probably gone through the biggest transformation in the last 15 years because this technology gives designers a new set of tools to work with.

Tell us about Cerno’s design.

We love natural materials. It’s very much inspired by our upbringing, constantly spending time outside; nature has been this infinite source of inspiration. Wood has very much been a signature material for Cerno since Day One. More recently, we’ve gotten into handblown glass. We make everything 100 percent at our factory. We have raw materials coming in and finished products going out, and that just gives us this really intimate relationship with every product we produce. Sustainability is a broad term, but we do everything we can to manufacture as sustainably as possible. Recently we installed a robust solar power system on the roof, which provides the majority of our power. The natural materials we use are regenerative, like wood, and we try to use wood that is grown and harvested responsibly.