Orplid Glass: from
the Glass Encyclopedia

Orplid Glass was set up in war-time London by Fritz Lampl and his brother-in-law Josef Berger, refugees from Nazi influence in Vienna, Austria. During the 1920s and 1930s they ran a workshop in Vienna which made "Bimini" glass, characterised by its very delicate opaque and latticino vases and little figures and animals.

They brought the name Bimini with them to London, but shortly ran into registration problems and invented a new name "Orplid". The Orplid logo is shown at the top left of this page. Fritz Lampl was a poet and publisher before he became a glass-maker. The name Orplid came from a German poem by E. Morike.

In 1938 Fritz Lampl built his glass furnace in the basement of his house in London and started making high quality art glass buttons and brooches and hatpins. During the war years (1940-45) and for at least six years afterwards, Lampl had great success with his Orplid glass and ceramic buttons and brooches. His glass was frequently featured in design and fashion magazines. Orplid gave employment to a number of artist refugees from Vienna whilst they settled in to their new country.

After the war foreign imports flooded the UK market. Lampl's small hand-made operation could not compete with mass-produced buttons from countries such as Czechoslovakia and the company struggled in its last years until Lampl's death in 1955.