Robe Brand Guidelines: The Czech Moving-Light Maker From Rožnov pod Radhoštěm

Two partners, homemade fixtures and a small Moravian town.

Robe comes from Rožnov pod Radhoštěm, a small town in the Wallachia region of the eastern Czech Republic. The company was founded in 1994 by Josef Valchář and his business partner Ladislav Petřek, who started out making their own lighting and effects fixtures, the London trade site TechieTalk reported in October 2014. The Czech news site Seznam Zprávy traced the story further back in March 2024: Petřek began building his own lights in 1989, and Valchář joined him soon afterwards.

The partnership still runs the business. Seznam Zprávy reported that the two founders hold most of the company, with two smaller partners holding the rest, and that both serve as managing directors. Robe’s own website lists both men with the title of CEO and splits the job between them: Petřek looks after finance, corporate infrastructure, staff and the development of the factory site, while Valchář is the public face of the company, travelling to exhibitions and distributors and carrying customer feedback back into product development.

By its twentieth year TechieTalk described Robe as one of the larger makers of moving lights. It marked the anniversary in 2014 with a gala dinner for about 300 guests on its “Robe Arena” stand at the PLASA show at London’s ExCeL centre, TechieTalk reported, by which time it worked with roughly 90 distributors across Europe, the Americas, Africa, Asia and the Pacific Rim. The company now describes itself as “a leading global manufacturer of entertainment lighting.”

BMFL, MegaPointe and the trade-show circuit.

Robe’s products are the automated fixtures used on concert stages, in television studios and at large events: moving heads that pan, tilt, change colour and shape the beam on command from a lighting console. Seznam Zprávy described the range in 2024 as professional stage and event lighting for TV studios and big shows such as concerts.

Two fixtures anchor the company’s own account of its recent history. The BMFL — short for Bright Multi-Functional Luminaire — was launched at PLASA in London in 2014, where, the company says, it won Robe’s fourth PLASA Innovation Award, and it grew into a family of related fixtures. The MegaPointe, a compact multi-purpose moving head, followed in September 2017; Robe says it won the 2018 PIPA award for best light, the company’s third PIPA win after the MiniMe in 2014 and the BMFL WashBeam in 2016.

Robe’s website also groups its products into families and services rather than single hits. It lists the iSeries, RoboSpot, ProMotion Lighting and Robe Maritime as separate sections. Trade shows mark its calendar: the BMFL was first shown at PLASA in London, and at Prolight + Sound in Frankfurt in 2015 the company showed ten new products, LSi Online reported in April 2015. Those included the BMFL Blade, which added framing shutters to the range, an LED strobe and the DL4 family of LED moving lights, with a lightshow on its stand every half-hour and staff who between them spoke more than 20 languages.

Its regional network has grown with the range. Robe’s website lists subsidiaries for North America and the Caribbean, the Middle East, Asia and the Pacific, the UK and Ireland, Germany, France, and Czechia and Slovakia. Robe Deutschland was launched at Prolight + Sound in April 2017 and opened its headquarters at Ismaning, near Munich, that October, the company says.

Light, consoles and the show floor.

Stage and entertainment lighting is sold to a small, technical audience — lighting designers, programmers, rental companies and venue technicians — and its makers present themselves accordingly. The product is the picture: moving heads, LED washes and profile fixtures photographed against black, often with a single beam cutting through haze, so that the shape and colour of the light carry the message rather than the housing.

Much of that presentation happens on the show floor. Fixture makers routinely launch new products at trade shows such as Prolight + Sound in Frankfurt, PLASA in London and LDI in Las Vegas, and their stands are built as small productions, with timed light shows and rigs of their own fixtures. Robe, for instance, marked its twentieth anniversary at PLASA in 2014, and Claypaky first showed its one-word logo at LDI in 2016, according to trade reports and the company.

Ranges are usually split by use. Touring fixtures are sold on output, speed and weight; theatre fixtures on quiet running, framing and colour rendering; architectural lines on outdoor ratings and long-term installation. Control is its own category, and several fixture makers now also own console or data brands, so screenshots of control-desk interfaces sit beside photographs of the lights themselves.

The visual language that results is consistent across the sector: dark backgrounds, saturated beams, and colour-temperature scales running from warm to cool white. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company — who founded it, who owns it and where it says its fixtures are made — and attributes to the company anything that rests on its own word.

Czech factories, a British console maker and an Australian control company.

Robe makes its fixtures at home. In March 2024 Seznam Zprávy reported that production takes place at Valašské Meziříčí and Karviná in the Czech Republic, alongside plants in the UK, and that most of the company’s more than 900 employees work in the Czech factories. Its website carries a “Made in the EU” heading.

In recent years Robe has bought into lighting control. In June 2023 Robe Lighting s.r.o. agreed to acquire Avolites, the British maker of lighting and video consoles, which had been in business for 47 years, LSi Online reported; Avolites was to stay based in the UK under its existing management. Valchář said Avolites “has always been at the pinnacle of lighting control, with products that complement our lighting fixtures.” In March 2024 Seznam Zprávy reported that Robe had also bought LSC Control Systems, a company founded in Melbourne more than 40 years earlier that makes control, power and data equipment for theatres, opera houses, theme parks and TV studios, adding Australian production to the group.

The group now presents several brands together. Robe’s website lists Anolis Architectural Lights, Artistic Licence, Avolites and LSC Control Systems alongside the main Robe brand, so the company that began with fixtures now also covers architectural lighting and the consoles and data systems that run a show.

For a design guide, Robe shows how a privately held fixture maker can grow into a group while keeping its founders’ name for the hardware on stage. Compare Claypaky, the Italian moving-light maker from near Bergamo, and MA Lighting, whose consoles run many of the same shows. For this guide we use stage black, a deep red and haze grey with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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