Lyon Empire: a one-person product house in London
I build and operate my own products. Lyon Empire is a one-person product house in London; everything below is something I made and still run. None of it is client work.
Michael Chalmers
hello@lyonempire.co.uk · LinkedIn
The register
two ventures, one co-founded studio
Prasso
A directory of yoga, pilates, reformer and wellness studios across the UK, wrapped around a private record of the classes you actually take.
Bubba
A desk object with an NFC chip in it, and an iOS app that locks your distracting apps until you get up and tap the object. Moulded puck, cast concrete base, brass inserts set into the pour so it comes apart cleanly.
Also: The Reset Rooms, a pilates and wellness studio in Crouch End that I co-founded and that trades today. It is a separate venture, not a Lyon Empire product.
Smaller: two Chrome extensions, both published on the store. Vinted Favs filters and sorts Vinted favourites; Cart Tools for Shopify logs, copies and edits carts and products, and pulls SKUs, for testing themes. Neither is the business, but both are mine and both are in use.
How I work
five rules I actually keep
- Write the decision down.
- Every project runs a numbered decision log, so a choice made in July can be argued with in December by someone reading the reason rather than guessing at it. Prasso's is past 120.1 Plenty of them are small and a few turned out to be wrong, which is the point: you can only revisit a decision you can find.
- Make the ugly one first.
- Nothing gets specced in detail until something rough exists and runs. A finished plan gives you nearly the same satisfaction as a finished thing without the risk of anyone using it, so I keep the planning short on purpose and get to a version that can be tried and disliked.
- Alone first, then open the door early.
- I get to something real on my own before I show it; that is how I work best. The discipline is bringing it out while it can still change, rather than when it is done and I am attached to it.
- Say what a number is made of.
- Any figure I publish carries its sample, its period and how it was counted. A number without those is decoration, and decoration in a data product is a liability.
- The machine proposes, a person decides.
- Models gather and structure heavily, and nothing they produce reaches a customer without a person clearing it first. That gate is in the schema, not left to good intentions, because good intentions do not survive a busy week.
Contact
| general | hello@lyonempire.co.uk |
|---|---|
| founder | Michael Chalmers, LinkedIn |
| office | Lyon Empire Ltd, London, United Kingdom |
| updated | 3 September 2026 · log |
Sources
- Prasso decision log, entries 1 to 127, February to September 2026. Counted from the repository at one commit, not estimated.
