What made you want to do the work you do? Please share the full story.
Before Festoon House existed, I was running digital marketing work for a mix of hospitality and trade clients, and I kept hearing venue managers complain about the same thing. They’d spend real money lighting a rooftop bar or a function space, and by the following summer half the globes had blown or the cabling had split from sitting in direct UV all day. I heard that story from operators in completely different parts of Sydney with completely different budgets, which told me it wasn’t one bad supplier, it was the whole category.
I checked what was actually on the market and almost everything was imported lighting built for climates far milder than ours. Nobody selling to Australians was engineering specifically for our sun and our heat. That gap is what pulled me out of agency work and into building Festoon House, starting with product built around IP67 waterproofing and UV-resistant cabling instead of whatever was cheapest to import. It wasn’t a lighting obsession that started this, it was watching the same avoidable failure happen to people I respected over and over.
How is AI changing your business? What changes are you making to adapt?
The biggest shift has been in how people find us before they buy. Search used to mean ranking on Google for specific terms, but now AI assistants are pulling answers directly from product pages and summarizing them, which means the way we write technical content matters more than the way we optimize for keywords. We’ve restructured a lot of our spacing guides, voltage limits, and installation specs into clearer question-and-answer formats so the actual information is easy to extract accurately.
Internally, we’re using AI tools to speed up the parts of the business that used to eat time without adding much value, like drafting first passes of product descriptions across a large catalog. But every technical spec still gets checked against the actual product before it goes live, since a wrong voltage figure or IP rating in a listing is the kind of mistake that costs us the trust we’ve spent years building.
What are the 3 things you like best about your work and why?
The first is hearing directly from an electrician or venue manager that a product held up on a job where the last supplier’s lighting failed, because that’s the exact problem I started the company to solve. The second is working with our in-house lighting designer on a genuinely difficult install, like a full commercial venue fitout, since that’s where the technical side of the product actually gets tested against real conditions.
The third is mentoring young electricians and builders coming into the trade. Watching someone who’s just starting out learn what actually separates durable lighting from the cheap version of it means the standards we built the business on get carried forward by people who’ll be specifying lighting for decades.
What do you think are your 3 biggest weaknesses and how are you overcoming them?
For a long time I was the single point of contact for every trade relationship the business had, which felt like good service but was actually a growth bottleneck since I couldn’t personally handle every account as the company scaled. I’ve been fixing that by formalizing the trade program with proper documentation and account processes so customers get consistent support without it running through me personally.
I also tend to hold onto product decisions longer than I should, wanting to verify every spec myself before it ships, which slows down how fast we can expand the catalog. I’m working on trusting the team we’ve built to handle first-pass verification while I focus on the calls that actually need my judgment. The third is that my SEO and digital background made me overconfident early on that content alone could carry growth, when paid channels and partnerships needed more deliberate attention than I gave them at the start.
Tell us about a time you were dead wrong about something.
Early on I assumed a two-year warranty would hurt our margins badly enough that we’d need to price out most budget-conscious customers to afford it. I built the first year of financial projections around a much higher return rate than what actually happened, expecting the extra coverage to attract people who’d buy cheap and lean on the warranty instead of taking care of the product. What I got wrong was underestimating how much the warranty would change who was buying from us in the first place.
Customers who specifically wanted a two-year guarantee turned out to be the ones who’d already been burned once and were done buying cheap lighting, which meant our actual claim rate stayed far lower than I’d modeled. I’d been so focused on protecting margin against worst-case behavior that I nearly priced the warranty down before we’d even launched with it, and that would have gutted the exact thing that ended up differentiating us.
Have you considered buying a business? Tell us about that experience.
I looked seriously at acquiring a smaller lighting supplier in Victoria a few years ago, mainly because it would have given us an existing trade customer base and a physical presence outside NSW without building it from scratch. I spent weeks going through their supplier contracts and customer list, and the numbers looked reasonable on paper.
What killed the deal for me was digging into their actual product specs and finding their cabling wasn’t rated to the standard we required across our own range. Buying the business would have meant either quietly lowering our own quality bar to absorb their existing stock, or writing off a large chunk of what I was paying for. I walked away from it, and it reinforced for me that an acquisition only makes sense if the product standard underneath it matches what you’d build yourself.
What do you value most and why?
Following through on a specific promise matters more to me than almost anything else in how I run the business, because that’s exactly what was missing from the lighting industry when I started Festoon House. A vague quality claim is easy to make and easy to break, but a two-year warranty is either honored or it isn’t, and customers remember which one happened to them.
That value extends past the product into how I deal with people generally, whether it’s a trade account that’s been with us for years or an apprentice electrician I’m mentoring for the first time. Doing what you said you’d do, consistently, is the whole reputation a small business actually has to compete on against bigger companies with more resources.
What achievement are you the proudest of and why?
Getting Festoon House’s lighting into venues connected to groups like Merivale and the National Gallery of Victoria still means more to me than any revenue milestone, because those accounts didn’t come from a sales pitch. They came from word moving through an industry that had already been burned by cheap lighting failing on real jobs, and choosing us specifically because the product held up where others hadn’t.
That’s the achievement that actually matches why I started the company. I wasn’t trying to build the biggest lighting retailer in Australia, I was trying to fix a specific problem venue managers kept describing to me, and watching commercial operators trust the product enough to specify it for high-profile spaces is proof that problem actually got solved.
What is your favorite book and why?
I keep coming back to Shoe Dog by Phil Knight, mostly because of how honestly it captures the early years of a company where nothing about the business plan was obvious and most of the growth happened through relationships and stubbornness rather than a clean strategy. That period matched a lot of what building Festoon House felt like, going straight to electricians and venue managers and figuring out the product through their actual complaints rather than a market report.
What stuck with me most is how much of Nike’s early identity got shaped by problems that looked like setbacks at the time, supplier issues, cash flow scares, product failures. Reading it during Festoon House’s first couple of years made the hard stretches feel less like signs something was wrong and more like the normal cost of building something real.
What advice would you give to your younger self and why?
I’d tell myself to formalize processes earlier instead of running the trade relationships through me personally for as long as I did. It felt like better service at the time, being the one who answered every technical question directly, but it quietly became a ceiling on how fast the business could grow because I was the bottleneck for every account.
I’d also tell myself that a specific guarantee beats a vague quality claim every time, and to lean into that earlier and harder. It took me longer than it should have to realize the two-year warranty wasn’t just a policy, it was the clearest proof I had that the product was actually different from what else was on the market.
Who has been your biggest mentor in life (personal or professional) and how have they helped you?
The venue managers and electricians I worked with in the early days functioned more like a collective mentor than any single person did, because they were the ones who actually taught me what durable lighting needed to look like under real conditions. I could research materials and specs on my own, but I couldn’t have learned what actually fails on a rooftop bar in February without people who’d lived through it telling me directly.
That relationship shaped how I still make product decisions today. Before we change a spec or add a new line, I want to hear from someone installing or using the product on a real job, not just look at what a supplier’s data sheet claims. That habit came directly from listening to the people who pointed me toward the problem in the first place.
Just for fun, what is your favorite ice cream flavor?
Salted caramel, no contest. There’s something about the contrast of sweet and salty that keeps it from getting boring the way plain vanilla or chocolate eventually does for me.