Reflecting on 2024, what would you say were CORE Lighting’s biggest accomplishments or milestones?
I suppose I should start in January when we launched our COMPACT product. This is around the time of the event production show. and it’s the first uplighter development we’ve done for quite a few years. It’s quite a radical change to the existing product.
Then around the middle of the year, we upgraded the ColourPoint Mini, so it is now about 50% brighter to give a market leading output of about 46 watts from just its two little LED arrays.
We moved premises in the summer to a more suitable building for the longer term, which is now a combined office and a warehouse space. That was quite an exciting kind of find, it’s an older premises, an old mill and it’s full of character.
We’ve also been working on solar recharging products. We have festoons, border path lighting, decorative fairy lights, all running off solar powered battery packs.
Our FLOOD lights traditionally have been used a lot in sports sectors, but we’ve seen added interest from more markets such as construction, maintenance and safety and lots of other things.
We have also been involved in temporary lighting for forestry sites, parks and leisure establishments, farm diversification.
And lastly we’ve redeveloped our website for the first time in a few years!
Were there any unexpected challenges this year, and how did the team overcome them?
The biggest one really was moving into these premises that we’re in now by necessity at short notice back in June, also during a family crisis with a close member of the extended family at the same time. The move was because of business expansion and it all happened very quickly. The old premises were meant to be just temporary premises for COVID times, initially for about six months or so, but in fact we were there for four years!
How has CORE Lighting’s presence in the Holiday Parks and Land and Leisure sectors evolved over the year?
We’ve seen a phenomenal response certainly from the shows that we’ve done this year. Not only in holiday parks and the leisure sector but also landscaping. In gardens you very often have cabling all around which is destroyed or eaten by the rabbits or other creatures, we provide a quick solution that works and creates a nice atmosphere. By adding some of the solar and off-grid capabilities of the products which I mentioned earlier it really addresses a new market for these kinds of products but combined with the uplighters where we can light large trees and landscapes we’ve seen a lot of interest.
Which new products or technologies introduced this year have had the biggest impact on your clients?
I’ve already mentioned solar recharging of our energy point products.
The COMPACT launched in January. It was significantly smaller and lighter than our other uplighters, with a similar output power to the ColorPoint Mini. It means it’s very lightweight for loading on transport. It’s much more portable and easier to carry without compromising its light capabilities, still lasting 12 hours on a full charge, but each unit is now under 1.5 kg and a whole charging case under 20 kg which makes it phenomenally light considering the performance of the product and what it outputs.
What role has industry events, like the Land Leisure & Tourism Show, played in shaping CORE Lighting’s strategies and connections?
We’ve met a whole host of new clients who’ve not come across our brand before. We’ve had lots of exciting conversations where people have sort of seen the light, if you like! We now have a large client base of some fairly famous names and large institutions. The 16-year heritage in what we’ve been doing means we are now being referred by other people within these new sectors. Occasionally we meet people we know historically from Event lighting who’ve also diversified which renews our contact with them.
How has customer feedback influenced product development or service improvements this year?
I think a lot of comments have come about the age of some of our designs. We’re one of the first brands to develop this sort of technology and some of our designs are older, but we’ve been developing as we’ve discussed, and have ongoing projects. It’s allowed us to start reviewing our designs again and that includes doing a lot more of the work in the UK without pushing the cost up.
So that’s by smart design revisions which started with the COMPACT, which was developed for a large public project in 2022 called Green Space Dark Skies, working with a fantastic organisation called Walk the Plank who were basically commissioned by the Unboxed Festival in 2022 to create this enormous project. We manufactured and supported nearly 2,000 units for this product. We’ve been developing this product now which is ready to release into the market for a wider customer base. That product had evolved from customer feedback on the project needing to be extremely robust to carry to the tops of mountains. We actually put a handle on top of it for that project. but it’s the same project product that we are now shipping without the complex GPS wireless and handle. It’s lighter than everything of similar brightness on the market, smaller than everything else to minimize the sort of packaging size and weight on an event.
Through customer feedback on the ColourPoint Mini and review of that product has allowed us to increase the brightness by 50%, to make it a market leading product and better value for its investment too. If you compare its price against other similar brightness products in the market, it certainly offers good value for money. We’ll be able to make further announcements in the near future, as you can imagine, it’s allowing us to look at other things.
What has CORE Lighting done to stay competitive and innovative within the industry?
One of the key things for us is that any new products are being designed to continue to allow UK manufacturing whilst remaining competitive on price and in some cases even lower on cost than other products of similar capability. We’ve got genuine innovation going on now because we are designers. We’re not just buying stuff from someone else. We’ll be able to talk about that soon.
We also have some simple app capabilities back up and running again. There were lots of reasons why they disappeared for a while, but they’re now back on again. They’re kept deliberately simple for the wider customer base that we cover, we will evolve those over the next few months.
How has CORE Lighting’s approach to sustainability evolved over the past year?
The main asset that we have in the products is the longevity of the products, the way they’re designed, the long-term serviceability of them.The age of the products actually is an asset because they’ve been in the market a long time. The parts haven’t changed much or at all, so it means the customers can keep running their products for longer. which has got to be a far more sustainable approach than making new and disposing old products.
We’ve seen a good secondhand market which we’ve been able to service. The original ColourPoint product was designed 13 years ago and it’s still going strong in a Version2 format and it’s still a superior product but the essentials of the product are the same as 13 years ago.
We’ve had many customers engaged in getting hold of spares and also had quite a few customers wanting servicing of products. As a result, a couple of years ago, we set up a facility where we can service our own products at the factory in the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire, so within the UK .
We’ve added solar panel recharging to our EnergyPoint battery packs this year.
Lastly, most of our parts are now coming from the UK and even local sources. The COMPACT new design has more than 80% of the parts coming from the UK and many of those are within a one two hour drive of where we’re based.
What are some trends you foresee for the lighting industry in 2025, and how is CORE Lighting preparing for them?
Before 10 years ago, most of our competitors were all UK, Western European and American manufactured brands manufacturing in their home countries. Manufacturing for those brands has almost entirely disappeared to Asia. But we’re now starting to see some of that coming back. We, as a business, are at the forefront of this having not moved much other than sourcing some parts seven years ago and since then we’ve been bringing a lot of parts back, as we’ve discussed earlier.
LEDs have become the norm and in LED technology over the last seven years the technology hasn’t changed much so on the back of that the products haven’t changed that much either, especially as the trend has been for Asian companies to evolve different models of the same thing. As a result, innovation in lighting has been small in the last 8 years. So we are working on designs which have been re-thought a little in concept and capability.
What would you say is CORE Lighting’s biggest strength as a brand, and how has that evolved this year?
Our innovative design and low assembly cost allows us to maintain competitiveness. We have a huge established bank of customers in many different markets with strong brands and famous buildings both at home and internationally. We’re seeing requests for strongly engineered and innovative solutions and have plans to develop this further over the next year or two.
How has CORE Lighting adapted to customer needs in large-scale lighting solutions for safety and ambiance?
Over the last five or six years we’ve been a lot more successful in outdoor lighting and we’ve become a lot more involved in people’s projects.
2018 started with us doing a large forest lighting project for the National Trust in which through lighting selected trees for dramatic effect we also bounced light off the trees at the same time lighting the path for safety.
For the Green Space Dark Skies project in 2022 there were 26 events using the 2,000 lights we’d manufactured, being used across the entire UK including Giants causeway, and all the tops of the highest nation peaks of the UK – Snowden, Ben Nevis, Sca Fell, Slieve Donard. There were huge safety issues in getting people up and down those places which used the uplighters as path lights in places as well as the handheld uplighters being used as lanterns when they weren’t being used for filming the immersive lighting effects on those peaks. Safety and ambience at festivals and events is crucial.
Large scale events such as fireworks displays, require ambience and safety again. You can light a fireworks display with lights on trees and objects/buildings around it to make it look more attractive.
Car parks are lit using our temporary battery FLOOD lights traditionally but a lot of people have been using our battery festoons recently because they also double up as safety lights and they’re quite attractive, but also quite bright in long connected lengths.
If you could share one lesson from 2024 with your team, what would it be?
I think if I look at the last four years, even our history actually, I would say perseverance has got to be the main lesson or main word I would use as a lesson. Perseverance. We were one of the first companies to develop battery powered event lighting 16 years ago, if not the first we were certainly among the first couple. We’ve seen Asian manufacturing come to dominate the lighting sector from around 10 years ago and then COVID knock the stuffing out of the event sector market for 18 months really after 2020. So we just had to persevere through that and find other ways of keeping ourselves going which we did as many other companies who persevered did too, but certainly many fell by the wayside.
What excites you most about CORE Lighting’s plans for next year?
We’ve actually got new models we’re working on for sales in existing and new markets. So we’ve got quite a few discussions going on there and I would say the main thing for us is building on what we consolidated in 2024 after two or three years of turmoil for ourselves and the industry. It’s really this last year that was a consolidation year for us, so we want to build on this much further and secure and grow our own position over 2025.