Traditions Specialty Lighting Professionals: An Enlightening History
Driving around the Madison area during the holiday season you are bound to see countless homes and businesses decorated in hundreds of glowing lights for Christmas. It is a guarantee that a handful of those lights were installed by us, Traditions, to help spread just a bit more of the Christmas spirit to everyone during this time of year. With more than 5,543,125 lights installed and over 315 projects completed it is hard to believe that we have only been helping others to create Christmas memories of their own for six years. In this blog, we are going to take a dive into the history of Traditions, and how two friends who loved the holidays were able to join forces and turn that passion into what Traditions has become today.
Traditions was founded in October of 2011 by Zach Zweifel and Phil Sutter. Although Zach and Phil’s “official” business partnership began in 2011, Zach and Phil’s friendship began much earlier. Six years prior to the founding of Traditions, Zach and Phil met while attending high school in Mt. Horeb, WI where each was on the school wrestling team. Throughout their days in high school, they found themselves working together on several unique projects such as building a house with other students and creating a floating concrete canoe. It was this mutual passion to work on different projects and create new and unique things that led them to start their own business.
Mt. Horeb High School
At the age of 20, Zach and Phil realized that working for someone else was just not for them. They had discussed starting a lighting company for some time when Zach remembered that there was a training seminar that was being organized by a supplier in Nebraska. After some research, Zach and Phil discovered that the seminar was only a few weeks away, and thus was the turning point for their idea. Either they decide to attend the seminar, or put their idea on the shelf for a bit longer and maybe never see it through.
Luckily, they decided to attend the seminar to learn about an industry many people know very little about. They packed up a truck and made the seven-hour journey to Nebraska on a Friday night. With very little startup money and resources, they decided to skip buying a hotel room for the night and sleep in the truck. The next morning, they attended a full-day of training at the supplier’s location gaining crucial hands-on experience that they still use today. After the training, they headed home and that was it; they were in business……well not legally…..yet. They took care of the necessary paperwork and began their journey to create Traditions.
One of Traditions’ first home Christmas lighting projects.
Starting out, Zach and Phil had very little experience in professional Christmas lighting. Zach had hung some lights at his parents’ house for a few years and Phil (up until this point) had just observed them from the road. They tried to learn as much as they could about the industry and decided to print some cheap postcards to shove into people’s mailboxes. Due to their lack of initial funds they couldn’t afford to send the postcards through the postal service, so they traveled from neighborhood to neighborhood hanging them on mailboxes and any other appropriate places they could find. By some amount of luck, people began to call them and for its first season Traditions landed a whopping six clients. To say Zach and Phil felt accomplished is an understatement.
The following season led to 20 clients, and the season after led to 25. In their fourth year, Zach and Phil began to hunker down and really get serious; this was no longer a side hustle…it was a business. They ended their fourth season with roughly 50 completed projects, and after that the next season saw 82 projects completed. The sixth year ended with their largest growth to date….135 completed projects! Throughout the first four years of the company, Zach and Phil both carried other full-time jobs. However, they both reached the point where each had to make the decision to leave their stable jobs and trust their ability to create and grow a company that could support them.
Today, the company not only supports Zach and Phil, but 2-3 other full-time employees and up to 10 seasonal employees. Over the years, Zach and Phil have learned everything they possibly could on Christmas lighting and expanded their services to low voltage landscape lighting and even event lighting. “It’s been a thrill to see how our vision has changed and grown over the years”, said Phil.
One of Traditions’ new multi-colored RGB Christmas Trees
While Traditions is still a very small company, they have their eyes set on making 2017 another record year, and showing Wisconsin that they are here to stay. Traditions’ goal is to one day light up the whole state of Wisconsin and help everyone to create Christmas traditions of their own!
