Profiling: Lovelight at 20 | Founders Jason Lewis, Jeremy Gomo and Ryan Lewis

“People do business with people, not with products” Jeremy Gomo

For all the things that have changed at Lovelight over the past 20 years, this might be the idea that explains most clearly why the business is still here, still growing, and still led by the same three people.

There has been plenty of evolution along the way. New products, new technology, different business models, bigger teams, bigger clients and more ambitious projects. But speak to founders Jason, Jeremy and Ryan about what has actually carried Lovelight through two decades, and the conversation keeps returning to the same place - relationships.

The relationships between the three of them. The relationships with the people who have built the business alongside them. The architects, designers, builders and clients who have trusted Lovelight repeatedly. The suppliers who have grown with them. Even the installers, many of whom have worked with Lovelight for more than a decade and, in some cases, passed their businesses on to the next generation of their family.

Speaking to these three, you soon realise that Lovelight’s longevity is less about a single breakthrough than the accumulation of thousands of interactions, decisions and promises kept. That was not necessarily the plan when Lovelight began. “We always had this ambition of world domination,” Jeremy jokes. In those first years, the vision was much broader than window furnishings. The founders experimented with technology, automation, online businesses and other ventures, imagining a collection of businesses operating beneath one umbrella.

They tried it all, but more importantly, they learnt from it. One of their most successful moves was realising that hyper-focusing on one thing, with everyone pulling in the same direction, would deliver better results.

As Ryan recalls, Lovelight was still working out where it belonged in the market when he joined. “Was it automation? Was it electrical? Was it blinds? Window furnishings were never the sexy option, but they were the constant and the business model that worked the best.” Twenty years later, that focus looks obvious. At the time, it was anything but.

There was no master plan for getting from those early days to the Lovelight of today. Jason is quick to reject the idea of one defining decision. “It’s more just a series of decisions that we hope are eventually right. If you make more right decisions than you make wrong decisions, you survive for 20 years.”

What did remain consistent was the willingness to keep turning up. “We fumbled so many times. And every single time we fumbled, we picked the ball back up and we kept running,” Jason says. “It all comes down to continuous and relentless, consistent hard work. The three of us have done that every single day for 20 years. We’ve showed up no matter how we’ve felt, no matter where we’ve been in our lives.”

It is a mindset the founders compare to endurance sport, another pursuit that has been woven through their friendship over the years. “There was a period of 10 years where we were riding 350 kilometres a week,” Jeremy says. “This business is also an endurance sport.”

That shared drive is not the only thing that has kept the three founders together for two decades. They are intensely competitive and all want to win, but they are also different enough to make the partnership work. In the earliest years, Jason and Jeremy did almost everything together. They drove to meetings together, attended appointments together and built the business side by side until a simple observation from Jason and Ryan’s father, Harvey, changed the way they operated. If both founders were doing everything together, how much more could they achieve apart?

At that point, the responsibilities split. Jason moved towards operations, while Jeremy focused on business development and sales. What followed was, in their telling, a two-decade competition between selling more work and building the systems capable of delivering it.

Then came Ryan. “I brought a more calm and level-headed approach to the business and to the relationships with clients, suppliers and the team,” Ryan says. “The boys are loud and constantly wanting to keep evolving at a million miles an hour, where I was happy to get them to slow down a bit.”

The contrast has consistently proved important. Jeremy talks about the way Ryan spends time moving around the office, sitting beside people, checking in and creating a sense of calm around a business that could otherwise operate at enormous speed. It is a comforting, embracing calmness, he says, in contrast to the “entrepreneurial world domination” that he and Jason have running through their veins.

Ryan’s ability to build relationships extended well beyond the team. Jeremy credits him with showing just how much value sits in the things no spreadsheet can capture. Remembering a client’s children. Knowing when someone’s wife is having a baby. Calling on a birthday. Keeping in touch years after someone has changed roles. “Those things are unseen,” Jeremy says. “But people do business with people, not with products or what you sell.”

It is this understanding of relationships that also shaped Lovelight’s approach to clients from the very beginning. The founders realised early that simply selling a blind or curtain was not enough. Lovelight was primarily operating business-to-business, and its customers had much bigger problems to solve than choosing a curtain. Jeremy says the questions they constantly keep in mind are: what problems does the client have with their current supplier? What problems does the category cause within their business? What are they trying to solve? The goal is to understand the entire problem, then develop a commercially realistic solution around it.

One of the earliest examples was Lovelight’s work with Metricon. Rather than simply supplying window furnishings, the team studied the different layers of the business, speaking with people at multiple levels to understand what made the category difficult. The resulting one-price model addressed not only cost, but a long list of operational pain points.

That approach became fundamental to how Lovelight worked. “We try to view ourselves as an internal division within the business that we’re doing business with,” Jeremy says.

Over time, trust followed. In the beginning, clients were effectively taking a chance on a young business claiming it could solve their problems. Two decades later, the reputation has been built on repeatedly delivering exactly that.

Businesses have changed, and Lovelight has changed with them. New technology has been built. Systems have evolved. Different commercial models have been developed. But the objective remains remarkably similar: understand what the customer actually needs, then remove as much friction as possible.

The same thinking extends in the opposite direction through the supply chain. Suppliers, the founders say, have been pivotal to Lovelight’s success. They have grown alongside the business, supported it through difficult periods and, in their words, “pulled rabbits out of the hat” when required.

There is also one particularly simple principle that has endured from Harvey’s advice through to the Lovelight of today: pay people on time.

It may sound transactional, but for Lovelight it is another expression of the same thing: relationships built on respect. For 20 years, suppliers have known they will be paid when promised or, on the rare occasion there is an issue, that Lovelight will communicate about it rather than wait for someone to chase them.

When asked what they are most proud of after 20 years, the conversation quickly shifts away from turnover, projects or growth and towards people.

“The people in the business,” Jason says. “It’s only happened because of the people in the business.” Today, close to 30 Lovelight team members have been with the company for six years or more. Some have been there for more than a decade. “There’s no bigger compliment or measure of success than that,” Jason says.

For the founders, those long-term team members do more than perform a role. They carry the culture forward. They train new people, protect the standards of the business and understand instinctively what kind of person belongs at Lovelight.

Those values existed long before anyone formally wrote them down. Principles such as getting things done and “being a mensch” were not invented as corporate values. The founders describe them as traits they brought into the business from their own lives, families and community. Twenty years on, one value they now believe deserves to be made more explicit is the one that has arguably been there all along: relationships.

It is perhaps the clearest explanation for why the same three founders are still together. “We are all very different but all very driven to succeed,” Ryan says. “We always want to win. We always want to improve and find better ways. We love what we do and we love each other. We have each other’s back one million percent.”

For Jeremy, the relationship goes deeper still. They fight and argue, he admits, but that is what happens in a family. “When things get tough, we don’t walk away because you don’t walk away from your family.”

Lovelight’s story is not really about avoiding mistakes, predicting every change in the market or finding one perfect formula for growth. It is about people who kept showing up for each other, learning how to use their differences, building trust over years rather than transactions, and extending that same philosophy to the people around them.

The business is much larger now. The projects are bigger. The systems are more sophisticated and the team spans far beyond the three people who began the journey. Yet Ryan says walking into work still feels surprisingly familiar. “Jase, Jem and me, with more friendly faces around the office and country.”

Twenty years after Lovelight began, perhaps that is the real achievement. Not simply that the business grew, but that the relationships grew with it.