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The recipe for entrepreneurial success has many ingredients, including expertise, commitment and timing, but one component that should not be overlooked is passion. You can have a great idea for a business and know how to execute a successful strategy, but without putting your heart into it, the business becomes unsustainable as the challenges of entrepreneurship take a toll. Ideoli’s Co-Founders, George Stroumboulis and Chris Hartswick, started Ideoli not just because they saw a gap in the market for custom furniture, fixtures and lighting, but because they had a passion for the industry, having just exited an LED lighting start-up that was acquired and went public on the New York Stock Exchange. In this new venture in an industry that’s highly relationship-based, George and Chris knew it wouldn’t succeed unless they could be truly passionate about their work, especially considering that the early days of a start-up aren’t always glamorous and require founders to wear an assortment of hats. That’s why George and Chris split the work according to their passions. George honing in on developing long-term relationships with partners and clients and building a fun, positive image for the brand, while Chris has focused more on the product side of the business, which has included forming strong manufacturing partnerships around the world to create products they could truly support. “I’m passionate about connecting with others to help them realize their goals, and clients pick up on that when we interact,” says George Stroumboulis. “That genuineness helps us form strong bonds that enable long-term success, rather than being so transactional.” As those relationships are formed, Chris’s passion for developing best-in-class products shines through as he and George work together to help clients invigorate their spaces. “By being truly interested in how clients want to design their spaces, I’m able to more easily work with them to customize the products that help them reach their goals, rather than trying to fit products into assumptions about what works best for their spaces,” says Chris Hartswick. The passion of Ideoli’s founders has propelled the company to international success in a short period of time, and it will sustain the company as it continues to grow. 

While different types of light bulbs have their place, LED lighting is the new wave—they run cooler and look cooler, which means clients can save money and make money by using LEDs. That’s why we integrate LED lighting into many of our products, ranging from lighting fixtures for food prep areas to backlit mirrors in retail stores. LED lighting offers huge advantages over traditional incandescent light bulbs and even the more recent compact fluorescent lamp (CFL) bulbs, including the following: 1. Efficiency LED bulbs operate at a lower wattage than other types of bulbs, because LEDs let much less energy escape as heat. So they require less power to produce the same amount of light, thus making them more energy efficient. If the U.S. switched entirely to LED bulbs over the next two decades, it would cut electricity consumption for lighting nearly in half, according to the Department of Energy (DOE). 2. Longevity LEDs also last significantly longer than other bulbs because of both how long the light itself functions and their durability. In fact, high-quality LED bulbs last over 25 times as long as traditional lightbulbs, notes the DOE. 3. Affordability Even though LEDs can cost more upfront than other bulbs, the lifetime savings due to longevity and efficiency significantly favor LEDs. In some instances, this additional efficiency can also help companies qualify for incentives or rebates from utilities or governments, thus furthering the savings. 4. Design LEDs arguably look a lot better than other bulbs and don’t have a delayed reaction when turning them on like CFLs. Not only are there a lot of color options, but the LEDs themselves are quite small, so they can be combined into more interesting designs or strung along the perimeter of a product. So when clients want innovative lighting displays or unique shapes for lighting fixtures, Ideoli can make that happen using LEDs. Clients can then create spaces that attract even more customers, which makes LEDs a great investment. Ideoli stays on the cutting edge of lighting design using LEDs, and with these lights we help clients invigorate their spaces however they imagine. 

In specialized businesses like industrial lighting, the terminology can seem like a completely different language. So it can be difficult to understand some of the features of industrial lighting products, which makes purchasing decisions more difficult. That’s why we want to help our clients pick up the lingo. Too often, we hear industrial lighting terms being used in the wrong context or simply misunderstood. Rather than trying to use this information gap to take advantage of clients, we prefer to work with them to get on the same page and build trusted, long-term partnerships. Take a look at our cheat sheet of some of the top lighting terms so you can stay in the know: Aperture: The diameter in the opening of a downlight, measured in inches. Sometimes manufacturers round up to the next whole-inch increment. Average Rated Life: The number of hours at which half of a large group of product samples fail under standard test conditions. Since this is a median value, any lamp or group of lamps may vary from the published rated life. Beam Angle: The angle at which luminous intensity is 50 percent of the maximum intensity. Candela: The Systeme International d’Unities (SI) unit of luminous intensity. One candela equals one lumen per steradian. This term was formerly known as candle. Color Rendering Index (CRI): A rating index commonly used to represent how well a light source renders the colors of objects that it illuminates. At its maximum value of 100, the colors of objects can be expected to be seen as they would appear under an incandescent or daylight spectrum of the same correlated color temperature (CCT). Sources with CRI values of less than 50 are generally regarded as rendering colors poorly, meaning colors may appear unnatural. Efficacy: The ratio of the light output of a lamp (expressed as lumens) to its active power (expressed as watts), expressed as lumens per watt. Illuminance: The density of luminous flux incident upon a surface. Illuminance is measured in footcandles (lumens/square foot) or lux (lumens/square meter). One footcandle equals 10.76 lux. Lumen (lm): A unit measurement of the rate at which a lamp produces light. A lamp’s light output rating expresses the total amount of light emitted in all directions per unit time. Ratings of initial light output provided by manufacturers express the totallight output after 100 hours of operation. While these are some popular terms you’re likely to come across, you can dive into even more depth by taking a look at this glossary from the Lighting Research Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.