Lightbulb Moment

It took a trip to China for the founders of Green Creative to spot an LED-bulb niche in the U.S.

- Jeff Kauflin

As Cole Zucker drives through San Francisco’s Mission District in his white BMW M4, he uses one hand to steer through busy intersections and the other to flip through women’s profiles on a dating app. It’s a big change from the weekday evenings in the spring of 2011, when Zucker would drive his Mazda 3 the roughly 40 miles from San Francisco to San Jose and park on a residential street around midnight. He’d get into the backseat, hang clothes over the windows for privacy and go to sleep. Four hours later, knowing it was the best time to catch them, he’d walk into one office building after another, looking for building engineers who might want to buy his startup’s lighting products. Nearly every one of them turned him away.

Six years later, Zucker, 33, and his 35-year-old cofounder, Guillaume Vidal, are co-CEOs of Green Creative, a profitable lighting manufacturer with 70 employees and $52 million in revenue. Their bulbs illuminate the aisles of many Walmart, Whole Foods and J. Crew stores. In a market dominated by Philips, GE and Osram Sylvania, Vidal and Zucker saw an opening when LED technology started to take off. They bet that the giant firms were illequipped to make the most of the rapidly evolving technology. “We used to worry about whether anyone would buy LED products,” Zucker says. “Now we worry about how to maintain our breakneck growth rate.”

The big draw of LED bulbs, of course, is efficiency. They use up to 75% less energy than incandescent ones and last 25 times longer. Even today, LEDs represent less than 10% of the U.S. market, but they’re gaining fast.