your space INSPIRING
Celebrating its 15th birthday, we chat to Enjoy Living’s co-founder Lisa Carrick about the company’s journey so far and what’s in store for the next 15 years.
I
t all started in 2010 with Enjoy Lighting when a friend from co-founder Lisa Carrick’s Coles Myer buying days reached out to her looking for a distributor in Australia. “He was the president of the number one flameless candle company in the US and wanted to expand into Australia,” she explains. “I’d never heard of flameless candles so he sent some samples to me. I put batteries in them, put them on the mantelpiece and that night I walked towards them to blow them out. I stopped in my tracks when I realised what I was doing. “I looked around to see if my husband had seen me because I was so embarrassed. I was still sceptical and walked backwards down the hallway, keeping my eye on the candles, wondering if I should be turning them off before going to bed, but left them on to see if the inbuilt timer would really work. The very next night I again went to blow them out and that is when I realised that this was truly something special.” Carrick rang her friend and she told him she had found a distributor… Carrick and 66
giftguideonline.com.au
her (co‑founder) husband David. He needed some convincing because while she had been a buyer for 15 years, she knew nothing about distribution. However, after a week of ringing him each day they both agreed they valued passion over experience and he gave her the green light. Enjoy Lighting made its debut at the AGHA Melbourne Gift Fair that same year, which was quite the experience, Carrick remembers. “We had a lot of foot traffic going past our stand and no one was stopping. Eventually I realised that people didn’t know they weren’t real [just like me trying to blow them out at my house]. I stood in the aisle, put a candle upside down on my head and stopped people in their tracks. Theatrics worked. We were nine deep for four days straight, reprinting our order forms twice to keep up with demand. Giftwrap wrote a double page on how we were the success of the trade fair. It was all a little surreal. “Even with all of my buying experience, I didn’t understand how rare it was to launch
EKTA Living
Lisa Carrick
In loving memory of Donna a product category, not just a product. And the opportunities and challenges that came with that.” The last 15 years has seen the candles become more technologically advanced. The original design was fabulous but could only be seen in a dark corner of a store as they were designed for lighting the dark, which presented barriers to entry for retailers who were brightening their stores with LED down lights. Since 2019, new engineering saw an exposed wick and sales have grown exponentially. The original candles were never remote enabled in the beginning and only had one timer option, now they have four. “The number one question around the world from any consumer is: how long do