Matt Little on Building Festoon House’s Durable, Trade-Focused Festoon Lighting Brand
Matt Little, Founder and Managing Director of Festoon House, shares how he built a festoon lighting business designed to withstand harsh Australian conditions. This interview explores the value of a strong warranty, direct trade relationships, and content tailored for real buyer questions—offering practical lessons for ecomm founders focused on durable goods.
In this edition of the Ecommerce Authority Playbooks series, we dive into how
Festoon House grows, retains customers, and prepares for the future of search in 2026 and beyond.
The interview
1. What’s the quick origin story of your brand, and what makes your product or positioning genuinely different from other options in your niche?
Matt Little: I started Festoon House around 2018 after years of hearing the same complaint from venue managers I worked with through my agency, that decorative lighting sold in Australia couldn’t survive an actual Australian summer. Cheap globes and unrated cabling would fail within a season, and nobody selling to the everyday consumer was building specifically for our UV exposure and heat.
The positioning difference is that we treat festoon lighting as commercial-grade infrastructure rather than a seasonal decoration. Every product carries an IP67 waterproof rating, UV-resistant cabling, and SAA approval, backed by a two-year warranty when most competitors offer one year or nothing. That’s the whole gap we built the business around, and it’s still the reason trade customers choose us over cheaper alternatives.
2. Since launch, what have been the 1-2 real turning points for your brand-specific decisions, pivots, or experiments that noticeably changed your growth or profitability-and what did you learn from them?
Matt Little: The first real turning point was doubling the warranty to two years early on, which felt risky because it meant our margins had to absorb more potential returns. What actually happened was it became our biggest conversion driver, because customers comparing us against a cheaper import could see exactly why the price difference existed. That taught me that in a category full of vague quality claims, a specific guarantee does more selling than any amount of marketing copy.
The second was shifting from trying to compete for retail shelf space toward building a direct trade program for electricians and builders. Chasing 400 retail placements against bigger players was a losing fight on their terms, but a direct relationship with the trade meant repeat commercial orders without a retail markup eating our margin. That decision is what let us grow profitably instead of just growing revenue.
3. Which 2-3 channels drive most of your revenue right now (for example SEO, paid social, email, marketplaces, influencers), and what have you learned about making those channels work in your category?
Matt Little: SEO and direct trade relationships are what actually move revenue for us. On SEO, the lesson was that generic content about festoon lighting doesn’t convert, but pages answering the exact technical question someone has right before buying, spacing calculations, voltage limits, IP rating explanations, rank well and convert because they’re solving the actual decision point.
The trade channel works differently, since it’s relationship-driven rather than discovery-driven. Electricians and venue managers reorder because the product held up on the last job, so the channel is really sustained by product performance more than any marketing push. Both channels only work because they’re backed by something true about the product, not because of clever targeting.
4. How are you thinking about search in 2026 – Google, AI assistants like ChatGPT, and other discovery platforms? What, if anything, have you changed in your content or site to stay visible as AI search grows?
Matt Little: The shift I’ve noticed is that AI assistants tend to pull from pages that answer a specific question cleanly rather than pages optimized primarily for keyword volume. We’ve restructured a lot of our technical content, spacing guides, voltage limits, installation specs, into more direct question-and-answer formats so the actual useful information is easy to extract regardless of whether a person or a model is reading it.
We’ve also leaned harder into being cited as a source rather than just ranking, which means keeping product specs accurate, current, and specific enough that an AI assistant summarizing “best outdoor lighting for Australian conditions” has something concrete to reference. It’s less about gaming a ranking system now and more about making sure the underlying information is genuinely worth surfacing.
5. What do you do to turn first‑time buyers into repeat customers and advocates? Are there specific experiences, content, or community touches that work especially well for you?
Matt Little: The warranty does most of the retention work by itself, because a customer who calls in for a replacement globe and actually gets one without a fight remembers that far longer than they remember the original purchase. We treat warranty claims as a trust-building moment rather than a cost to minimize, and that’s usually what turns a one-time backyard buyer into someone who orders again for a bigger project.
Beyond that, our in-house lighting designer handles consultations for anything from a backyard setup to a full venue fitout, and that direct access to real expertise is something a big-box retailer can’t offer. Customers who’ve had a good consultation experience tend to come back when they’re doing a second property or recommend us to someone in the trade, which is where a lot of our commercial accounts have actually come from.
6. If you had to write a short playbook for an ecommerce founder one stage behind you, what would you double down on over the next 12 months – and what would you stop doing entirely?
Matt Little: Double down on whatever specific, verifiable claim actually separates your product from the cheap version of it, and build your entire content and warranty strategy around proving that claim rather than talking about your brand in general terms. For us that was weatherproofing, so instead of writing about “quality lighting” we published the actual IP ratings, cable specs, and warranty terms next to competitor comparisons. That specificity is what search engines and AI assistants both reward now, and it’s also what stops a customer from bouncing to a cheaper option they can’t actually evaluate.
Stop chasing retail shelf placement if you’re a smaller player without the capital to fight for it. I wasted real time early on trying to get into stores that already had relationships with bigger suppliers, when that same effort put into a direct trade program or SEO content would have paid off faster and kept more margin. Fighting a distribution battle you can’t win on price is the fastest way to burn a year of runway for very little return.
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