In my continuing pursuit of figuring out how lighting vendors build their inventory, I have come across three distinctive methods that a few different companies have utilized. A company may buy all their gear based on supply and demand. Or they buy certain pieces of gear and sub-rent the latest expensive fixtures on the market rather than risk they will be outdated. In the past, some companies actually built all their own lights, truss and dimmer racks. I thought that I summed it all up. But then I got to talking to some friends who work for Christie Lites. And it didn’t take long to figure out that there is one other way to build a business, and it seems to be working just fine. If you do it Huntly’s way.
Starting from a Garage
Huntly Christie started his own lighting company up in Toronto way back in 1985. Not unlike other young entrepreneurs who had a fascination with lighting, he launched his business in his parent’s garage. He began at an exciting time, as the advent of pre-rig truss and moving lights were in their infancy. Back then, I think most lighting companies were innovators with their gear. The standard “off the shelf” brackets, cables, clamps and truss weren’t available to just purchase from a salesman, let alone a website. So Huntly cemented some ideas in place at an early age and has stuck to his guns. And they are not normal. But then expanding your business to a dozen or so locations in North America is not a normal thing many can boast of, in any industry.
When you rent gear from Christie Lites, you get a long list of every cable, nut and bolt, rigging piece, etc., on a spreadsheet. I normally hate these things, but last month I happened to look through it just to see what was listed. All the cables were in weird lengths. There are no 5- and 10-foot jumpers. They are 4 feet and 8 feet instead. The multi cables are not all your industry standard lengths of 25-foot increments. Nope, they are all just another facet of Huntly’s Way of doing things. I tried to decipher the logic of this. It wasn’t metric, and it didn’t make sense. Not until I sat down with the guy himself and asked him why.
“When I started out, I was keen on some of the latest technology and what one could purchase at the time. Back in 1985, there were no people I found that were mass-producing truss in America for what I wanted to do. But Thomas, a truss manufacturer out of the U.K., was building and selling pre-rig truss. The same stuff you get today for double hung rows of PARs, etc. These truss sections were all standard 7-foot, 10-inch sections,” Christie states. “And I just hated the fact that all the cables, when they reached the dimmers, were different lengths. I found it messy and there was a lot of unnecessary copper lying around so I borrowed the idea of 8-foot cable denominations from two smart Quebecers — Jacques Tanguay and Louis Racine.” Interesting concept, one that I think is unique. And pretty cool if you can get away with it for three decades.
Truss Refinements
Christie went on to fabricate much of his own gear, including some AC Distro racks, his own color changers and then his own truss. He tinkered with other fellow Canadians, designing trusses that could be manufactured in his home country. He has complete inventories of stock 12-inch and 20.5-inch box truss like everyone else. But he saw a distinct need for 16-inch truss. And better ways to develop his own line of pre-rig. With the advent of the Hud truss a few years ago, Huntly saw the direction the concert touring industry was heading, but thought he saw some flaws in the ways others had engineered their models. So he built his own, and it is strong. A 40-foot stick of his moving light truss can be lifted by only one motor at each end, with little sag. The lights can mount and slide easily anywhere within the truss, even between two sections. Keeping up with his traditional-sized pre-rig trusses, he opted to just design and construct two sizes — 7 feet 10 inches and 3 feet 10 inch-sized sections. I thought this was odd, until I designed a plot utilizing what he had available. It was just as easy, and the existing cable lengths he has would still ensure a nice clean dimmer area.
A Limited “Menu”
By the late 1990s, Christie Lites had acquired all kinds of moving lights as well as consoles. And as a vendor of this high quality, expensive gear, he was realizing how hard it was to keep his crews totally knowledgeable about everything they own — and how to run and repair the fixtures should they break. Also, how to program the desks and be able to answer most of the questions programmers would call about. At this time, Huntly made an important decision — one that few people would ever venture to do themselves, and one that everyone seemed to question. He decided to have his company concentrate on renting just one companies’ moving light products and one companies’ consoles. He chose Martin Lighting and MA consoles.
When I heard this, I thought the guy was off his rocker. But he had a plan, and in his case, it has worked just great. “The problem was, we didn’t have a huge staff in the warehouse, and those guys couldn’t take the time to know the ins and outs of Avos, Hogs, Compulites, grandMAs etc. But if we decided to just own MA consoles, then we could have guys that knew them inside out,” Huntly tells me. Apparently, he found the same principle could be applied to moving lights. Not too many people can rebuild a color system from a VL500 as well as a MAC 2K.
Is it luck, or skill, that the two manufacturers he chose to align his company with would go on to be the leaders in their respective industries? By agreeing to stick with one manufacturer, I’m thinking he got some sweet deals along the way. The fact that he received the first 2000 MAC Aura LED fixtures before anyone else in the biz saw their first may be a testament to this loyalty. Others may think that with the quick-changing LED market, this may have been a bold move. I don’t know if that concerns Christie. I asked him, point blank, “Surely there are some fixtures out there that your clients are demanding yet you don’t have. How do you deal with that?” His reply was twofold. “First of all, I never said I wouldn’t supply other products. If lighting designers want a certain product, it is our job to listen, and we will find a solution (whether it be purchase or sub-rent). Our business model is based on supporting the design community, and we will do what we can to deliver the client whatever fixture they desire. You want another console, no problem. We just can’t tell you how to operate it.”
I watch as other lighting companies dabble in video. It’s great for a company to expand and be a one-stop shop for many designers if they can keep the gear busy. But it’s not part of Christie’s plan. When media servers were introduced 10 years ago, they didn’t jump on the bandwagon. “We do lighting. That is a video tool,” was his consensus. And with Christie Lites shops showing up everywhere with the same quality gear, it’s obvious that Huntly’s Way is working.
