PLSN: Apollo Design is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. In 1992, why and how did you start the company?
Joel Nichols: At the time, I had no experience in theater. My background is actually in the steel industry. One day, a friend of mine showed me a gobo that was expensive and hard to get, because it was a custom-made gobo. He also showed me the prices for these gobos in the trade magazines and asked me if the prices were normal. I called the dealers listed on those magazines. They all told me the same thing: “The price is expensive; the service is not very good.” Although they were not really happy with the overall product, they kept buying from the same manufacturers because there were not a lot of companies making custom gobos at this time. Knowing the steel industry, the price seemed ridiculously priced and we just ran into business in 1992. When we started the company, we had no grand vision for it. There were about two to three companies in the U.S. who made custom gobos, and they were more afterthoughts for them. It took us about a year to start getting regular orders. During the first five years in the business, we did not have any custom gobo competition. All we did was custom metal gobos. A lot of dealers, even our present-day competitors, gave us referrals.
PLSN: How were the other products added to your product line?
Custom gobos were interesting, because we were left in the market like a little tree growing up in the woods. We grew by getting our dealer base and relationships established and just making custom metal gobos. The next product line was pretty easy. We started doing standard gobos, because we already had equipment and the customers. A few years after that, we started to get into black-and-white glass gobos, which was already being made by a company in the U.S. market.
In the mid-1990s, the market was transitioning from ellipsoidals to scanners. Customers who used to buy one gobo were now buying six or eight gobos for one lighting fixture. So the industry was growing very fast in volume, both for metal gobos and glass gobos, because of the new technology. That really helped us to boost our sales volume. We were in the right place at the right time.
Following that, we wanted to start manufacturing colored glass gobos. At the time, you could make a color glass gobo by using different plates for different colors, but not by color mixing. Around 1998, we started to work on color-mixing gobos. In 1999, during the LDI trade show, we introduced the first color-mixing gobo to the market. It really caught the market, and our competitors, off guard, and grew our gobo sales to a new level. Apollo Design became the leader at both metal gobos and color glass gobos.
From 1992 to 2000, we were a gobo-driven company. In 2001, we introduced gel for the first time. It was not a planned product, but we were told by our dealers that the largest gel company in the U.S. market was backordering around 25 percent of all the products that they shipped to their customers. We also found out that the U.S. market was very weak in product diversity for color scrollers, and we also got into those markets. Within a six-month period, we were, volume-wise, the number two company for scrollers in U.S.
PLSN: Your company is based in Indiana. How does this location, being away from the main entertainment industry centers, affect your company logistically?
Indiana is really a very strong and cost-effective manufacturing base in the United States. We have a very good work force here. I can walk 200 yards from my office and find a world-class machine shop. Indiana has one of the largest manufacturer tool-and-die industries. In terms of shipping, UPS ground is two days to New York City and four days out to California, and it is very cost-effective for all the U.S.
PLSN: How would you describe the position of Apollo Design and your customer profile in the market today, in the 20th year of the company?
We are the world’s largest producer of gobos. We produce both custom and standard gobos. We ship all over the world — Russia, U.K., Japan, the Middle East, and more. We have a pretty diverse customer profile in both the dealer and individual customer sense: small Mom-and-Pop type operations that will service and support small local theater districts, medium size companies that handle both some productions and some retail sales, and larger retail or production oriented companies. We sometimes make gobos for a wedding, but at the same time, we get large orders from amusement parks or large productions both in and outside of the U.S. We make a lot of OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) gobos in lights from countries all over the world, because we are the only company that does both metal and glass gobos with a 100-percent laser cut process, and this gives us a consistency that nobody else has.
PLSN: How does the approach to stage lighting change from one country to another country and, as a result of this, how does it change gobo orders?
We do find subtle changes in the orders from different countries based on the economics of the country, and also their venues. The way the lighting is done changes from country to country. In the U.S. venues, there is plenty of electricity and space to do anything that you want. Also, we have big players in the lighting industry, but not many small manufacturers. In Europe, venues get a little confined; there is a better diversity in lighting fixtures in order to achieve different effects in smaller spaces. It is a lot more of a cultural decision, which light to use in Europe. This affects the sizes and types of the gobos that are used. Italians love to buy lights from the Italian manufacturers. Japan seems to be one of the most efficient countries in terms of space usage. Japanese dealers tend to give more details in their orders, they send CAD drawings with specific information. Their theaters are a little bit tighter than the U.K. They are more precise about the light they use for different purposes, whereas we can load up a big truck and light anything with it here in the U.S. In the Middle East, there is a good openness to diversity of lighting fixtures, though this has nothing to do with the specifics of the units, but the interaction with the company. They want to buy from the people that they know, they want to communicate on a friendship level first and then become a customer.
PLSN: What makes your leading products, gobos, different from your competitors’ products?
In early 1990s, I was watching lasers. The speed, the precision and the cost of the lasers would come to a point that they would be cost-effective. In 2006, we started to work on a laser-cutting process. It took four years to develop, for both metal and glass gobos. Before transitioning into a 100 percent laser cutting process, we produced thousands of gallons of chemical waste through our chemical etching process. This transition shortened our turn time; the precision and consistency for both metal and glass is vastly improved. I can find one dot under a microscope on a gobo, and the exact same dot would be in the following 10 laser cut gobos, too. This is never possible with an etching process. We do lots of modifications to the laser machines and the software, because the default settings are just not good enough to make the smaller details that have to be consistent. The most important request of OEMs is consistency; those gobos need to be perfect copies. In this manner, we are four to six years ahead of our competitors.
PLSN: What do you think about the market’s current situation and the future?
The market has been very constricted since 2008. Shows have tighter budgets, and lighting is done with the equipment available for rental, because producers are being more reserved on their spending. So you need to fight a little harder for sales and to bring unique products to the market, which makes the market a more competitive environment. If we look at LDI 2011, some unique technologies came online. You saw more LED ellipsoidals, more RGBAW LEDs.
This year, we introduced our new LED units, the Multiform HP3-90 and HP5-70. New technologies are pushing forward to give broader opportunities and new tools to the lighting designers. Market diversity of lighting fixtures could get a lot stronger as a lot of these new technologies mix up decision processes.
LED walls are starting to be used more artistically. They mix and match better. The quality and design of the video is getting better. I am glad to see LED walls, LED lights and conventional fixtures together, broadening the opportunities for designers.
PLSN: Looking at this big picture in your company’s 20th anniversary how do you imagine Apollo’s future?
We will continue to build the company with our four product lines: Gobos, gel, LED lights and accessories. These are going to be Apollo’s long-term core product lines. We can also spin off and start a new company if we have a new product idea. I think you are going to see Apollo concentrate more on pushing technology and introducing new products that the market has not seen before. If you are not making those changes that truly change the market, it gets boring. We will take our LED technology and will start to support our dealers in different ways. We hope we can create more design options than lighting options. Pretty much all of the manufacturers get the core LEDs from the same companies, and so the only way to be different is to bring diversity to the market through design, usage, ergonomics, weight and interface of fixtures. That’s why we want to focus on this design point of view.
