Building a Brand Nobody Sees, AI Install Videos & Tariffs with Serge Magarik

Hi, everyone. I’m Serge Magarik, CEO and founder of VONN Lighting. I’m very happy to be on this podcast today and share anything I can with all you listeners.

In my previous life I spent quite a bit of time on Wall Street. The key difference between the finance world and building a brand is that in finance you’re making financial decisions using research done by analysts, focused on profitability, on making money. You select a company that’s provided by your analytical staff, and then you have to do your own due diligence, if you know what you’re doing, or at least pretend you know what you’re doing. The truth is, it’s very difficult to present an investment idea to an investor without thoroughly understanding the product. While learning about the product, you’re learning about the company, how it was marketed, how it’s built, why it has become successful, and, more importantly, what it is going to do for the stock to appreciate. Depending on how long you spend in the industry, you learn quite a bit about different industries and sectors, and more importantly you interact with executives, who share their positions, ideas and insights, and the experiences they’ve been through.
You take that information from your investment career as a financial advisor, and brand building is a completely different animal. First, you have to be familiar with the industry, so you have to work in the industry before you get involved, otherwise it’s pretty much impossible to navigate. Once you gain experience, you should be familiar with every department and every vertical of your company. In my first venture, with Krause, we did everything manually: picking, packing, bringing the packing slips upstairs, processing everything through QuickBooks, writing orders on the board, matching them with the data on the portals, bringing the packing slips downstairs, shipping the orders, writing down tracking numbers. Then you take that knowledge and experience and integrate it into your workflow when you build an ERP and a CRM, your infrastructure. Without being hands-on, you won’t be able to do that.
Secondly, to build a brand you need to be well financed, and, more importantly, you have to be true and honest with yourself. Can you really do it? Do you have the right people around you? Are you able to find and hire the right people? You have to be honest, because if you overestimate yourself and you’re underfunded, chances are you’re setting yourself up for failure.

Great question. Lighting is the focal point of pretty much any interior decor, and I’m not saying that because I happen to own a lighting company. My office is a perfect example. When people walk in, it’s the lighting that makes the first impression, and the wow effect on people’s faces says it all. We’ve transformed how people experience their space in offices, clinics and hospitals, schools, car dealerships, hair salons, and high-end residential and commercial buildings.
Some of the best-known projects we’ve done in North America over the last couple of years include 1000M in Chicago, Winthrop Center in Boston, the Ritz in Boston, a Lamborghini dealership in Miami, Aqualina, and Jade Ocean. The list goes on. We were fortunate and grateful to be selected for Cavalier Stadium, which we’ve just completed, as well as Cipriani Casa in Uruguay. We have a vast portfolio, and honestly it puts a smile on my face to see the before and after, and what lighting alone does to a space.

The honest truth is that lighting is probably one of the most difficult verticals in home improvement when it comes to brand building. For one, you don’t see the brand on the physical item, because it’s up in the ceiling, so you never see the logo like you do on faucets, sinks, and often on furniture. Branding lighting is very difficult.
It’s a long and painful road, because you have to earn the reputation. You have to be awarded projects so people know you and trust you, and it’s a catch-22: you can’t get a project unless you have a portfolio, and you can’t build the portfolio unless you get the project. Getting through that hurdle took some time, but meeting with people, bringing them into the office, and sending samples out so they could feel and touch the products made people trust us and put some faith and confidence in us. We started slow and gradually built up to where we are today.
Building a brand in lighting really comes down to design, the ability to value engineer, and the ability to work around clients’ needs, and that’s precisely what we do. We’ve worked with over sixty thousand products across multiple, if not all, of the verticals of lighting, including LED mirrors and medicine cabinets. In nearly every project we work around the designer’s vision, and that’s what we’re known for. Lighting is not an easy product to replace, and when something goes wrong it comes with consequences. We have a defect rate of less than three percent, and the industry knows that. Working with VONN gives people the assurance that the products will work and remain functional for many, many years, which is another advantage of LED: it’s a maintenance-free product.

The business model breaks into three. The first is B2C, directly from VONN, interacting with the end consumer, which is predominantly retail, though we also work with designers, architects and developers, which is more of a B2B model. The second is B2B2C, where we work through Home Depot, Wayfair, Lowe’s, Lumens.com and others. That’s the business that’s been heavily impacted by tariffs, which I hope I have a chance to address during this podcast, because I’m certain many listeners will understand exactly where I’m coming from.
The third is B2B, our ability to engage directly with developers, installers, electricians, distributors and other professionals in the industry. We don’t just offer lighting products. We also offer services, including specification, calculation, lighting design and layouts. That improves the project itself. We’re on the calls, heavily engaged with the installers, the millwork people, the designers and the lighting specifiers if needed, and we tune the process so the products selected are the appropriate ones, and when they’re delivered to the project they’re functional. The installers have ease of installation, the designers are happy, and, most importantly, the end consumer is satisfied, both on budget and on the overall result.

We use AI for searchability and marketability. Today if you type “LED chandelier” or “LED pendant” into Google, we pop up first in organic results, or at least we should still be. We’ve achieved that, and we use AI for the same reasons: engaging with consumers. We publish quite a bit of content where people can search key terms and get answers about lighting installation, ambience, and selecting a specific design element.
We’re also heavily involved in AI content generation: videos of the products themselves and, more importantly, of the actual installation. If you visit vonn.com and click the Videos tab, you’ll see the models we’ve built. In thirty seconds you can see not only the fixture but how it’s installed, the lighting element, and its construction. That eliminates time wasted on reading installation manuals, and it helps the purchase decision, because you clearly see the functionality before buying. We use AI tools to create that content, which is very effective, efficient and precisely accurate.

It’s hard to tell. The market changes. This is fashion lighting, and it all depends on the category, because we’re spread across multiple verticals: decorative, commercial and residential, architectural, which has its own subcategories like track, linear and spotlights, commercial, landscape, and mirrors and medicine cabinets. It’s difficult to predict because it’s a cyclical business, just like fashion. We cater to design needs, and whether it’s ultra modern or transitional depends on demographics and design preferences. Sometimes we have a model that hasn’t sold for six months and we’re about to abandon it, and then all of a sudden it becomes a bestseller. It’s very difficult to predict.

You mean besides exit, which is really why we all build brands in the first place? I think it’s a good time for me to touch on the tariff portion. Many business owners and brand builders know what we’ve been through. Not all of us. Some areas were unaffected, even benefited, over the last year and a half, but many in construction, development and home improvement, and in toys, bedding, furniture, even clothing, got hurt by the tariffs. I hate politics, so I won’t go there, but the tariffs had a huge impact on many businesses, and it’s a domino effect. In this industry, when tariffs went from 32.6 percent to as high as 177 percent, it pretty much halted all shipments. That was true for plumbing, for furniture, for pretty much all the importers affected, and it stopped business for the last year. Many went out of business.
But for those who have survived, every adversity creates an opportunity, and that’s precisely how I see things. It’s probably been the worst year in the last decade for VONN financially, but at the same time we were able to grow our pipeline to a level I have never seen before. That means more projects, big names, and big collaborations with large-scale developments, which we currently have in our pipeline. For those who will follow us after this podcast, keep your eye on the Projects tab on vonn.com, because a lot more projects will be added within the next twelve to eighteen months.

I did. Interestingly, it’s the first time in my entire career that I got involved because of a passion for a product. I fight Muay Thai, and last September I had two ribs broken. It wasn’t the first time, but it was an unpleasant experience. I had some experience with peptides before, taking BPC and KPV for my digestive system because of GERD, and I saw an improvement, but never with injections. When I broke my ribs and had to travel to Dubai in early October, I decided that traveling with broken ribs wasn’t ideal. I took a friend’s advice and was referred to a well-known peptide specialist who treats UFC, MMA, NFL and NBA athletes. I trusted him, and within three weeks I was back in training in the ring.
I was fascinated with the product, but equally disappointed with the experience I had as a patient, with respect to processes and oversight. So I created an ecosystem called Scitology, not to be misconstrued, God forbid, with Scientology. No affiliation whatsoever. I built a platform for transparency between physicians and patients in the world of peptides and hormonal treatments. This is just phase one, with full AI integration, through 503A protocols, direct-to-patient pharmaceutical-grade medication. I’m very compliant when it comes to the medical spectrum, and I want to be in compliance with all FDA regulations. The platform is now becoming quite popular, but I built it as a patient, out of passion for the product and seeing the results. I’ve been on peptides ever since, and I’m an advocate and a passionate supporter.

It’s Scitology.com, S-C-I-T-O-L-O-G-Y dot com. Take a look. It’s an informative place to learn and better understand precisely what peptides are, and to tell them apart from what’s being sold online, which unfortunately is not something I would recommend. It’s banned and prohibited, but people do it anyway. I built a safe environment that people can trust. It says “In God We Trust” on the dollar. I hope people will recognize Scitology when it comes to medication, peptide and hormonal treatments. Time will tell.

Stephen, thank you. I appreciate it. I hope everyone enjoyed.