Some entrepreneurs in the Delaware region are developing bright businesses in the holiday season, focusing on Christmas light installation on homes and commercial buildings.
The future of the seasonal work is so bright that it’s proven to be a great pivot for seasonal side businesses like
Justin’s Pressure Washing. Justin Cunningham, who lives in Landenberg, Pa., started the pressure washing business for homes in Hockessin and southern Pennsylvania in 2022.
But as competition with other home improvement and handyman service companies continued, he started to look to a more festive side business.
“I needed something to do all year, and everybody at other pressure-washing companies was plowing snow,” he said. “The more I looked into lighting installations, the more interesting it was.”
The Christmas light installation business is interesting enough that there are multiple franchises in the sector, including We Hang Christmas Lights, whose founder, a man really named Thomas Trees, has
toured the country training others. One day, Cunningham hopes to give up his job as a federal auditor and turn lighting installations and home detailing into a career.
It’s taken decades for installation companies and such franchises to become a trend. The earliest such outfit started in 1986, in Lubbock, Texas. Christmas Decor started franchising a decade later. But speaking from experience, Cunningham finds it’s a growing market – he’s done about three dozen houses this year, and he’s done work as far away as White Marsh, a suburb just north of Baltimore.
Most people want warm lights, and last year everyone chose white (he offers four shades), but some this year picked multicolored displays, and he has also started installing lights for Halloween.
“More eggs in the basket,” he explained.
In Middletown where homes continue to sprout up like Christmas Trees, entrepreneur Carl Zitofsky was able to tap into the niche market with Bright Home Delaware. The Middletown resident once was a credit manager and started Bright Home in 2021. Today, his company strings lights for wealthy communities like Bayberry and others – and employs as many as 10 people at the peak of the season.
Bright Home handles more than 400 installations, and a typical one is $950 to $1,550, which includes design, commercial-grade C9 LED lights, installation, takedown and boxing, Zitofsky said. In the following years, costs for installation and takedown are about half that, although many customers choose to expand beyond the facade or onto landscaping.
“We’ve had people for four years who add every year,” Zitofsky said.
Bright Home’s base for Christmas lighting is New Castle County and northern Kent County. Zitofsky’s Colonial home was his training ground. It serves as advertising, with a prominent location next to the ballfields at Silver Lake Park.
Installation season starts as early as September and runs through early December, with takedown early in the new year, he said. The exception: people who want permanent lighting, handled starting in the spring.
Zitofsky likes the patented
Trimlight system, which places the lights in channels and offers “virtually unlimited colors, patterns and animations.”
Permanent lighting takes longer to install – a day compared to "one and a half to three hours for Christmas lights – and so it costs more: $3,000 to $5,000, he said. For permanent lighting, Bright Home’s territory goes 90 minutes from Middletown.
Zitofsky said he and installation manager Carl Ewing take pride in the little details of their work. That includes all the bulbs pointing downward, even when upward and outward is faster, not stopping on the corner but instead “giving the building some wraparound for a 3D look.”
It also includes using white wiring that blends into fascia better than green wiring, installing bulbs every 12 inches rather than a cheaper 15 inches and using a bulb at the peak of every A-frame.
“My kids can tell the difference,” he said.
