If you tell him that his company is the “Apple of lights”, Marco Franciosa smiles, rolls his eyes and whispers a “maybe”. And yet she does not deny it. How could it? In 5 years, Twinkly has really managed to become for the lights (Christmas and not only) what the Cupertino company is for smartphones and to create a market that was not there from scratch.
Today Twinkly (Ledworks, the company that controls it) employs 60 people, has two offices in Italy, in Milan and in the province of Padua, and in 2022 it will exceed 50 million euros in turnover. There were 36 last year and just 3 in 2018, but here it’s not just a question of numbers: it is a question of mindset, relationship with suppliers, pursuit of excellence, approach to the market and precisely the creation of a business that did not exist before.
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Ledworks was founded in June 2016 by Franciosa, who is now executive president, along with Andrea Tellatin e Stefano Grasselliwho are today CEO and CFO respectively: “We made the first 10 thousand Twinkly lighting kits to gauge people’s interest – he explained to us when we went to visit him in his office in downtown Genova – But the first serious year was 2017 ”.
The intuition, however, came first: “I remember it was December 2015, my wife convinced me to go in Milan together with a group of friends to visit a shop specializing in Christmas lights – Franciosa told us, a past as a deejay in the discos of Liguria – We start wandering around the shop, I get bored, I go upstairs where they had lots of lights, in so many temperatures of white. I buy a set and on the weekend we use them to decorate the tree. They are beautiful, but they do nothing, they turn on, they just turn off. I wanted more, I had seen the Tree of Life at Expo and I wanted that“. He wanted what Twinkly has become famous for in the world, that is, lights that could be turned on and off on command, independently of each other, controllable from the smartphone and modular in order to create plays of light and color schemes: “They were arriving on so-called market led addressable, which thanks to the passage of a third cable (in addition to ground and current, ed) can receive information on what to do, how to switch on and off, in what color, for how long and with how much intensity. And so we gave it a try ”.
How Twinkly’s lights work
An attempt that has definitely been successful: “To date we are close to 2 million subscribers through our app, of which 30% have more than one device ”. What in the business world is called first-mover advantage (the advantage of starting first, of making the first move) has allowed the company to still be practically unrivaled today: “Entering our sector, getting to where we are now, it’s not easy – Franciosa explained to us – It took us 3-4 years just to perfect our app and make it work as we wanted, we protected our inventions with 15 patents and we were also good at choosing the right chip suppliers, having them made in Taiwan for our needs, tailored and just for us ”. Which is a bit like what Apple does, after all.
The heart of it all are Twinkly lights, which became very popular in Italy at Christmas 2018: they are groups of 250-600 LEDs to be used to decorate the tree and to be controlled via the smartphone or with your own voice, thanks to the compatibility with Google Home, Alexa and Apple HomeKit. They can also be bought online, even on Amazon, with prices ranging from 80 to 300 euros. No: they are not cheap, Franciosa knows this and in fact one of the objectives of 2023/2024 is precisely that of “trying to lower prices by 20-30%”.
This is how they work: you take the LED strips out of the package, place them on the tree, you download the app (which is this), you connect them to your home wifi and use the smartphone camera to map the lights, which is essential to effectively use the preset effects and also to create new ones. Subsequently, you can turn them on and off from the phone, set the effects to be played, set a timer and manage the light intensity, which are two functions that are even more important in this period of attention to consumption and energy saving.
Twinkly Squares, the novelty of 2022
In mid-September, the company introduced Twinkly Squares, light panels that can reproduce up to 16 million colors and used for compose real works of pixel art: the pack of 6 panels costs 250 euros, to which others can be added (the kit with 3 panels costs 100 euros) to create paintings, columns, frames or handrails along the stairs.
We had the chance to try them for a long time: assembly is really simple and can be completed without looking at the instructions, each panel is joined to those around it through cables and clips that hold them in place, while the main one has a USB-C port for connection to the electrical outlet. On their use, we agree with what Franciosa told us: “They are designed for a room where there are other lights, perhaps for the gaming room of a video game enthusiast or as a background for those who stream on Twitch or for a youtuber, not to be alone in the middle of a white part ”. Where in fact they get lost a little.
That time at Chiara Ferragni’s house
Where they definitely wouldn’t get lost is in the home of Fedez and Chiara Ferragniwho have been using Twinkly lights for Christmas decorations for years now: “The collaboration with her was born a little by chance at the end of 2019 – Franciosa told us – We still had some budget to spend on the promotion, a friend she suggests I try to involve her, a little joking and a little no. We contact her personal assistant, who was initially a bit skeptical but she was convinced when she saw the videos of the product, confessing that Chiara is crazy about Christmas lights ”. And so “let’s make an appointment and go to their CityLife apartment for assembly and set-up: we brought the quantity of LEDs established, but they wanted more and we had to go and buy other packages in the center of Milanto then come back and complete the job “.
The partnership with one of the most famous digital entrepreneurs, which according to Franciosa is “a success from the human point of view and a success from the point of view of visibility”, is only part of the company’s broad marketing strategy. who immediately focused heavily on social networks: to date, l’hashtag #twinkly has been used in over 41,000 Instagram posts and has collected over 37 million views on TikTok. “We are only sorry that we have not yet found someone equally strong abroad”, Franciosa confessed to us.
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How is it going in the rest of the world
What they found abroad, on the other hand, are the customers: the United States alone accounts for 50% of the turnoverbut Twinkly lights also do very well in Canada, Australia, Germany, France, UK and the Nordic countries and were also fine in Russia e Ukraineat least before the war broke out.
They are still not very common in South America, while in China “we are not there but we would like to be there, even if it is a difficult market due to the linguistic and cultural barrier, not to mention the fact that our social networks are not their social networks “. Among other things, China is also the country where what the company considers comes from the only real competitor: it’s called GoVee, also sells on Amazon but produces only LED strips, neon and other lighting devices for the smart home. No assault on Christmas, at least for now.