Brisbane manufacturer Luxxbox lights up the world

The couple behind boutique Brisbane lighting manufacturer have won global recognition for their work and now earn 80 per cent of their revenue from the US.

Kara Chiconi and Jason Bird from lighting manufacturer Luxxbox

Brisbane couple Jason Bird and Kara Chiconi are literally lighting up the world.

The husband and wife founders of boutique lighting manufacturer Luxxbox have emerged from the pandemic bigger and stronger, recently picking up a highly contested international design award for their acoustic lights and posting a record month in sales.

Founded 17 years ago, Luxxbox is now a multimillion dollar business with an enviable list of commercial clients including Amazon, Ford, Pfizer and Doordash as well as a new factory in California serving the rapidly expanding North American market.

“Through Covid and the crazy of 2022, Luxxbox has continued to design and manufacture from our facility in Eagle Farm,” says Chiconi. “We we’re lucky in Queensland because they never shut down manufacturing during Covid unlike other states where people went to the wall. We soon realised that if we could keep manufacturing, we could keep the doors open.” Chiconi says the pandemic did force some changes in the business, with Luxxbox ditching its furniture line and concentrating solely on acoustic lighting.

“We were competing against these giant European companies that could punch out a lot of good furniture at a lower cost than we could,” she says.

Kara Chiconi and Jason Bird

The decision to focus on lighting has paid off, with Luxxbox earlier this month winning the prestigious Architizer 2022 A+ award for its new Hemii light.

“The award is reinforcement that the shift to lighting was the right one,” she says. “We are particularly proud that it was judged the best in terms of aesthetics, performance and impact by a global panel of architects, beating out hundreds of entries world wide from some of the biggest design firms in Europe and the US.”

The dome-shaped Hemii light is made from recycled acoustic PET and hand-upholstered in biodegradable wool.

Chiconi says acoustic lighting - which can be hung next to, or above, work spaces to absorb noise in open plan spaces - was becoming increasingly popular as workers demanded a more flexible work environment following the pandemic.

“Part of having a flexible work environment is privacy and quiet,” she says. “We are doing a lot of retrofitting of industrial spaces where there can be a lot of noise bounce. Open plan offices are great but they are incredibly noisy.”

Luxxbox recently completed a major project at the headquarters of Doordash in Arizona that involved installation of thousands of metres of lighting.

Chiconi says the US market now makes up 80 per cent of the company’s revenue, necessitating the opening of a new factory in Sonoma in Northern California. “It is basically a mirror of our Brisbane factory to help sustain our growth in the US,” she says.

Luxxbox blue and grey fitout design

She says Luxxbox is still committed to manufacturing in Australia, with recent global supply chain issues due to pandemic lockdowns reinforcing that view. The company employs about 35 people across both sites.

“We bought a lot of manufacturing in-house long before Covid,” she says. “We realised early on that you had to be in control and not reliant on places like China.”

Jason Bird worked as an in-house industrial designer before deciding to strike out on his own.

“In 2007, we started a showroom in the Valley and began developing our own collection,” Bird says. “We were doing a lot of design work but it was becoming increasingly difficult to get reliable manufacturers in Australia.”

Bird says the company will continue to manufacture in Australia, even though that can be a challenge. “Distance is still a problem in Australia with so many clients overseas,” he says. “Australia has grown up with the import mentality in that we will accept things take time to arrive. But clients overseas will not accept that.”

Six years ago, the company moved to Eagle Farm, establishing a factory and office in a World War II-era warehouse just off Kingsford Smith Drive.

Originally published as Brisbane manufacturer Luxxbox lights up the world