An architect by trade, Mike Treanor established Mullan Lighting in the border village of Mullan, Co Monaghan in 2009. The village had suffered following the closure of the Border Brand shoe factory in the 1970s, but the emergence of Mullan Lighting has been instrumental in rejuvenating the area. In the tint village, it employs 75 people, and now occupies the site of the former shoe factory. It is, by any standards, a local business with an international outlook.

Now, the company is currently doubling the size of its manufacturing facilities in a million euro expansion project and has just launched a new brand – Mullan Ceramics. The history of the village has long illustrated the history of the Irish border. Indeed, Mullan was decimated after security forces in the North closed Ballagh bridge in 1973.

Now, however, a local company is aiming to give the village a new future.

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Mullan Lighting has just launched a new range of products called Mullan Ceramics which fuses ceramic elements with Mullan Lighting designs to create a range of lighting accessories which is very much in keeping with the current interiors trend of natural and handmade objects for the home. 

The opportunity arose last year when a ceramicist renting a space within the Mullan Lighting manufacturing facility moved on to work elsewhere. “I contacted a chap I knew from school, ceramicist Stephen Kieran, to see if he’d be interested in getting on board and so Mullan Ceramics came about,” says Mullan Lighting founder Mike Treanor.

“It’s interesting – it’s all an experiment at this stage. We are focusing on the lights at the moment and the ceramics side of things may take their own course at a later stage.”

The launch of Mullan Ceramics has resulted in the employment of an additional three full-time members of staff for the company bringing the total to 75. The company is a significant employer in the area where it competes for staff with other major players such as Combilift, Silver Hill Foods and Errigal Contracts.

There has always been a tradition of creativity and craft in the local area around Mullan. “Between stone and woodcarving, lacemaking and art there is certainly a tradition of making in the area,” says Treanor who adds that the addition of the ceramics branch of the business will allow new products lines to be developed alongside the company’s existing range of lighting products and bespoke services.

Growth in the USA

A large part of Mullan Lighting’s business is based on large scale bespoke projects whereby Mullan designers work with interior designers, architects, lighting designers and engineers to create bespoke lighting products for environments such as office spaces, hotels, bars, restaurants and retail spaces. One of their most ambitious projects to date has been the large-scale outdoor project at La Mer, Dubai where they created all the outdoor lighting for the beach front complete with lights that can withstand 50-degree temperatures and potential sandstorms.

Since the advent of the pandemic however, the business has seen an increase in their B2B and B2C business – particularly in the US region where they have seen a growing demand for their products from both domestic and commercial customers. While growth in the Irish market has remained fairly stagnant so far this year for Mullan, sales in the US have gone up over 400% compared to this time last year.

“While certain markets certainly dipped last year, Ireland in particular, we did experience growth in other areas,” says Treanor. “Last year was certainly very challenging and we did not grow the business but this year we are on course to grow the business by 30 percent by the end of the year. The US market for us grew considerably, however. In the US we see growing demand in the domestic market. We also have commercial projects too, but it is mainly being driven by domestic growth.”

Social media

This growth in the US market and more widely in the area of direct-to-consumer sales has not happened by accident, however.

International trade fairs are the company’s traditional route to market but Treanor says that while they are “great fun” and put the brand “in contact with commercial clients all over the world” he is in no hurry to return to them: “We are in no hurry – we won’t attend until the situation is more comfortable than it is at the moment.”

Mullan Lighting has had support from Enterprise Ireland in the past few months to help them gain more traction in the US and their emphasis on social media has begun to pay off – particularly in the US where their Instagram account is proving popular and resulting in sales.

“We had to invest in other ways to reach our customers internationally so we placed more focus on social media, particularly Instagram. Two more people joined the marketing team – one of them focuses solely on social media and on communicating what we do at the factory day-to-day as opposed to talking about the products on our website,” explains Treanor. “We are trying to really connect the customer with the day-to-day at Mullan.”

He admits that it is early days in terms of gauging the return on investment, and that it can be difficult to measure the true impact of social media campaigns, but says that they are receiving very positive feedback from customers. He says that while the “Irishness” of the business “doesn’t do any harm” when it comes to attracting American consumers, it is, rather, the genuine nature of the business that appeals to Mullan customers.

“When they see that the company is genuine, see the people behind it and the products being made step-by-step, they connect with the company and we are finding that people are coming forward and buying our product. We’ve opened the doors to the factory on social media so-to-speak.”

Impact of Covid-19

Covid-19 and its related lockdowns have naturally presented problems for the company who began producing safety screens in response to demand during the initial lockdown last year. “At the very beginning we were hit hard and had to diversify and try to get people back to work. People wanted hygiene screens in a hurry to get their own businesses up and running, we had the equipment to do it and it kept a few people going here. Thankfully that part of the business has stepped down and we are not producing them to the same degree as before.”

Treanor says that the first four months of the pandemic last year were the worst for the company and staff had to be temporarily laid off however he has been able to re-employ people as projects and production have picked up again. Many of their commercial projects had to be put on hold and, as many of the products were in various stages of development, large sections of the factory were given over to storing items which were either half- or fully-made from projects that were on hold.

“We understood that it was a challenging time for people and we shared that burden but that backlog has eventually cleared as things have reopened and the projects have continued so thankfully, while it was a burden for a period of time, it hasn’t affected us overall,” says Treanor who is mid-way through a €1 million expansion project at his facility. The project began last summer to double the size of the factory and is largely self-funded though with support from the LEADER Fund and Enterprise Ireland.

“Overall business in 2020 was down marginally, however we have continued to invest in growth with the construction of our factory extension, which is nearing completion,” says Treanor. “We also took the time to look at our entire business model and at how we produce goods. During the quiet few months we laid out the factory differently, took a different approach to our sales and marketing and worked on relaunching our website. A small silver lining on the whole situation was that we did have the time and space to reevaluate where we were going and possibly to motivate ourselves to push on further.”

Covid safety

Mullan Lighting employs many staff who are members of the same families. There are two, three and even four members of some families working at the facility which could be an issue if one family member is deemed a close contact of a positive Covid-19 case however this hasn’t been a major issue to date.

The company has taken measures to ensure that if there is a close contact or a positive case in the factory that it doesn’t spread. “People are generally well spaced out and work in small teams, we have staggered lunch breaks, we don’t have a shared canteen space, everyone wears their masks, we do temperature tests and the usual precautions so thankfully we have not had an outbreak within the factory. We have had a few close calls but thankfully we have been very lucky,” says Treanor who says that the management team has not deemed it necessary to employ the use of lateral flow tests.

Website relaunch

While the company only launched a new website less than three years ago, they are currently updating it again, not least because customers turned almost solely to online shopping over the past year.

“People had no other option during Covid other than to shop online. We noticed that our following on social media has swelled in the last 12 months and the same with our web sales which have more than doubled online in the past year,” says Treanor.

He agrees that customers online are both visually aware and also impatient and therefore speed and usability are key to the success of online retail. “Customers will click away very quickly if your website is not up to scratch.”

“It’s not that long since our last website launch – only two or three years ago but we are going again and updating it with the latest technology . Speed and usability are key and our products very much depend on us having really good quality high resolution images. Our website is already up there with the best but we want to make it even better. It really is our storefront  – we are in the middle of nowhere and so it’s the window into what we do and it’s so important.”

The company is currently working on a number of large projects creating bespoke lighting for cruise ships grounded due to the pandemic. “That industry is taking the time to refurbish ships and we are working on a couple of projects. They’ve been hit very hard but seem to be riding the wave so-to-speak,” says Treanor. “Clients such as this work directly with our design team to design the products and there are a lot of factors to take into consideration such as salty sea air, vibrations on the ship, safety and so on. Projects such as these are challenging but we like to rise to the challenge.”

Thoughts on Brexit

Mullan established a UK-based company a couple of years ago as a result of the threat of Brexit and this is something that will likely be needed even more going forward, says Treanor.  “Things seem to be getting more confusing than they were before. What we’ve done seems to have worked though as our UK sales figures have almost doubled on last year.”

Mullan Lighting has a facility north of the border, five minute’s drive from their southern operations. “We use that facility from time-to-time to ease the burden of exporting and importing from the UK where we also have the UK-based company,” says Treanor. “We also have a UK-based agent working on mainland UK. As travel restrictions took hold we appointed an exclusive full-time agent on the ground in the UK who works mainly with retailers and designers.”

Treanor says that Brexit has created a lot of confusion for business owners. “We are trying to make things as simple as possible for our customers in the UK and there is still a lot of confusion over customs clearance with goalposts constantly changing and deadlines relating to duties and taxes and so on. There is still a lot of confusion among courier companies when it comes to the customer receiving the parcel – we are constantly trying to make the process easier.”

Product innovation

Product innovation and a client-focused approach are the two mainstays of Treanor’s approach to business. Investing in these areas means he now has three people working full-time on new product development and two people working full-time on ongoing bespoke projects. Designers at Mullan come from various academic and industry backgrounds including ceramics, textiles, engineering and interior design.

“We have found that employing people from a multitude of backgrounds works really well and results in new ideas and approaches,” says Treanor. “We have found that it is very easy to design something complicated and very difficult to design something simple. We find that if we work hard enough we can come up with a simple design that people can relate to and that works really well.”

Mullan Lighting can often have three- to 400 projects running simultaneously.  “A lot of time has to be spent getting the design just right… so we take our time on the product design and then everything we do is focused on the customer. We work for the customer. The  customer dictates what they want – they tell us what our lead times need to be or what level of flexibility is needed. Having a short lead time and producing quality products helps mitigate the challenges of maintaining a customer-centric approach as the company grows. “We know that if we start to step away from that we will start to stagnate or go in the wrong direction. If we are to continue to be successful we know where our targets lie and have to stick to them.”