We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Jared Haworth a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Jared, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to go back in time and hear the story of how you came up with the name of your brand?

The concept of a lightship was the perfect metaphor for our neon design studio. Lightships were floating lighthouses, sent out to guard navigable approaches to land, operated by a small but dedicated crew keeping their lamp alight. I couldn’t think of a better parallel to our business, keeping neon lit in the face of challenges from more modern technologies. We’re the keepers of that light, allowing it to shine brightly, and helping to spread the awareness and enthusiasm for this unique art form.

Jared, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I’d been fascinated by neon lights my entire life. Even some of the earliest snapshots I’d taken on my first film camera were of neon signs I’d seen in Connecticut and New York. As I grew up, my eyes were always drawn to the light.

A few years back, I had the opportunity to take a hands-on class in making neon signs at a now-closed studio in North Carolina. That class served as a small taste for me, and led down a path of first renting time there to work on personal projects, to eventually leaving my career in software development and joining the team to work full-time in neon.

Shortly after I’d joined that shop, the owner announced he’d be retiring and closing down the location. I wasn’t ready to go back to working in technology, and a few others folks working there didn’t want to give up being in the neon business, so I launched Lightship Neon to allow us to continue working, creating, and sharing our passion for neon.

Because the hands-on class was so valuable to my own neon awakening, we’re committed to continuing to offer classes at Lightship Neon. It’s fairly unusual for a shop to open its doors and “give away its secrets,” but our feeling is that the more people who can gain an appreciation for our craft, the better the world will be for all neon artists. That includes offering corporate team-building workshops, where businesses looking for an alternative to golfing, go-kart racing or escape rooms can come and have a one-of-a-kind experience and put something tangible into their workspace to which they’ve all contributed. And everyone who comes away from our workshops wind up looking at neon lights in a new way, and understands the dedication and effort it takes to create. Every neon sign (not just in our shop, but worldwide) has been bent by hand, by a craftsperson standing over a 1,000ºF flame, working the glass into letters, numbers, and shapes.

We do more than just offer classes, too. We create custom neon signs, too, whether it’s small, personal designs that could hang in a kitchen, office, garage, or living room, or large outdoor creations for businesses who see the value in a locally hand-made artform that’s designed to last for decades. We also perform repairs and restorations on older signs – one of neon’s strengths relative to our electronic competition is that it’s all just glass and inert gas; we can repair or remake glass tubing and bring old signs back to life, something that isn’t true for LED-based signs.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

We’re often surprised by which of our posts garner more attention on social media. In particular, though we make illuminated (and sometimes animated) signs, the posts which people seem drawn to are the ones that just feel like ‘routine’ operations for us. For instance, when we’re making a neon sign, one step includes painting out the sections of glass that we want to remain dark. To do this quickly and easily, we’ve made a dip tank full of paint, where we can lower the glass in to evenly coat all the hidden parts of the glass.

We started recording videos of us lowering the glass into the paint and showing it obscuring the tubing. These have turned out to be some of our most viral videos! They also wind up being seen by far more of our non-follwers than our followers, which is super important to gaining new exposure and new eyeballs.

So, the most important thing for us has been to watch the insights and trends, and not just make the content that *we* think is exciting, we have to create the content that our audience is most likely to engage with, even if it’s something that’s just humdrum to us.

How do you keep your team’s morale high?

I’ve had the opportunity to run a few different teams (in a few different industries) across my whole career. To me, there are a few common things that have made each of those teams successful.

First and foremost is trust. Every career I’ve been involved with, whether it’s technology or neon signs, has included working with incredibly talented and motivated people, and it’s important to give them the room to shine. It means not micromanaging or helicoptering over them. Trust goes both ways, so I have to show them that I’ve got their best interests in mind, and that I’m not going to ask them to do anything I’m not willing to do myself. Sometimes that means I’m the one on the ladder sixteen feet in the air, no matter how uncomfortable that might make me!

Trust isn’t something that’s just given once and held permanently, either. When launching Lightship Neon, I’d only been working with Rich Marvill (our incredibly talented glass bender) for a few months, and while he had an idea of my working style, I was asking him to put a tremendous amount of trust in my ability to start a business, keep it funded, and keep him employed. That’s on my mind every single day, ensuring that I demonstrate to him that his trust was well-placed.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://lightshipneon.com
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/lightshipneon
• Facebook: https://facebook.com/lightshipneon
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/lightship-neon/?lipi=urn%3Ali%3Apage%3Ad_flagship3_search_srp_all%3BZAWJ9BAMRcO4FRcPj5S7cg%3D%3D
• Other: https://bsky.app/profile/lightshipneon.bsky.social

Image Credits

All images taken by Jared Haworth