Rockland Company Blazes a Trail with Energy-Efficient Lights

Greenburgh resident Jacqueline Shkreli, co-owner of Selah, said the new lights not only save energy but represent hair color more accurately.

As a result, the salon isn’t getting any more calls from customers surprised by the tone of their newly tinted hair in the daylight.

“Clients aren’t calling and saying their hair color is different,” Shkreli said. “It’s a happier customer.”

Developing energy-efficient lighting that meets the demands of hair colorists concerned about accurate lighting has been a mission at Eco-Lite Products for more than a year and a half.

Howard Gurock, president of the Tappan-based company, said he was inspired to develop salon lighting by the experiences of his wife.

“My wife would get her hair colored every three to four weeks and then would complain that it looked different at home than in the salon. One day, I said to her, when I couldn’t take it anymore, ‘Why?’ And she said it was the lighting, the lighting is no good,” Gurock said.

Unlike other husbands in similar positions, Gurock was uniquely qualified to do something about the problem.

A one-time partner in a Rockland law firm, the New City resident had recently become partners with childhood friend Jeff Gasman in a company that specialized in lighting for independent jewelry stores.

In 2007, Gurock and Gasman bought a Jersey City, N.J., company known as Econo-Lite and moved the business to Rockland, changing the name to Eco-Lite to reflect the emphasis on energy-efficient lighting.

Econo-Lite, with 11 employees, assembled specialty light fixtures designed to make diamonds sparkle in a pure white light.

“If you go down 47th Street, 90 percent of the lights in the jewelry stores are made by our company,” Gurock said.

Gurock saw the potential to find new markets for specialty lights in other retail arenas that need to highlight merchandise in glass cases, including art galleries and craft stores.

The Santa Barbara Zoo in California, for instance, turned to Eco-Lite for energy-efficient lighting for its gift shop.

The company scored a coup when Cohen’s Fashion Optical, a chain of 120 eyeglass stores, hired Gurock to develop lights similar to those in jewelry shops but with less intensity.

When the idea of creating lighting for beauty salons came up in discussion with his wife, Gurock said he and Gasman did old-fashioned research to see if there would be a market for such a product.

They called two hair salons in all 50 states, asking the question: Do you like the lighting in your salon?

Nine out of 10 owners said no.

Knowing that lighting, especially high-intensity lighting that produces a natural light, uses tons of electricity, Gurock said creating an energy-efficient fixture was the No. 1 goal for the system.

The company’s lighting experts began creating a fixture with a ceramic-metal halide light bulb.

Unlike the halogen bulbs favored by colorists, metal halide bulbs uses less energy and still emit a bright white light. Metal halide lights are often used in sports stadiums.

Gurock’s team started with a 22-watt bulb. By using reflectors in the fixture, they were able to create enough light to replace a 50-watt halogen light.

With a prototype in hand, Gurock began reaching out to stylists, eventually finding his way to the doors of Carmine and Beth Minardi on Madison Avenue in New York.

Well known in beauty circles for their celebrity clientele as well as their expertise in designing salon lighting to accurately represent color, the Minardis were initially skeptical of Eco-Light’s quest.

Carmine Minardi, a beauty educator for 20 years, said that salons use both incandescent and halogen lights to produce a flattering mix of warm and cool light.

The downside is the lights are expensive to install and maintain because not only do they guzzle electricity but they are so warm they require lavish air conditioning.

Existing energy-efficient lights that used fluorescent bulbs weren’t suitable for salons, Minardi said.

“Most energy-efficient lights are very, very white, whether they are fluorescent or compact fluorescent. They are very good at saving energy, but they are not good for looking at skin tone or the tone of hair,” he said.

That was also a pitfall of the first Eco-Lite prototype.

“When I saw the prototype, I said that in theory this is great. I’d love to save money on electricity and air conditioning,” Minardi said. “But the original was too white and too clear.”

Persuaded by the persistence of Gurock, who kept coming back with new prototypes based on Minardi’s advice, the couple agreed to team with Eco-Light to create a complete system of energy-efficient lights that could accurately render hair color.

The Minardi Color Perfect Lighting System took over a year to develop and consists of three fixtures: an ambient light that’s hung a foot below the ceiling; a task light suspended over a stylist’s chair; and an LED-based fixture placed at the customer’s eye level to light the face.

The system won the International Beauty Industry Innovator Award at the 2009 America’s Beauty Show in March in Chicago.

Minardi said the secret is warming up the bulbs with strategically placed glass gels of different hues. The mix of reflectors and gels softens the white metal halide light, creating a flattering effect without sacrificing energy efficiency.

Minardi said that the lighting portion of the electric bill at his New York salon has dropped by 70 percent and the overall bill is down about 35 percent.

Salons are not usually environmentally friendly places, Minardi noted, with the large volumes of hot water and chemicals in use as well as the constant hair drying.

“If every salon in America drops its power usage by 35 percent, that’s a heck of a lot of savings for the environment,” Minardi said. “This is definitely a move in the right direction for any industry, but especially with ours.”

The price for the system for an average-size salon would be $3,000 to $5,000, with each light costing $129 to $499, an expense Gurock contends will pay for itself in energy savings.

Available since January, the lighting system is in about 100 salons around the country, Gurock said.

Ted Cortese, owner of diVa Colour Studio in Memphis, Tenn., said he was the second salon in the country to install the Eco-Lite system.

“One of the problems I’ve always had is that I did not want hair color and skin color tainted by fluorescent bulbs,” he said. “This is the closest thing to outside natural light that you can have inside a building. These lights are not only clean as far as tone on skin and eyes, but they put out almost no heat.”

In the South, that saves on air conditioning. “My utility bill last year in June and this year in June is half,” Cortese said.

Cortese spent $10,000 to light seven stations at his salon.

“The light bulbs themselves might be a little expensive, but they last for years. I’ve got the finest lighting system I’ve seen in 35 years in this business,” he said, adding that he is saving an estimated $450 to $600 a month on his electric bill.

Laurel Smoke, editor-in-chief of Modern Salon magazine, said the Eco-Lite system is unique because it not only provides color-accurate lighting but also energy savings.

“The major challenge in lighting in salons has to do with hair color,” she said. “Colorists are striving to get the color the client wants. If they are trying to get a buttery blond versus a golden blond versus a platinum blond, the lighting can make a huge, huge difference.”

Salons have also been striving to become more environmentally aware.

“This company has come out with something that gives salons not only great lighting for hair color, but something that’s environmentally friendly,” Smoke said.

Gurock said Eco-Lite is experimenting with other energy-efficient lights, including an LED that uses just 30 watts of electricity but has the power of 200 watts of halogen light or 1,000 watts of incandescent light.

While Gurock declined to reveal sales figures for the privately held company, he said they were over $1 million.

Despite the recession, sales have held steady, he said, because of all the new markets the company has pursued beyond its jewelry store base.

Gurock, who will be 47 next month, said he has big hopes for the business once the economy turns around.

“We want to be known as the company of choice for energy-efficient lighting in the retail and eventually the consumer world,” he said.

Additional Facts

 On the Web:

www.eco-lite.com

Tags: eco-lite, econo-lite, energy efficient lights, jewelry lighting, salon lights