I start booking Christmas light installs in August. People give me a hard time about it. It was 112 yesterday and I had two holiday design visits scheduled.
But there's a reason I do it this way, and it's not marketing. Every November I have to call people back and tell them we can't fit them in. I've been installing lighting in the Valley since 2004 and that call has never gotten easier. So this post is basically me trying to have that conversation in August instead, when there's still something I can do about it.
The install window is three weeks
Almost everyone wants their lights up in the stretch between the week before Thanksgiving and the first week of December and any earlier than that feels weird to people, and much later than that the family's already showing up, so everything lands in the same narrow window.
Now think about how many houses around Gilbert, Mesa, Chandler, Scottsdale and Queen Creek want professional lights this year, and all of them are trying to fit into those same three weeks or so of workdays. A crew gets through maybe four or five houses on a good day, fewer if one of them is a big two-story with a complicated roofline, and once those weeks fill up there's nothing I can do about it. I can't add Saturdays to November, believe me I've wanted to.
So when someone calls me in the summer, all that's really happening is they're getting on that calendar while it still has open days. It's not a trick or a promotion or anything, it's literally just the order people called in.
Permanent trim changes the timeline even more
A word on permanent trim lighting, since that's most of what we install now. What that is, is the LED channel that mounts under your roofline permanently. You control it from an app, run whatever colors you want, and never put up seasonal lights again.
Installing it is a real project though. There's a design walk, then measuring out the rooflines, mounting the track, the wiring, getting the app set up on your phone. Depending on the house it can take a couple of days, and it's not something I want to be starting from scratch at your place on December 3rd. You don't want that either, trust me.
But if we start in August or September it's done well before the holidays, and you get months of use out of it first. People run orange for Halloween, their team colors on game day, that kind of thing. Most of my trim customers tell me later that the holiday part ended up being maybe half of why they like it.
Rushed decisions look rushed
The other thing about waiting too long is that you stop making choices and start just taking whatever can be done fast.
When there's time, we can figure out what actually suits your house. Single clean color along the roof. Warm white year-round with color just for December. Sometimes we get to talking and it turns out the roofline isn't even the priority — they want the saguaro lit, or the entryway. That kind of design conversation happens in September. It does not happen the week before Thanksgiving. In November everybody, including me, is just trying to get things up.
I'll just be blunt about this part because I've watched it happen for twenty years now. My August customers end up with better lighting than my November customers do, even though it's the same crews putting up the same products. The only thing that changed is how much time everybody had to think.
What booking early actually commits you to
A lot less than people assume, which surprises them. Usually it starts with a phone call, then I'll swing by some evening after dark since that's the only honest way to see what a house actually needs at night, and from there we work out a plan and pick a date. There's no deposit for lights sitting in my shop all fall or anything like that.
Being booked early just means the design conversation already happened and your date is protected. Then when it rolls around we come do the work, and in the meantime you get to forget about the whole thing, which as far as I can tell is the part people appreciate most.
Anyway
That's my pitch, for whatever it's worth. Nobody wants to think about December right now and I include myself in that. But most of the houses that look great the weekend after Thanksgiving belong to people who made one phone call back when it was still miserable out, and if lights are on your list at all this year, that call takes about ten minutes. Might as well have it while the good dates are still sitting there.
Desert Outdoor Lighting has served the Phoenix Valley since 2004. Licensed and bonded, ROC# 340142. Get in touch for a free after-dark design visit — we're booking holiday and permanent trim installs for this season now.