🎧 Pax Lighting: Modern Craft of Lighting Teegan Nordhues

Appears in the April 2025 issue of Ceramics Monthly.

 

The audio file for this article was produced by the Ceramic Arts Network staff and not read by the author.

Editors: Tell us a bit about your background and what led you and Jeff Nordhues to establish Pax Lighting. 

Teegan Nordhues: Jeff and I are high school sweethearts who have always had an entrepreneurial bent. Even at seventeen, we were dreaming up plans to work for ourselves someday. After high school, Jeff got an industrial design degree from the Art Institute of Colorado while I got a degree in English. After college, we got married and both worked for the Dessin Fournir Companies in a tiny town in North Central Kansas. It was a luxury furniture, lighting, and fabric design firm. Jeff did the lighting CAD and digitized their entire parts library while I was working in their PR and marketing department. This was the first time we saw a company doing amazing work and a bang-up business in the middle of nowhere. 

After a few years there, Jeff got a master’s degree in industrial design from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) before getting a job at Baker Furniture, which was owned by Kohler at the time. It was a peek into overseas manufacturing and a corporate design environment. The corporate design world is filled with wonderful people, but Jeff is at his best when he’s building things so we moved back home to Nebraska with the aim of making good on the promise to ourselves to build a business. 

We started in furniture but ever since high school ceramics, Jeff has been deeply interested in what ceramics can do. And I think since he was coming at ceramics from more of a production, industrial design mindset, he saw the huge potential in slip casting. We finally quit the furniture idea and decided to focus solely on incorporating slip-cast ceramic into light fixtures. Through slip casting, we found we could make the pieces a lot lighter, which is incredibly practical when hanging fixtures from a wall or ceiling, and with some tweaking to our recipes, we’ve been able to strengthen our terra cotta nearly to a stoneware level. 

Eds: How are each of your skills utilized within your roles in the company? 

TN: Jeff is in charge of production and I’m in charge of sales and marketing. Jeff was making everything himself—both the ceramic side and the custom brass pieces—but we’ve since hired an amazing head ceramic artist who does the bulk of the ceramics production. She actually knew nothing about ceramics when she joined us. She has a master’s degree in chemistry so she was able to come at slip casting from a scientific angle to learn how all of the elements interact and was able to perfect her skills from there. Since we both have clearly defined areas in the business, we’re able to work well together. Although we’ve had to put a strict “no talking about work after 10pm” rule, as a whole, we really like working together. 

Eds: What are some specific examples of the challenges you have faced when transitioning from corporate design to running your own business? 

TN: I think we’ve had to adjust our expectations on just how long things take, as well as understand the strategy of growth. Larger corporations have already gone through the growing pains and have staff and money to move fast to meet the breakneck speed of design trends and yearly cycles. We started out thinking we could have two product releases every year and now we’re thrilled to get something new out in time for the International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF), the trade show we’ve attended the last couple of years in May. And it’s usually by the skin of our teeth. 

Also, since we started from ground zero, we’ve had to be so smart with what we spend money on and when, which means sacrifices have had to be made at different points. So, for example, even though we needed a bigger kiln, we chose to make do with our smaller kiln so we could spend the money on attending a trade show to hopefully get more sales, which in turn could buy a bigger kiln. It definitely pinched, but in the end it paid off. When you work in a corporate environment, either they don’t have to worry about that or you don’t get to see that type of sacrificial decision-making. 

Eds: How does Pax Lighting differentiate itself from other high-end lighting brands, both regionally and nationally? 

TN: I think our ceramics are a differentiator for sure. There are other ceramic lighting companies that do beautiful things, but I think that since Jeff has an industrial design background first, and a self-taught ceramic education second, our clay components look less like traditional ceramics and more like parts themselves. 

Also, the other thing we’ve tried to emphasize as a business is good communication and we’ve made it a goal to respond to emails and quote requests within 24 hours. You’d be surprised how often we get compliments for that. 

Eds: Describe how you approach incorporating clay into light fixture designs. What does this material contribute to the final products? 

TN: We joke that Jeff’s middle name is “streamlined.” He’s always trying to eliminate anything unnecessary and I think our ceramics reflect that. We spend a lot of time experimenting to create clean, precise shapes and pieces that feel almost like traditional lamp parts. But then the glazes add color and texture not achievable in any other lighting material. At this point in the market, it still feels unexpected. 

Eds: What are some of the unique challenges of operating a luxury design business in a small town like Kearney, Nebraska? How does Pax Lighting envision contributing to the growth of the design industry in Nebraska? 

TN: One challenge has been finding local vendors who could precision machine brass parts to the luxury standard. There are a lot of machine shops, but because they’re used to agricultural equipment they didn’t notice the details like we needed. It took time, but we’ve found a couple of Nebraska vendors who are absolutely unparalleled. The other has been staff—we knew we weren’t going to be able to hire people who were already ceramic artists or good with brass. So, we hire for particular qualities and then we know we’re going to have a few months, if not years, of training before they’ll be on their feet. Sometimes, that long training time can be a pretty big struggle especially when we’re up against deadlines. The last one is more personal. Because this industry doesn’t exist here, I’ve noticed I’ve come to dread the “What do you do?” question because the answer always requires a lot of explanation. My favorite response recently was, “Wow, that’s a really bougie job for these parts.” But it’s a great life here, our family is in town, our team is amazing, and I don’t think we’d trade it for easier vendors or staffing. Also, fun fact, each of our fixtures is named after a small town in Nebraska. 

One of our dreams for being in Kearney is opening up possibilities for creative people to be able to use their skills everyday. Our approach to training is the apprenticeship model in the hope that we can offer rewarding work for those who thought they’d have to move to the city for a job. Right now we’re involved with the local university’s interior design program and always have an intern from the program who is interested in learning about product design. But in the future, once we have the capacity, we hope to expand our involvement to find ways to support the local art programs. 

Eds: How have you incorporated sustainable practices into Pax’s lighting design and manufacturing processes? 

TN: We feel that fewer, better objects are where we should be as consumers. So, since the beginning, our aim has been to create lifetime products and we genuinely hope that our fixtures will be repaired and refinished instead of thrown away. We’ve also made a huge effort to keep our circle of vendors and suppliers within a few hours of us, which is a challenge here. 

the author Teegan Nordhues is co-owner of Pax Lighting and head of their sales and marketing department. To learn more, www.paxlighting.com.