Company Pro Audio · Video · Lighting
The Nativity Play That Turned Into a Lighting Company
It began in a basement with a nativity musical nobody was supposed to sell. Two decades later, the Vaque family builds the LED house lights hanging over your church stage - and their salespeople make nothing on the sale.
Most companies would love a clean origin story. Springtree Media Group has a strange one. In 1999, Peter Vaque was not trying to start a lighting company. He was in a basement writing a Christmas nativity musical called "A Porcelain Christmas," and the family built a small publishing operation to sell it to churches. Then, by his own admission, he had "nothing else in me to write." The play stopped. The company did not.
What happened next is the part worth studying. The Vaque family kept the equipment and the church relationships and pivoted - from selling a script to selling the sound and lighting that make a script look good on stage. Today Springtree Media Group is a Franklin, Tennessee outfit that does something unusual for its size: it manufactures its own LED house lights and video walls, and it also resells the big professional brands. Six people. Roughly $1.9 million in revenue. A product line hanging over church stages across Middle Tennessee.
01 / What they actually doAn AV company that builds, not just resells
Walk into most audio-visual dealers and you'll find a catalog of other people's gear marked up for resale. Springtree does that too - it carries Allen & Heath mixers, Blackmagic Design switchers, NovaStar video processing, and RF Venue antennas. But it also does the harder thing: it designs and manufactures products under its own name, Springtree LED. The flagship is the Spatial Flat, a recessed, DMX-controllable house light that dims smoothly and puts out enough punch to matter, sold in 30W and 50W versions with pendant models for high ceilings.
That vertical move is the whole strategy. On its own products there is no distributor in the middle, which is how a company this small competes on price with sellers ten times its size. The company's public promise is blunt: "Affordable, Premium AV Equipment." Manufacturing is how it keeps both words in that sentence honest.
02 / Who buys itChurches, theaters, schools - and one very busy venue
Springtree's customers are the places that need professional AV but rarely have a professional AV budget: houses of worship, theaters, schools, and event spaces. Churches, in particular, are quietly one of the largest buyers of pro lighting and video in America, and they're a natural fit for a company that started out selling to congregations. Springtree also has a long working relationship with The Factory at Franklin, providing audio, video, lighting, and stage design for events at the venue.
03 / The problem it solvesMaking AV simple enough for a volunteer
The buyer of a church lighting rig is often not an engineer. It's a volunteer on a tech committee, or a pastor who inherited a mess of dimmers. Brandon Vaque - Peter's eldest son, now the company's Chief Marketing Officer - describes his own mission as simplifying the AV process. That shows up in the product: Spatial Flats are built to be specified and controlled without a lighting degree, and Springtree's "starter packages" exist so first-time buyers can get a working system without overbuying.
"We are a collective of individuals who want to add value to our world - we just happen to be a Sound and Lighting Company."Springtree Media Group, mission statement
04 / What makes it differentNobody in the room is working the commission
Here is the detail most competitors can't copy without rewiring their whole business: Springtree's product specialists are not paid on commission. When the person recommending your $40,000 lighting system earns the same money regardless of what you buy, the pressure to oversell disappears. For a customer base of churches and schools spending hard-raised money, that's not a marketing line - it's the reason the referral pipeline stays full.
It also reframes the sales conversation. A commissioned rep sells the biggest system a buyer will sign for. A salaried specialist can, in theory, talk you out of gear you don't need. Combine that with an in-house product line priced below the majors, and you get a company whose incentives point at "right-sized" rather than "maximum."
05 / The productsFrom house lights to pixel pitch
The catalog splits into three jobs. Lighting: Spatial Flat house lights, plus stage fixtures - ellipsoidals, fresnels, wash lights, movers - and the DMX control stations and wireless DMX to run them. Video: modular LED video-wall panels in multiple pixel pitches, from a coarse 3.9mm down to a sharp 1.9mm, driven by NovaStar processing, alongside switchers and streaming gear. Audio: microphones, mixers, speakers, amplifiers, and in-ear monitors. Sales, installation, rental, and production support wrap around all of it.
06 / The reluctant heirThe kid who didn't recognize Taylor Swift
Brandon Vaque didn't want the family trade. As a teenager he was dragged to his parents' AV warehouse to build "a good work ethic," and he resisted the business for years, studying history at UT Chattanooga instead. There's a story he tells on it: one Friday his father worked a Franklin gig for a young unknown performer he called "the real deal," and showed Brandon a photo of her hugging him. It was a pre-fame Taylor Swift. Brandon had turned down the shift. Growing up in a Nashville suburb crawling with talent had made him numb to it.
He came back anyway, and the return is what modernized the company. The reluctant heir is the one who launched Springtree LED and made "simplify the process" the product philosophy. It's a familiar arc for family firms - the successor who resists the business often understands best what it needs to change.
07 / Where it fitsThe unglamorous, essential middle
Springtree competes on two fronts at once. As a dealer, it's up against national sellers like Sweetwater, Full Compass, and CCI Solutions, plus regional integrators chasing house-of-worship contracts. As a manufacturer, its LED line runs against brands like Chauvet, ADJ, and Absen. Sitting in both lanes is the trick: the manufacturing keeps prices defensible, and the dealer relationships keep the customer coming back for the rest of the room. Neither a pure box-mover nor a pure factory, Springtree owns the middle - the part of the market that's too small for the giants to service well and too technical for the buyer to handle alone.
A commissioned rep sells the biggest system you'll sign for. A salaried specialist can talk you out of the gear you don't need.The Springtree difference, in one line
There's no funding story here, no valuation, no press-release arc. There's a family, a warehouse in Franklin, a product line they build themselves, and a rule that the people selling it don't get paid more for selling more. For the places Springtree serves - churches, schools, community theaters - that combination is worth more than another catalog.