Mac Harman and the trouble with a perfect Christmas

The trees were too slender to ignore. Thomas “Mac” Harman was skiing in northern Idaho when he noticed a stand of conifers in a clearing, sheltered by the surrounding forest. They grew tall and straight, unlike the battered shapes he often saw at altitude. He took photographs. Two years later, when narrow Christmas trees were finding an audience, he returned to those pictures and designed Balsam Hill’s Cathedral Fir.

There are less picturesque ways to do product research. A spreadsheet, for instance, rarely requires ski boots. But Harman’s business depends on looking carefully at an object most people recognize without examining. A convincing artificial tree needs a believable outline as well as believable needles. The whole thing must survive the scrutiny of a living room.

That combination of observation and practicality runs through his career. He has worked in consulting, run a wire-products manufacturer, earned a Stanford MBA and built Balsam Brands around a holiday with remarkably little tolerance for late delivery. His material happens to be festive. The decisions underneath it can be severe.

A side business with other plans

Harman grew up outside Cleveland, where his father ran a manufacturing business. At about ten, he wanted to become an architect. Designing buildings fascinated him. He eventually set that ambition aside, uncertain that the work available to him would resemble the work he imagined. The interest in making things remained.

He graduated from Williams College in 1998, studying geosciences and economics with a minor in environmental studies. His subsequent working life included McKinsey and leadership of Progress Wire Products. By the time he finished his MBA in 2005, he had experience with both the language of business and the stubbornness of physical goods.

The Christmas idea had a domestic starting point: an old artificial tree in his wife’s family that failed to resemble a tree convincingly. Harman thought a better version ought to exist. He also knew the inconvenience of trying to fit Christmas into a busy household. After moving to the Peninsula, he and his wife worked long hours in a small apartment and sometimes never got around to putting up a tree.

He launched Balsam Hill in 2006. In his later account, it was initially supposed to produce seasonal income while he pursued another business. The supposed sideline kept growing. There is a welcome untidiness to that beginning. A founder can recognize an opportunity before correctly guessing how much of his life it will occupy.

The difference between a branch and a tree

Harman has been clear that he did not invent the technology he used to make realistic trees. His opportunity was applying it to a product customers would recognize and want. At an early Stanford Shopping Center pop-up, visitors touched the merchandise and mistook it for live trees. For a seller asking people to pay for an imitation, confusion was a promising review.

The design process gives that reaction some substance. Balsam Hill describes studying fresh branch cuttings, then translating their details into hand-carved molds. The references range from forests in Norway to a spruce in the founder’s backyard. An everyday tree becomes something to inspect, reproduce and fit into a manufactured whole.

Harman’s attention can make a ski jacket an unusual piece of research equipment. He has described carrying pruning shears and coming down a slope with branch samples tucked inside his coat. The architect he once imagined becoming might recognize the impulse: study the structure, carry away a reference, make something that belongs in a particular space.

The result must work twice. It has to persuade someone browsing a screen, then satisfy them when a large box arrives. A realistic photograph is only the first examination. The customer gets the next one, at home, under lighting the manufacturer cannot choose.

“You can’t move Christmas.”

Mac Harman

A promise with seven names attached

The early business did not proceed in a straight line. Balsam Brands lost $2.1 million on revenue of $6.3 million in 2008. In February 2009, Harman gathered its seven employees and guaranteed their jobs and salaries through the end of the year.

He believed competitors would retreat during the downturn, creating an opportunity for Balsam to push forward. That was a commercial judgment carrying a personal consequence for each colleague. People who had been worrying about their employment could direct their attention toward the work ahead.

A guarantee is an unusually legible form of management. There is a date attached. Someone can remember precisely what was offered. The episode makes Harman’s recurring emphasis on colleagues easier to assess than any cheerful phrase about workplace culture could do on its own.

His father had supplied an earlier lesson in choosing people: when someone exceptional appeared, consider making room even before a role existed. In his later career advice, Harman returned to the importance of colleagues worth learning from. Together, those accounts suggest a consistent priority: decisions about people deserve attention before a job description or project makes them convenient.

The holiday declines the extension

The calendar supplies a second kind of discipline. A customer can move a sofa delivery by a few days. A Christmas retailer has considerably less room to negotiate with the occasion its products serve. Thanksgiving shifts, the interval before Christmas changes, and the work still needs to be done.

Seasonality can make a profitable annual business look peculiar from month to month. In 2017, Harman described enormous November demand alongside repeated attempts to find products that would sell during the rest of the year. Pet beds earned enthusiastic reviews and failed to sell. Customers had apparently granted the brand less permission to furnish the dog than to decorate the house.

Artificial flowers made a more understandable extension. They used a familiar capability, resembled products customers already associated with the company, and offered occasions outside Christmas. The contrast is a useful piece of retail common sense. Sharing a customer does not automatically mean sharing a reason to buy.

There is also a hard limit on recovery during a season. Specialized manufacturing cannot conjure an entire replacement supply at short notice. Once stock is gone, the opportunity may be gone until the following Christmas. Festive commerce requires a rather unsentimental relationship with what can actually be made and shipped.

A shopkeeper behind the screen

For all the logistics, Harman has an affection for the experience of ordinary shopping. He wanted colleagues in the Redwood City office to get outside, buy a coffee and remember what it felt like to be served. A good exchange at a counter might inform the welcome they built into an online store.

It is an appealingly inexpensive form of professional development. The tuition fits in a paper cup. More seriously, it asks employees to carry their own customer experiences back into work, where distance and software can make the person placing an order feel abstract.

The organization now works across that distance on a much larger scale. Its public team page lists locations in California, Idaho, Ireland, the Philippines, Canada and Mexico. Dublin serves as its international headquarters; Boise houses its largest U.S. office. The work has traveled a considerable distance from the first desk in a Palo Alto apartment.

Harman’s connections in the Philippines also extend beyond commerce. He serves on the board of Negrense Volunteers for Change Foundation’s U.S. organization. His involvement with the Philippine nonprofit followed Typhoon Yolanda; he has described the importance of training and jobs for parents in its work against poverty. The relationship places his business life alongside an ongoing interest in opportunities for families.

The lights lead back to Cleveland

In June 2025, Balsam Brands announced that it would become the official global brand licensing partner for GE holiday lighting beginning with the 2026 holiday season. For Harman, the association had a hometown connection: he had grown up knowing GE Lighting as part of Cleveland’s industrial landscape.

The agreement broadens the company’s work beyond its own flagship name. It also brings his career into a pleasing circle. A child watching a manufacturing business grow outside Cleveland became an entrepreneur preparing holiday products carrying a familiar Cleveland-associated brand.

The commercial weather has been less charming. In December 2025, Harman described U.S. shoppers visiting Balsam Hill’s website without completing purchases. He said tariff-related costs had pushed up prices, while stronger international business helped cushion the domestic weakness. Those were his observations about that season, with its particular pressures.

Expansion has continued. In September 2026, he announced dedicated Balsam Hill webstores for Spain and Italy and a new distribution center serving southern Europe. Each additional market adds another set of customers whose expectations must survive the journey from an online image to a tree in a room.

The ornament he already owns

Harman’s own account of Christmas offers a useful place to end. In a holiday message, he recalled volunteering to arrange the presents as a child, giving packages a discreet shake in the hope of identifying a LEGO set. In adulthood, Christmas morning included opening presents and making waffles with his family.

One ornament drew his attention: a plaster impression of his kindergarten-sized hand. A retailer can manufacture a tree with careful attention to its branches. It cannot manufacture that particular memory for somebody else. The customer supplies the years, the people and the associations that accumulate around an object.

That is the curious arrangement at the center of Harman’s working life. He spends his time making an imitation convincing enough to enter a real family ritual. The commercial deadline comes every December. What people remember may last considerably longer.