About Rick Kovac

COO, Golden Lighting

I've spent more than 30 years running manufacturing, sourcing, and operations for international businesses — the kind of work that has you on a factory floor one week and negotiating with a supplier on the other side of the world the next. That's taken me through Australia, the UK, India, Thailand, the Middle East, Malaysia, and the U.S., usually landing wherever a business's operations, sourcing, and bottom line all meet.

Along the way I've built supply lines sourcing 30,000 products from over 100 countries, and turned more than one struggling operation profitable by paying close attention to how things actually get made and moved, not just how they're supposed to work on paper.

I joined Golden Lighting as COO in April 2023, after five years as Managing Director and Board Member of Delisauce World Foods in Malaysia. Different industry, same instinct: I like understanding how a product gets from raw material to someone's home, and what actually makes it worth having there.

None of that happens only at the office, either. I've remodeled three homes myself, in Australia and Malaysia, and I've been the family handyman for as long as I can remember — my first real project was a retaining wall I built at 14, in our family home in Los Angeles.

One of those projects overlaps with what I do now more directly than the others: I designed and installed the outdoor lighting around our koi pond in Malaysia myself — uplighting on the stone walls, a backlit feature panel, low-profile lighting along the deck — so the space reads completely differently at dusk than it does in daylight. It's the kind of small, hands-on project that taught me more about how light actually behaves outdoors than any spec sheet does.

That's the instinct I bring to this blog: the sourcing-and-operations side that knows how a fixture gets made, and the guy who's actually wired his own pond lights and watched them come alive at dusk. I'm not a lighting designer by training — I'm the guy who now sources, ships, stands behind, and, some weekends, hangs the fixtures Golden makes. I've seen a lot of light fixtures in 80+ countries. I'm still learning what actually works in a home, and I'd rather write that down honestly than pretend otherwise.