APRIL 2026 SMALL BUSINESS OF THE MONTH: SANDY BEACH LIGHTING & DESIGN CO.

At night, Sandy Bach Lighting & Design Co.'s work speaks for itself

By Shelby White

The moment Michelle Schwindler lives for happens in the dark.

After weeks of site visits, design drawings and meticulous installation, the crew steps back. The homeowner stands at the edge of their property, waiting. Then the lights come on, and their homes become something they have never seen before. Columns catch the light. Stone facades take on depth and shadow. A roofline they have never given a second thought suddenly commands the night sky.

“We see tears,” Michelle said. “We get high fives, we get hugs.”

She and her husband Andy call it the “nighttime reveal.” It is the culmination of every project their company, Sandy Beach Lighting & Design Co., takes on, and in five years of business, it has never gotten old.

Outdoor lighting has become a design discipline in its own right. As homeowners demand more from their exteriors — custom fabrication, architectural accents, fixtures designed to highlight specific features of a home rather than simply light them — specialists who can deliver are in short supply. Michelle and Andy saw that gap in Greater Lafayette and built a company around it. Their work just landed in a national coffee table book. They are the only Greater Lafayette business in the industry.

Sandy Beach, which Greater Lafayette Commerce named its April 2026 Small Business of the Month, operates with a staff of six out of Lafayette, a market the Schwindlers themselves initially doubted. When they launched the company, they assumed the work would pull them toward Indianapolis, toward the affluent north-side suburbs of Carmel and Zionsville where high-end residential projects were concentrated. That calculus has reversed. Most of their new business now comes directly from Lafayette.

“What’s happened here over the last handful of years is really interesting and surprising,” Michelle said. “This market can be a little slower to catch on to trends. But it starts showing up.”

For roughly a dozen years before Sandy Beach existed, the Schwindler’s designed full outdoor living spaces like patios, pergolas, fireplaces, the works. Lighting was always part of the package. It was also, they noticed, almost always an afterthought. Clients would sign off on a $80,000 outdoor kitchen and then treat the lighting as a line item to trim. Andy kept pushing back. The lighting, he argued, was the difference between a space that looked finished and one that looked alive.

When they surveyed Greater Lafayette and found no one specializing in the discipline, the decision made itself.

What Sandy Beach sells is intention. From the first site visit, the Schwindlers are thinking about how a space should feel after dark, which architectural elements deserve emphasis, how light layers across a property, what color temperature reads as warm rather than clinical. They think about connecting separate areas of a home’s exterior into a single coherent composition.

“It’s less about installing lighting fixtures and more about design,” Michelle said. “We design environments and how they’re meant to feel.”

That philosophy has earned the company a footprint well beyond Indiana. Andy sits on the board of directors for the Association of Outdoor Lighting Professionals — the industry’s national trade organization — and teaches its certification course, training designers who are entering the profession across the country.

The couple’s client roster includes Fair Oaks Farms’ holiday experience and an annual donated lighting design for Food Finders Food Bank’s Blue Jean Ball, the hunger-relief organization’s largest fundraiser, where their packages routinely sell for thousands of dollars above their appraised value at auction.

This spring, the company’s national profile grew again. Sandy Beach was featured across 10 pages of “Masters of Landscape Lighting,” a coffee table book released April 27 on Amazon and at major book retailers. Every property in their section was photographed in Greater Lafayette.

The Schwindlers also host The Reveal, a podcast on their Sandy Beach Studios YouTube channel, where they discuss lighting design alongside the less glamorous realities of building a company from scratch: the cost of materials, the cost of labor, what it means to run a business with your spouse and still want to have dinner together at the end of the day.

On that last point, Michelle is direct. Running a young business is consuming in ways that are hard to overstate. She does not dress it up.

“When your business is your life, you eat, sleep and breathe this,” she said. “I’m not saying that as a flex. At some point we all need to have a separation.”

But the work itself, she said, makes the intensity bearable.

Her advice to other small business owners is unadorned: find something you love, and bring your people into it. She has taken it literally. Her 10-year-old daughter has already been drafted as a creative consultant on the Fair Oaks Farms holiday show design.

Greater Lafayette Commerce’s recognition arrives at a moment when the Schwindlers are still, by their own account, figuring out how big this thing can get. The business is five years old and changing fast — larger accounts, more commercial work, a city growing into itself around them. There is no buildout on the horizon, no expansion plan to announce. Just the work, and the moment at the end of every project when the lights come on and someone sees their home for the first time.

“I can’t imagine investing so much time into a profession that I didn’t just love,” Michelle said. “And the fact that my husband and I both love this, it’s just fun.”