OUR STORY
The Art of Light — and the years it took to earn that title.
The Problem Nobody Was Solving
For five years, Udam Singh Hooda sat on the other side of the table from some of India's finest architects and interior designers.
He listened to their visions. He understood their intentions. And then — again and again — he watched them compromise.
Not because they wanted to. Because the industry gave them no choice.
The moment that stayed with him longest was a small one. An architect designing an MD's office — a considered space, every detail deliberate — needed a light fitting that would cascade perfectly over the width of a custom table. A precise dimension. A specific intent. What arrived on site was 100 millimetres too large.
One hundred millimetres. The difference between a designer's vision and what the industry was willing to offer.
The project moved forward. The light went in. The table sat beneath something that almost fit.
Udam never forgot that almost.
The Education
Udam joined Pierlite as a Sales Engineer in 2006 — part of the Gerard Group's Indian operation, a company that also owned Sylvania, Austube, and Crompton across Australia and New Zealand. Pierlite India operated what was then the largest lighting factory in the country.
But Udam was never just a salesman. Even in those early years, he understood that the real work happened at the intersection of product and purpose. He got involved in everything. He pushed. He questioned. He was never content to stay within the lines of a job description. While others sold, Udam got involved in everything — new product concepts, packaging, specifications, the details that most salespeople never touched.
By the time he was made Delhi Branch Manager, Udam had learned something most people only learn after decades: that the best lighting is never about the product. It is about what the product allows a space to become.
But management role meant distance from what he loved doing. It meant meetings and matrices instead of conversations with designers. In a young man already uncomfortable with a title that came ahead of its time — leading a team of colleagues older than himself — the gap between what he wanted to do and what the role required grew too wide to ignore.
After five years of education that no classroom could have given him, he resigned in 2011.
The Years Between
For seven years after Pierlite, Udam S Hooda ran a trading firm — representing Pierlite, Sylvania, Austube, and other high-quality brands as a project partner. He stayed close to designers. He stayed close to projects. He kept serving. He kept watching.
And the same problem persisted, no matter the brand, no matter the product, no matter the budget.
Designers were still settling.
The industry was still selling boxes.
No one was asking: what do you actually need?
The idea that became Sketch Lighting was not a business plan. It was a decision. A refusal. If the industry would not build what designers envisioned — then someone had to start a company that would.
The name came from that intention. Sketch it. Leave the rest to us.
The Floor in Okhla
In late 2018, Udam took a 1,500 square foot workshop in Okhla Industrial Area, Phase 2.
There was nothing in it. Just him, his accounts manager — who had been with him since 2011 and would not let him do this alone — and a concrete floor.
Standing in that empty space, the feeling was not anxiety. It was the opposite.
Now we can make what project designers need.
For the first time in twelve years of working within other people's constraints, the answer to a designer's brief would never again have to be: "We have something similar."
Within three months, the workshop was full. They had outgrown it before they had properly settled into it.
The Test
Then came COVID-19.
Sketch Lighting was luxury. And the world had stopped buying luxury.
The team stayed. The salaries were paid. The rent was paid. The savings ran down slowly, and then quickly, and then the firm began to run on loans. Udam had built something real — a team that believed in the work, a reputation forming project by project — and now all of it sat still.
The lowest point was not dramatic. It was quiet. It was the arithmetic of a savings account against a monthly payroll, narrowing.
Then the phone rang.
A client in Jaipur. NAV Backoffice, Sitapura — 90,000 square feet of office space. Sketch Lighting had pitched for the designer lighting alone. But the client had seen the quality of how they worked, the depth of how they thought, and they handed them the entire project. Every light. Every space. Every square foot.
No single project has defined Sketch Lighting since. But that one proved it.
All the hard moments were only moments that added to our wisdom.
What We Believe — And What We Cannot Tolerate
The Indian lighting industry is, for the most part, busy selling lights packed in boxes.
Most brands are not asking what is good for the project. They are asking what is good for inventory. Giant brands — companies with decades of heritage and global reach — are still selling 80 CRI light sources into spaces where food is prepared, where art is displayed, where human beings spend the hours of their lives that matter most. 80 CRI, when 95 CRI exists. When the difference between the two is the difference between a space that feels alive and a space that merely functions.
Nobody is telling architects and interior designers this. Nobody is sitting down with their teams and talking about light — not as a product category, but as a design material, as a shaper of experience, as something worth understanding deeply.
This is what Udam S Hooda — The Lightologist — does instead of selling.
When Sketch Lighting visits a design firm, we do not walk in with a catalogue. We walk in with a presentation that is never about us. It is about their relationship with light. About what they have been specifying without knowing what they were missing. About what becomes possible when the brief has no box to fit into.
The response, in room after room, firm after firm, is the same.
Applause. Questions. And a conversation that does not end when the meeting does.
Today
Sketch Lighting operates from New Delhi. We are trusted by some of India's finest architects, interior designers, and lighting consultants. We are called when the budget is real and the vision refuses to compromise.
We still start every project the same way we started the company.
With a blank floor. And the question: what do you actually need?
"If you can sketch it — we can light it."
Udam S Hooda
The Lightologist · Founder, Sketch Lighting