Twenty Years of Vivid Concepts
A staircase is defined as a passage between floors until something changes how it is experienced.
Suspend the right fixtures above it, and the climb becomes a sequence of small, deliberate illuminations — a run of light that turns a purely functional space into one worth pausing in. Light the risers, the landings, or the wall alongside the climb, and the transformation happens differently again, tracing the architecture itself rather than floating above it.
Either approach changes the same fundamental fact: the staircase is no longer simply a way to get from one floor to another.
This is the premise Nick-Cole Fleshman has built a career, and an entire business, on. Lighting, in her practice, is never an afterthought layered on once the architecture is settled. It is treated as one of the tools that determines how a space functions and how the people inside it actually feel.
A staircase can be left as a structural necessity or reconsidered as an opportunity, and Nick-Cole has spent her career choosing the latter, project after project, fixture after fixture. It is the reason Vivid Concepts has never been simply about selling lighting.
Nick-Cole moved from Calgary to Edmonton in 1997 with no hands-on experience, only a newly discovered passion for design. She landed at Lightform, a company only a few months old at the time, where she was conducive in launching Calgary and Vancouver locations before the direction of the business shifted. What pulled her toward building something of her own was, in the end, a vote of confidence from someone already in the industry, who told her, as Nick-Cole remembers it, “if you start your own business we’ll support you.”
That support met an early education abroad. A factory tour with Artemide Spa in Italy, followed by repeated trips to Euroluce, gave her a firsthand look at how a global lighting brand operates, from the showroom housing Artemide’s iconic Tizio desk lamp to the robotic warehouse behind it. It was her first trip to Europe. “I was only 22 years old,” Nick-Cole shares, and the impression has stayed with her since. “I was lit,” she says simply. Vivid Concepts opened its doors in Edmonton in 2006, with a Calgary showroom following soon after.
The premise has held steady since: lighting design delivered directly to design-savvy clients, built in close collaboration with Alberta’s architecture and design community.
Vivid’s expertise spans hospitality, corporate, medical, and residential projects, from new construction to renovation, with recent work including the Italian Center Shop. The showrooms themselves function as galleries — an ever-changing collection of what is current in the world of light, open to the public for browsing and available by appointment for consultations.
Along the way, what has been built is not only a business but a network of relationships, and Nick-Cole is candid about what it takes to sustain that. “Owning a business is never easy, people stay, people go… you have to adapt,” she explains.
Vivid’s collections, including A-N-D Light, Bover, BOCCI, Tom Dixon, Artemide, and LODES, bridge the space between budget-conscious essentials and one-of-a-kind custom installations. Nick-Cole describes the guiding philosophy simply: creating brilliance through strong relationships and thoughtful lighting. It is a line that reads as a tagline and functions as an operating principle, one that extends well beyond commercial work and into how Vivid shows up for the community that has supported it since the beginning.
Vivid Concepts supports the University Hospital Foundation’s Festival of Trees and the Alberta Women’s Health Foundation. “Women’s health and research is so important to ensuring a women’s success,” Nick-Cole notes. “I love to look for ways to build each other up,” she adds, a commitment that runs alongside client relationships built the same deliberate way — one project, one fixture at a time.
This anniversary year, for Nick-Cole, is a marker of consistency rather than a moment for looking backward. Asked what it feels like to reflect on twenty years of work, she does not hesitate. “The honest answer is I never look back,” she says, comparing a finished project to a piece of fashion that has had its moment before it is torn out to make room for what comes next. Vivid has spent two decades defining spaces through the harmony of feeling, function, and form, engineering light to shape how Albertans experience the rooms they live and work in.
The staircase, lit well, makes the point plainly: a fixture is never just a fixture, and the right light can turn an ordinary passage into the best part of the room.
Vivid Concepts operates showrooms in Edmonton and Calgary.