James Keirstead‘s life-long passion for entrepreneurship started in the fourth grade, when he decided to expand a single paper route to three with the help of his twin brother, John Keirstead. They shovelled snow in the winter, mowed lawns in the summer, always working together.
15 years later, the twins officially became business partners when they opened their own hot tub store in Richmond, B.C. after a few years working in different hot tub shops. It was the ’90s after all, and hot tubs were the ultimate status symbol.
The brothers knew the industry would continue to grow so they partnered with other entrepreneurs to buy Blue Falls Manufacturing, a hot tub manufacturer, which they gradually expanded into 30 countries, making their flagship product Arctic Spas a household name in middle-class suburbia. In 2009, Keirstead also acquired a company that designs hot tub controls — the electronic brains of the hot tub that connect and manage all the plumbing equipment. But as Keirstead’s company kept innovating these controls, the manufacturer kept jacking up production costs, which led to Keirstead’s next big move in 2011: He purchased a factory in Edmonton to make the controls themselves.
Of course, this only sparked new collaborations, and innovations that led to Keirstead and partner Nabil Fallah realizing that they could create something completely unique while using their warehouse, equipment and expertise.
Keirstead was always looking for ways to enter a new market with a new product outside the hot tub industry. “I just didn’t know what that product was when I started,” he says. The next epiphany came from the owner of Landmark Homes, a homebuilder using prefabricated walls to bring down construction costs. Landmark wanted to manufacture walls with built-in light switches but couldn’t seal them off — building codes required its structures remain open for electrical inspectors, even though the point of it was to eliminate the wiring. The owner asked if Keirstead could help Landmark get rid of the need for electrical boxes. This question inspired his next venture: Levven Electronics.
The light switch in Keirstead’s palm looks, feels, and clicks like any other switch, but the back of the plastic product is flat — not a single wire exposed. Instead, power controllers and switches communicate using a radio frequency at home. When the resident is away, they can still control the switches on their phone with Levven’s app, since its gateway also plugs into the home’s Internet router. Levven could eliminate about 30 per cent of wiring in a home, saving money and labour, and increasing sustainability through the use of less copper.
“Everything we are doing is trying to reduce cost so we can go in and compete against regular, wired switches,” says the CEO, speaking over the buzz of busy factory machines. Beside him a little circuit board goes through what he calls “an oven” that fuses together all its parts. It comes out the back end of the machine, still warm, its miniscule components looking like pin drops. These go through an automated inspection machine examining each of the tiny components for fault detection in mere seconds and “gets it right every time,” he says.
Keirstead opens the Levven Controls app on his phone. It displays icons for all 40 of his home’s lights. He can turn them on and off, dim them, set them to timers, and just about everything else you can expect with home automation.
It only took two years to go from concept to prototype. Stitching together 60 or 70 wireless devices on a single network — that’s the hard part. It’s “a lot of traffic” to control, says Keirstead. With no comparables, Levven had to invent a software that prolongs the lifespan of a typical battery so that homeowners don’t have to replace them for nearly a decade. Next, he developed encrypted security to prevent someone from hacking into a home’s light network. And on, and on, for another four years, until the hardware and software were user-friendly.
And that’s not counting the factory machinery, which dropped more components than it placed when they started. “I had to replace the entire line,” he says. “Even these machines will be updated, because we need faster equipment to keep up with the demand.”
Naturally, the first customer was Landmark Homes. However, despite loving the product, it quickly found that their intended goal of sealing the walls off in the factory did not, in fact, save that much time or money. After three years, Landmark Homes went back to traditional wire switches, but Levven tried to forge ahead with other homebuilders. It quickly hit more roadblocks.
Wireless or not, light switches still had to pass electrical code installation requirements that said light switches require switch boxes behind them. Of course, Levven’s switches did not have boxes for wires, because they did not have wires. The code did not recognize wireless switches; they just weren’t in the books. They could sell their switches for renovations but not in new construction.
Without a single region sanctioning their technology, Levven spent the next six years lobbying chief electrical inspectors and other policymakers across North America, but got nowhere, says Keirstead. The turning point came in 2018, when Schneider Electric, one of the largest electrical companies in the world, happened to start fighting the same restrictive regulations across North America preventing the Corporation from also selling wireless wall mounted controls. With two companies now submitting proposals for changes, the U.S. and Canada were finally convinced to broaden the definition of a “wall switch” in their respective electrical codes. In 2023, eight years since first facing opposition, Levven could move forward.
Based on company projections, it could be 500 homes a month by fall and 2,000 a month in 2026. That’s 60,000 controllers and 80,000 switches. And among their new partners is Landmark Homes again. “If we didn’t have Arctic Spas for all these years, this product never would have made it to the light of day, because it would just cost too much money [to manufacture],” says Keirstad. “We’re just at that point now where we’ll probably break even this summer.”
Homebuilder Minto Group, which installed Levven lights in all 270 Calgary houses since 2023, credits Levven for shaving off roughly one scheduled construction day on every build. Wireless switches, explains Minto representative Graham McCulloch, also improve the air tightness of a home, providing more energy savings, and can be moved around, or complemented by more switches, as easily as hanging up a picture frame. So there’s no need for residents to hire electricians and drywallers (or worse yet, to move wires themselves).
“Levven,” says McCulloch, “has taken something that might have been overlooked from an innovation perspective and completely changed how it functions.”
This article appears in the May 2025 issue of Edify
