How PopLight Kept Growing Through Tariffs and Shipping Delays

PopLight makes rechargeable, wall-mounted reading lights built for people who want great lighting without drilling into their walls. Founded by Rose and her wife Caroline after they couldn't find anything like it for their own apartment, the brand found its first audience among renters looking to make the most of spaces they don't own. Since appearing on Shark Tank, PopLight has grown into a fast-moving DTC brand with a loyal community and a new product line on the way.

The challenge: Running an inventory business in an unpredictable world

PopLight's story begins with a simple insight: renters deserve good lighting too. The brand proved that out quickly. A $300-a-month test on Meta ads produced 20,000 email sign-ups in a matter of months. A Kickstarter campaign followed. Then Shark Tank.

What Rose didn't have a roadmap for was the cash flow reality of scaling a physical product business.

"It seems so easy. Buy product, sell product, buy more product. And it's so complicated."

The complications piled up fast. When tariffs hit, Rose had just committed most of her available cash to inventory. She was overstocked and facing a new cost she hadn't planned for. Then a shipping container carrying PopLight's two most popular colours got stuck near the port of LA. With stock unavailable, conversion rates dropped, the cost of acquiring customers went up, and ads still had to run. The business was paying to sell a product it couldn't ship.

Rose turned to her bank first. JP Morgan couldn't help. The business was too small by their standards, and the P&L didn't look the way a traditional lender expects. E-commerce brands don't grow in straight lines. They can have a quiet Q2 and Q3 and then double or triple the whole year in Q4, and that rhythm doesn't translate well to a conventional credit assessment.

"There's no space for a business like mine. From an e-commerce perspective, your P&L is not positive every month because you have months where you put all your cash into inventory."

The solution: A lender that understands how e-commerce works

Rose found Wayflyer through a contact who'd used them before, at a point when she was weighing up several options. The terms mattered. Wayflyer's rates were competitive, but what mattered more was how the product was structured.

Other lenders Rose looked at required a personal guarantee. During a period of genuine tariff uncertainty, with costs potentially moving in ways that were hard to plan around, taking on personal liability for business debt was a risk she didn't want to carry. Wayflyer didn't ask for one.

The working relationship that developed with her account manager, Harriet, gave Rose something she hadn't had before: a way to plan. Rather than reacting to crises, she could map out funding cycles in advance.

"Once I could plan out this is when I buy inventory, this is what I think I'll do this year, this is the worst case, this is the best case, and plan out funding around that, it changed things."

When the shipping container got stuck, Harriet helped Rose move fast. Wayflyer stepped in with working capital to cover the period while the inventory was inaccessible, allowing her to keep acquiring customers and build a waitlist while the stock situation resolved.

Speed has been a consistent feature.

"If I got a purchase order from a retailer tomorrow, I'm pretty sure we could figure it out in a week together. Something crazy's gonna happen. I'll get an amazing opportunity or I'll be hit with a lost container, and you guys can step in within under a week, in every situation where I've needed funding urgently."

That combination of speed and relationship is what Rose says makes Wayflyer work for a brand at her stage.

"You need a lender when things are bad and you need working capital to get by, but you also need a lender when things are really good. Both of those things happen on any given day running an e-commerce brand."

The results: Staying in business and building for what comes next

Rose is measured about what the funding has done. The last two years have been hard, and she's not claiming a clean growth story. What she is clear about is what would have happened without it.

"I don't think I could have grown the business at all without Wayflyer. Between the container that got stuck in customs, tariffs, and the costs of everything going up, we wouldn't have been able to maintain or grow at all. There were just all these unknowns that got thrown at me this year."

Beyond surviving the disruption, the funding has also let PopLight move forward on product. New styles, colours and finishes are in development, work that started over a year ago and has required sustained capital to push through.

"If we were doing it organically through just supporting it through our revenue, it would have probably tacked on like another nine months of dev work. It's so capital intensive to make new products."

Those products are on track for Q4, alongside a set of brand collaborations that Rose is excited about.

The business is still working through some of the overhang from the container situation. But PopLight is in stock, new products are coming, and Rose has a clearer sense of how she wants to fund the next phase of growth than she did when tariffs first arrived.

Interested in following in PopLight's footsteps? Wayflyer has funded over 6,000 businesses worldwide with $6 billion worth of working capital, backed by world-leading financial institutions. Apply in minutes and access funds in hours. Start your application today.