VELUX American President Discusses His Business Journey to South Carolina

As president of Fort Mill, South Carolina-based VELUX North America, Stephan Moyon leads and collaborates with hundreds of colleagues and his executive team to spearhead  growth and expansion in North America to becoming one of the most recognized brands within the home improvement and interior design space. 

VELUX is a worldwide leader in residential, commercial, and industrial skylights with over 10,000 employees worldwide and manufacturing or sales presence in 39 countries.

The Danish manufacturer has significant manufacturing operations in Greenwood and celebrated its 50th anniversary in South Carolina last year.  

In North America, it employs more than 1,000 people.

In 2025, VELUX, introduced the all-new VELUX Skylight System, a first-of-its-kind product designed for total light control, enhanced energy efficiency, and homeowner convenience. 

Featuring a pre-installed, remote-controlled, solar-powered shade, the Skylight System responds to growing demand for smarter, more sustainable daylight solutions, creating a new business opportunity for builders, contractors, roofers, and installers looking to offer cutting-edge home upgrades.

Regarding leadership, Moyon once said in a LinkedIn post:

1. Leaders: Recognize what works and most importantly what does not work QUICKLY. This implies setting your ego aside when those bad decisions are yours, have the courage to "adapt and overcome" as the Marines say. Nothing worse than covering up a bad decision with a series of more bad decisions. Build an environment empowering employees to try new things, fail quickly and move on. The worst environment is one driven by fear ... leads to paralysis very quickly.

2. Employees: Stand up to Group Think. Have the courage to speak openly, honestly, and forcefully and challenge your leadership as needed. Never, ever say, "I was told to ..." Dear ambitious people, the quickest way to the top in a great organization is not conformity. Differentiate yourself with constructive challenge. Be curious, be skeptical, offer solutions. Do not repeat and perpetuate the problem.

3. Leaders: Reward those who challenge you and give them room to grow. Challenge those who always agree with you and wonder why that might be.

4. All: Absolute certainty does not exist. Be very leery of those who know everything all the time. In business, I live in permanent doubt, and I am a professional skeptic. Constantly evaluating your own decisions is tough but necessary. I refuse to be prisoner of my bad decisions. Own up to them and move on quickly.

In a recent interview in Fort Mill with Integrated Media Publishing editor David Dykes, Moyon discussed his career, and what he believes are his core values.

Here are excerpts from that conversation:   

Q. Why South Carolina, both Fort Mill and Greenwood?

A. We’re a company, still family-owned company at this point, originating from Denmark. Our founder, back in the ‘70s, was looking for a factory in the United States. Somehow came to Greenwood and was very, very well treated. He had a haircut here and was very well treated, was amazed by the kindness of people, was looking for a town that would offer a good manufacturing base and good weather, good transportation, proximity to major markets like Charlotte and Greenville. That’s really how  the story started. I think they were looking to be in a Southern state and just happened to come to Greenwood. 

Q. As much shipping as the company was doing, I imagine back then, Greenwood was not necessarily a shipping hub. What was it about Greenwood and the access to interstates or the access to the ports? Those were not like they are now.

A. You’re right. I think at the time, probably, was also attractive, (the) low cost of land, low cost of development, and what they deemed to be a good workforce capability in Greenwood.

VELUX has a history of being one of the primary employers in the towns that they settle in. This has been the case almost across the world. I think they saw Greenwood as just big enough to provide the workforce and small enough to be one of the largest employers in town in order to have preferential recruitment power for the workforce, essentially.

Q. You have South Carolina connections.

A. Yes, I do have South Carolina connections, even though I ended up here more or less by accident. I went to college in South Carolina.

I’ve got connections to Greenwood because I ended up going to Lander University. I was born and raised in France and was looking for a way to continue playing soccer and go to university at the same time. 

I ended up graduating from Lander and then moving on from there to go to Clemson, an MBA at Clemson. I’ve been attached to South Carolina since 1988 in various ways.

Q. Talk about what’s in Greenwood now. You have a new central distribution warehouse. 

A. I think it’s approaching a million square feet. We’ve had a lot of expansion in our manufacturing facility in Greenwood. We just expanded into a new distribution center. We have manufacturing facilities, and we have logistics facilities. We also have our customer service team that’s located there. We have a finance team that’s there. Accounting team is there. All of our manufacturing staff and our primary production plant for the U.S. is in Greenwood. So we probably have somewhere around 700 people located in Greenwood.

Q. How many in Fort Mill?

A. Fort Mill is only about 35, I think. Fort Mill is the sales … plus the marketing team. We have national accounts and sales that’s here. It’s really people outside of the marketing team. It’s a lot of people here that travel for a living to see customers and so on. It’s not so easy to travel to a major airport out of Greenwood. We built and started in this building in 2001, and we primarily built here in Fort Mill. We stuck with South Carolina, and we wanted to be close to a major airport. That’s why we opened this facility here. Of course, we use this also as a customer experience center. We bring customers in here. But we also have people walking in the door just curious about skylights, wanting to talk to somebody about a project they have in their home. We deal with a decent amount of foot traffic that just comes into the building.

Q. Is there one particular thing that South Carolina had an advantage over North Carolina for you?

A. I wasn’t the person at the time that chose to locate right here in Fort Mill, but we saw Fort Mill as definitely what it’s turned out to be, which is a big growth area. We felt that we could get very good visibility here on (SC) 160. There’s actually a lot of traffic here. I think everything in real estate is about opportunity and location and cost. It’s a balance of the three. We felt pretty good about this location all along. We almost wish now that we had purchased a larger plot of land because we could probably use the expansion at this point. 

Q. Talk about supply chain challenges you’re facing now, trade issues, because you import a fair amount of material.

A. About 95 percent of the windows we manufacture are manufactured right here in the U.S. We actually export from the U.S. to Japan, to Canada, to New Zealand, and to Australia. Now, you’re correct in the sense that the supply chain required to build these windows, even though they’re built in the U.S., we do import products from all over the world, although we certainly try to source as much as possible from the United States. 

Last year, we made a major product introduction. We call it the Skylight System, which is a solar shade being integrated standard in every skylight that we sell, which I think we’re the first company in the fenestration space, as we call it, the window space, to ever include standard a solar battery-operated shade in every single skylight that we make. Now, those shades are coming in from, the parts are coming in from Europe. In that sense, we certainly have a global supply chain. We’ve always had a global supply chain. It’s still global today. We’ve had some sleepless nights working out the supply chain issues and thinking through the tariff ramifications and so on. 

But in general terms, as far as availability of material, we have no supply chain issues. It’s just on the cost side that there are some ramifications to the tariffs.

Q. You mentioned Canada. The tariff situation in Canada has been much debated. Is that improving, your relationship with Canada, or is it becoming more difficult, or is it just a lot of uncertainty right now?

A. It seems to be changing by the month, so it’s a difficult thing to put your finger on. … From our perspective, we have a separate business, which also reports into the North American organization, but it is a completely separate business. As far as we’re concerned, the only challenges that we have are in the transactional cost of shipping something that’s manufactured in the U.S. into Canada because our Canadian organization uses also about 95 percent of what they sell is coming from the United States, manufactured right here in South Carolina, and the other 5 percent coming from Europe. There’s been some transactional costs for sure to doing business from the United States and exporting into Canada.

Q. What about the workforce? Can you find the number of qualified workers in Greenwood that you need and even those here, or is that still an ongoing challenge?

A. Workforce is always an ongoing challenge. It’s not new. I think we have been remarkably fortunate, though, to be a choice employer in Greenwood County. I can’t say that we are facing severe issues with recruitment of labor and workforce in the Greenwood area. It’s actually been a very good market for us. The Fort Mill area is a bigger market, but it’s also a more competitive market. 

If anything, actually, I would say we’re probably seeing tougher struggles in recruitment in a market like Fort Mill than we are in a market like Greenwood that’s more isolated geographically.

Q. What challenges in Fort Mill for what kind of employees?

A. Well, in general, just Fort Mill and just nationally, probably the largest challenges in recruitment are sales employees. Marketing employees are also difficult to find. … Certainly, we are very particular about the people that we look for. It’s a challenge.

Q. Do your salespeople have to have college degrees? 

A. I highly recommend it. It is not a mandatory thing to have a college degree, but we primarily search for folks with a college degree. If not, with good experience, good solid experience in sales.

Q. From your experience, how do you mentor sales professionals who have to make 10 calls to get three appointments to make one sale. That’s almost a 90 percent rejection rate.

A. That’s a very good point. That’s the nature of any sales job. What makes it maybe even more challenging in our case is most of our salespeople are working remotely, so they are on their own, so to speak, in their territories. Probably the biggest challenge is to keep them connected to the mission, make them feel part of the company as a whole, and make sure they stay connected. Because we’re in what I would call a passion business. 

When you think about what we sell, we sell a product that provides daylight and fresh air. There’s really no downside to this product. I think the fuel that drives this company is the passion, the pride in selling a product that has no downside. It is all about space, transformation, wellness, making people feel better in their homes, making people feel healthier in their homes, having a product that has the ability to improve indoor air quality, for example, in addition to bringing more daylight, which most people want more daylight. The reason I bring this up in the light of your question about recruitment is we find that our people take on that. They buy in to this mission that we have.

… We exist as a business, of course, to sell products, to make money, but we exist as a business to improve somebody’s life. We feel that our product, quite frankly, in the entire spectrum of building products that are out there, we feel that our product really has a special place in people’s hearts because once you put a skylight in your home, you very quickly realize the value proposition that you have in your hands.

We find that most people that have been skylight users that have experienced skylights want more in the future. No one’s ever said, “Jeez, I wish I had put fewer skylights in the house. Let me take those out.” 

Q. You don’t sell retail?

A. We do not sell direct to consumers as a company, but we do sell to the Home Depots of the world. We’re at Lowes. We are at every what we call lumber yard or roofing wholesale outlet out there. We have somewhere around 15,000 locations that sell our products across the United States.

Q. But you don’t have franchises?

A. We do not. The closest thing to a franchise that we have is a business model where we have about 200 skylight specialist companies. Those are entrepreneurs who own a small business, typically between four and 15 to 20 people. Their sole mission in life is to sell VELUX skylights in the marketplace. They’re not owned by VELUX. They’re independent business owners, but their business is the selling and the installation of VELUX skylights. 

Q. So they can use the VELUX name and the branding?

A. Correct.

Q. Leadership. You had a post about five months ago, “A Short Essay on Leadership." You start off with "In Good Times, Everybody’s a ‘Leader.’” You said, “The backslapping does not stop, which inevitably leads to complacency and poor diagnostics.” 

How do you combat that in this company? 

A. What  I try to always remember is that in good times, you should always wait for the other shoe  to drop. What I mean by that is you should always prepare in good times for the hard times that are to come because the economy goes through ups and downs. 

Of course, at the end of the day, we are in consumer products, and consumer spending will vary and will fluctuate through various economic cycles. We are somewhat dependent on that. You have to insulate yourself from consumer spending fluctuations by building the most solid value proposition that you can and constantly being in a mode where you want to grow the category that you’re in. 

VELUX is the 800-pound gorilla in its own category. We are fully vested in. That’s all we do. We are the major player in the category, which has advantages and disadvantages.

One of the disadvantages is that we are the only one that’s really promoting this category and trying to grow this category and investing in this category. In good times like in bad, we’ve got to continue and stay steadfast in our mission to promote our benefits, promote how we can transform space, how we can help people live a healthier life and a more comfortable life into their homes.

We have to continue investing through the ups, which is typically easier, but also through the downs. Being a family-owned company with a very long-term view is extremely important in doing this.

Q. Because you’re not publicly held.

A. We’re not publicly held. We have less sensitivity to quarterly results. As I said, we are fully invested into this category because that’s all we do. We don’t sell doors. We don’t sell shingles. We don’t sell windows. We sell skylights. It’s a niche category, but it’s an incredibly powerful niche category because of the benefits that it provides. … In times of affordability issues, there’s a critical message here, which is that you can transform space inside of your home for a relatively small amount of money.

Q. Now, you said, again, in part of your short essay on leadership, that leaders very easily distinguish themselves in adversity. How have you done that?

A. It may not be a big surprise to you that this is not the best housing market right now compared to just two or three years ago.

The market is a bit frozen. People are being conservative in their spend. The roofing activity is not what it used to be. From my position, it’s important to stay level, to stay calm, to recognize the macro environment, recognize what’s internal performance versus things that are just outside your control, that are macroeconomic factors that you cannot do much about.

This lends itself well to VELUX values of mutual respect, of commitment, of courage. It’s important that the leadership stays determined, steadfast, cool, calm, and collected through tougher times. We are a company that’s fortunate enough to have a great position in the market, to be family owned as I mentioned. It’s focused on the long term. 

I owe it to myself and to our employees here to showcase our long-term commitment. Short-term results are never an indicator of long-term performance or long-term execution. 

… If you look at just what’s happened in the last two months, nationally, what’s happening this week with snowstorms in the Northeast, that has a huge impact on our business in the short term. People cannot put shingles down. They cannot put skylights down when the temperatures are as cold as they are, when you got snow and ice on the roof. 

You’re not going to sell anything in the short term. The year has started quite slowly. That doesn’t panic us. That doesn’t deter us from our longer-term mission. We just keep plowing through it. We keep our commitment the same. We stay calm. I do not look at sales reports every day, purposefully, because it doesn’t tell me anything. What I sold yesterday is not an indicator of what I will sell tomorrow. 

Now, on a monthly basis, of course, there’s a financial impact and so on. But I’m not micromanaging the sales results on a day-to-day basis. I know, for example, this week, our sales are going to be poor in the Northeast. They just got two feet of snow in Boston and in New York and New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

Those are big states for us.

Q. Talk a little bit more about developing a compelling value proposition so that it becomes a self-evident choice as customers realize that’s what they wanted all along. How do you do that? Is it marketing?

A. You know the Henry Ford quote? "If I’d ask my customers what they wanted, they would have said, ‘Faster horses.’"

I think Steve Jobs probably said, “If I’d asked my customers what they wanted out of their phones, they would have never come up with the iPhone. I had to put it in their hands.”

In our case, with the Skylight System, we know that when people want skylights, they want the daylight, they want the fresh air, but they also want an opportunity to control the light even though they sometimes can’t even imagine that that’s possible for something that’s 15 feet in the air. How could I control a curtain, so to speak, or shade from the ground when the skylight is 15 feet in the air? 

The reason we made the decision to launch the Skylight System is because we wanted to leverage our size and our volume in order to provide a very affordable solution to consumers that they couldn’t even imagine that they could put in their skylights.

… People couldn't envision that the skylight manufacturer can be the manufacturer of the shades or blinds that go into the skylight. We were facing that struggle, yet people told us, “Jeez, I wish you would make blinds.”

We do make blinds, but somehow we could never connect the dots. We decided to leverage our volume and our efficiencies to put in their hands a small remote control at a very affordable price and given the full-service solution, if you will, from the get-go. Point and shoot. We hope that they're so pleased with that solution they're going to go to their friends, to their neighbors, to their family and say, “You need to get a VELUX skylight. Look at this.”

Q. One of the most effective tools that have been pointed out about people such as yourself building an environment is empowering employees to try things new, but to fail quickly and move on. The worst environment is one driven by fear, you wrote, and that leads to paralysis very quickly.

How do you handle employees who are failing?

A. One experiment is better than a thousand expert views. That’s a VELUX model. The reason that’s important is because in any situation, there’s a thousand reasons not to do something, and there’s usually one to do it. One of the hardest things to do as a market leader like us would be to just think about conserving what we have. Don’t take any chances, don’t take any risk. Just keep doing what you’re doing. It’s working fine. That’s not what we’re after. We are after growing this category of daylight from above to two, three, 10 times the size that it is today. We feel that in order to do that, we have to take some calculated chances as we did with the Skylight System. We felt that we needed to put this product in the hands of a customer in order for them to realize, of course, that’s what I need, that’s what I want. But in order to get there and not take 50 years to get there, we had to put it in their hands first. 

Q. The fear of failure can really paralyze a lot of people. How do you handle employees who have failed? Let's say somebody didn't meet a sales quota or someone didn't deliver on time. You have disciplinary avenues you can take, but how do you help them deal with the fear of failure?

A. Maybe one of the first things to do is to ensure that every employee understands this is not the kind of environment where you will get punished for failure, at least not under my leadership. I would prefer that people take chances and come into this office to discuss new ways of doing things, new avenues, and they’re not going to find in me somebody who is going to veto (it), stop it or discourage them from doing that. I think culturally, it’s important to set the guardrails properly and to have our people understand that behavior is not only not going to be punished, but it’s encouraged.  

Probably one of the rarest species, if you will, in the corporate world is to find someone who has the ability to provide contrarian thinking, and most importantly, the courage to come in to their hierarchy, or their peers, and propose new ideas and have the ability and willingness to carry it through, to get the approval from the hierarchy and to manage the project.

I think no one in this building, or hopefully VELUX anywhere, would ever come out, if you were to interview every one of our employees, and say, “Oh no, we don’t want to do this at VELUX. That’ll get quashed or I’ll get punished for this.”

Culturally, my ambition, and what I believe is the case, is to set the guidelines or the guardrails properly in order to foster that behavior.

Q. Where did you learn that?

A. My predecessor in this role, a gentleman by the name of Tim Miller, who I worked with for 20 years. When I would come in to his office and say, “I'd like to do this or I'd like to do that,’ he would always say, “All right, I wouldn't do it this way, but I trust that you'll carry it out properly and no matter what, don't screw it up,” is what he would tell me with a smirk on his face. Don't screw it up. 

I think it's about intent-based leadership. This is a term that we've used at VELUX here in the last couple of years. Intent-based leadership is essentially about letting employees explain their intent. I'll come into your office, you talk to your boss and you say, “I intend to do this.” The wording is important because when you say, “I intend to do this,” you're sort of asking for approval, but you're communicating, you're signaling that you're going to do it. “I intend to do this. This is why, and this is the outcome that I expect.”

I would expect every manager in this company to promote this approach and to carry it out themselves with their employees and their hierarchy.

We're not a “no” company. We don't want to be a “no” company. We want to be a “yes” company.  We want to leave people the room to experiment and to be proud of trying new things.

Q. What one thing is keeping you up at night these days?

A. Execution. It's customer experience. Because, like I said, nice office here, nice desk, but the customer is not here in this building. 

What keeps me up at night is, what do all these great ideas translate into when you walk into the Home Depot or Lowe’s or any of our distribution partners, when you talk to one of our skylight specialist companies, how are they going to treat you? 

When you talk to any installer, for that matter, if you call a roofing company in Rock Hill or in Fort Mill, how will they react once you call and say, “I want to replace the two skylights in my house?” Will they call you back? Will they give you a fair quote? Of course, will they recommend a VELUX product, but I'm more concerned about the overall consumer experience in that journey, because the worst thing that can happen is we have the best ideas and the best marketing, the best product, and then somebody says, “You really shouldn't do skylights.” Why are they saying that? Well, they're saying that either because they don't know anything about skylights, because they don't know how to install skylights, because God knows what.

But that is the ultimate killer in the consumer experience. We, as a company, have to do everything that we can to control, educate our customers and our customers' customers in order to provide consumers the best experience possible so that when they go to their families and talk about the Skylight System, not only do they like the product, but they liked the experience of getting it installed. They found somebody responsive. They found somebody who did a quality installation. 

Manufacturing the product is like the tip of the iceberg. The consumer experience is a lot more than just the product. It's about the experience of purchasing it, getting it installed, finding somebody to install it. How long did it take? Was I prepared for the sheetrock work that was going to have to take place in my house or the painting work? Was I informed? Was I educated? Because expectations have to match reality. At the end of the day, you sold your product, but expectations were not aligned with the reality of the job, and that can lead to a negative experience.