It started with a light.
Tom Numan discovered LED flex neon in 2013 — a fledgling technology that most people had never heard of. He saw immediately what it could become: a safer, more accessible, more beautiful version of an industry icon. He started experimenting out of a garage in Christchurch, New Zealand, messing around with the product to see how the different LED colors could totally change the personality of a room.
Radikal Neon was officially born.
What started in a garage became a real business. Radikal Neon officially launched in 2016, and the phones didn't stop. Custom signs for restaurants, gyms, retailers, weddings, and eventually some of the biggest brands in the world. The team grew fast. The jobs got bigger. And so did the chaos of trying to manage it all.
The problems started piling up.
With a growing team across multiple locations, Tom started to feel the pain that every sign shop owner knows — jobs slipping through the cracks, quotes taking too long, clients calling for updates, inventory being guessed at, installation crews in the wrong place. The tools available weren't built for the sign industry. Spreadsheets, WhatsApp threads, and memory aren't a system.
"I was running one of the most Googled sign companies in New Zealand, and I was still managing jobs in a spreadsheet. There had to be a better way — I just had to build it myself." — Tom Numan, Founder
Building the tool we always needed.
Tom and the Radikal Neon team in New Zealand started building RADIKAL — not as a software company, but as sign makers who were sick of the problem. The entire platform was built and designed in New Zealand, with every feature coming directly from a real pain point in the Auckland shop: the pipeline from how we tracked jobs, the quoting engine from how long quotes were taking, the client portal from the endless "where's my sign?" calls, and the analytics from never quite knowing which marketing was actually working.
We opened in Los Angeles.
Radikal Neon expanded to Melrose Ave, LA — serving celebrities, restaurants and brands out of one of the most competitive sign markets in the world. It was a milestone for the brand, but the real engine was still in New Zealand: a growing team, a growing client base, and a growing list of operational headaches that off-the-shelf software simply couldn’t solve.
For every sign shop, everywhere.
RADIKAL is now live — and available to every sign and print shop in New Zealand, Australia, Ireland, and the UK. It was built entirely by our New Zealand team — people who are still making signs, still running the pink trucks, and still getting the 3am installation calls. We built this because we needed it — and we think you do too.
