On 23 September 2026, shortly before the Mid-Autumn public holiday (25-27 September), the Foshan campus of ANOVA Lighting, the company’s one-stop architectural lighting partner, turned into a garden of handmade light. The whole company gathered for an afternoon and evening of play, craft, and friendly rivalry, organized by an internal event committee and opened by the company’s founder.
Seven teams, named after figures from Chinese mythology and classic literature, competed from afternoon into evening: Team Nezha, Team White Dragon, Team Journey to the West, and four more. And the object at the center of it all was something nobody bought and nobody threw away.
Fifteen Minutes, One Lantern
The heart of the afternoon was the lantern-making workshop. Each of the seven teams received a materials kit prepared by the admin team and one simple brief: build a single Mid-Autumn-themed lantern in fifteen minutes.
Then came the defense. In a fifteen-minute presenting and judging session, every team stood before the judges to explain its lantern and argue for its design. Points were on the line, but so was pride. A lantern, after all, is never only an object. It is an argument about what a team values.
One Lantern, Two Jobs
The handmade lanterns were not finished when the judging ended. Each one took on a second life as the display rack for the lantern-riddle round. Every team drew twenty prepared riddles and wrote ten of its own, and the finished cards hung beneath each team’s lantern, waiting for rival teams to walk up and solve them.
It was a small piece of design logic hiding inside a party game: one handmade object, two purposes, nothing wasted. And to keep the contest honest, monitors enforced the integrity rule that looking up riddle answers on smart devices was prohibited.
Play, Made by Hand and Run by Heart
The lanterns stood at the center of a wider afternoon of garden games. Teams faced off in ring toss and in the bottle-standing challenge, a head-to-head contest decided over three cumulative rounds. Every station was run by staff volunteers serving as game officers, timekeepers, scorekeepers, order monitors, emcees, and transition guides, while an admin team handled materials, prizes, and catering, and a photographer documented the day.
The message ran through everything: this celebration belonged to the people in it. Nothing was outsourced, and nothing was treated as disposable — not the games, not the decorations, not the effort.
Dinner, Gala, and a Birthday Pause
As evening settled in, the main hall hosted a catered group dinner punctuated by toasts from team leads. The evening gala brought a choral performance of the company’s own anthem, a comedy talk-show act on the origins of Mid-Autumn, and four more song and dance acts, all scored by judges. Mid-program, the room paused for an employee birthday celebration, with the founder presenting the birthday gift.
A six-round lucky draw kept anticipation high. By the time champion, runner-up, and third place were settled by cumulative points across the four games, performances, and hosting, a full day of effort had been tallied and honored. A whole-company group photo closed the celebration a little after 21:00.
Decorations With a Second Life
Here is the detail we keep returning to. The team-owned lanterns and riddle cards were kept by the teams after the event for reuse. A decoration built for one evening will hang again — in an office, at a desk, at next year’s celebration.
That instinct is exactly how ANOVA approaches lighting: modular systems that upgrade instead of being replaced, and fixtures made with recycled materials wherever they can be. The full thinking sits behind the company’s product range and technical guides, behind the engineering and ODM development capability that turns sustainable ideas into manufacturable products, and behind our own sustainable lighting principles.
Build things that last. Give them more than one job. Let them stay.
