Featured Startup Pitch: Born out of the maker movement, LumiLabs wants to improve indoor lighting

By CHRISTOPHER SMOLINSKI, LUMILABS CO-FOUNDER

ELEVATOR PITCH

LumiLabs creates vibrant illuminated works for style and for wellness.

PRODUCT/SERVICE DESCRIPTION

LumiLabs is very much a lighting laboratory. We currently offer uplighting services for wedding and special events in addition to our original product, Lumious.

Lumious brings the sun indoors by placing a window where you don’t have one. Lumious produces the beauty of bright orange sunrises, brilliant noon day sun and rich red sunsets. The new light also takes advantage of the benefits of blue light wavelengths: Namely helping to wake up in the morning and lull you to sleep at night.

LumiLabs is a proud member of the maker community. We offer an LED lighting crown—Crystal Crown—both assembled and pre-programmed to match your event or in kit form. Crystal Crown is available for $285 and the kit is currently on sale for $29.99. We will soon be adding a maker’s kit for Draper 2.0, our illuminated pocket square.

FOUNDERS’ STORY

Ariel and I were searching for a wedding venue. We wanted uplighting to be a prominent feature of our reception. A high price point and lack of options pushed us to solve our own problem and solicit our technology for other people’s events.

Previously, I had learned about multi-color LED lighting during my senior design project at Gannon University in 2010. In 20 minutes, Ariel and I had a prototype shining our signature teal. Previously, it had taken my senior design team five months to get that level of control.

The ability to make over 16 million colors is powerful. That’s approximately seven million more than the human eye can distinguish, and also 16 million more than the male vocabulary can handle. Armed with this power, we began experimenting with something really exciting—mimicking sunlight indoors. After all, light bulbs come in two general varieties—candlelight and overcast day.

MARKETING/PROMOTION STRATEGY

Born from the maker movement, LumiLabs operates in that community. We were recently featured in Make: magazine for our illuminated pocket square project, Draper 2.0.

MARKET OPPORTUNITY

Today more young professionals are concerned about the quality of their sleep. They want to achieve more during the day. Lumious allows those who are concerned about the quality of their sleep to access the most natural sleep regulator—blue light. The pattern of the sun mimicked allows for optimal feelings of productivity and motivation, similar to the feelings you would have on bright summer days.

HOW WE’RE UNIQUE

Unlike other ‘natural light’ solutions, Lumious changes color and intensity during the day just like the sun. Behind the scenes, blue light wavelengths are used to simulate the natural benefits given off by the sun.

For uplighting—we are able to undercut the market, offering a costly service for $100-to-$200 dollars less than the competition. We have the ability to create over 16 million colors. We are also independent from any additional services.

BUSINESS MODEL

We make things, and we sell them.

We don’t believe in punishing curious visitors to our site with advertisements. We don’t think that your personal information should be sold. I guess we’re just old fashioned.

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HEADQUARTERS: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

WEBSITE: www.lumilabs.co

INVESTORS: Bootstrapped

YEAR FOUNDED: 2014

FOUNDERS: Christopher Smolinski, Ariel Grace E. Armstrong

BLOG: lumilabs.co/blog

TWITTER: @Lumi_Labs

YOUTUBE: youtube.com/channel/UCiNaQ93x5aajdSAbVnBRKiw

PINTEREST: pinterest.com/lumilabs