Vive La Revolution!

We have been at quite a few trade shows over the past couple of months. One question we keep getting from booth visitors: When are LED lights going to go mainstream? The short answer is “Now.”

LED lighting is based on semiconductor technology. Like all semiconductors, LEDs evolve rapidly; think of “Moore’s Law”, which describes the doubling of performance and the halving of price every 18 months for computer chips. Given this, in just a few short years, LED lighting has moved from the fringe to being a viable lighting source for commercial enterprises. Our Miletus PAR-38 Dimmable LED Light Bulb (20 Watt) makes an excellent replacement for a 150 Watt halogen bulb, whilst using less than 1/7 the power. Yes, the initial cost is quite a bit higher, but the bulbs pay for themselves several times over, given their much greater lifespan (50,000 hours – which means lowered rebulbing costs) and reduced power use. As such, the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is far lower. Nothing is more mainstream than a great ROI.

The bottom line: LED lighting technology is enterprise-ready. Swing by our booth next time we do a trade show – or just pick up a test order of bulbs – and see what we already know: LED lighting may be revolutionary, but the revolutionaries are set to seize control of the palace. Watch this space…

Beauty and the Bottom Line

Jewelry stirs us. It was likely the original luxury item, a unequivocal statement that, in a primitive and uncertain world, the wearer had more than enough; jewelry still retains a certain talismanic power. In days gone by, before the advent of modern banks, people wore their wealth as a signal of their influence and affluence; a literal badge of distinction. This is still true for those who choose to bling; for the rest of us, jewelry is given as a mark of achievement, as when an employee is rewarded for longevity or excellence, or as a token of love and esteem. Thus, nervous would-be grooms fork over the traditional two months’ salary for an engagement ring, rather than giving the bride something “practical” like snow tires.
For those on the other side of the glittering counter, mood and atmosphere are crucial. A jewelry store must feel intimate and inviting, never cloying or intrusive. The jewels alone should draw the eye, showcased in all their brilliance. They are prizes and must be allowed to shine.
On the other hand, a jewelry store is a business and whilst the eye of the customer lingers on the jewelry, the jeweler’s eye must stay firmly on the bottom line. It’s beauty versus the bottom line, romance versus finance, the sacred versus the profane - well, you get the idea. Rarely can we satisfy both urges. Rarely - but not never...
We are delighted to present our latest showcase: this high-end jeweler is based on New York’s Madison Avenue, part of a shopping area regarded as one of the most exclusive on the planet. The financiers, advertising honchos and wealthy Upper East-Siders who shop in this district expect and demand the very best and bring an extraordinarily discerning eye to jewelry purchases.
Yael Sonia thrives in this environment. Her designs are bold yet highly sophisticated, influenced by a childhood split between New York and Brazil. Perhaps her much-traveled background partly explains her pieces: many seem informed by both the traditional jewelry of indigenous peoples and simultaneously by the chic boulevards of the world’s great cities. It might also explain her “kinetic” pieces, with their dynamic moving parts. Her emporium is a “boutique” in the true sense of the word; delighting her clients with one-of-a-kind pieces.
Yael brings the eye of an artist to everything she does, so we are especially pleased that she went with LED replacement bulbs from LED Waves to transform the lighting scheme in her New York boutique. Take a look at these “before” pictures:

You will notice immediately that the contrast between the display cabinets and the rest of the room has been heightened. LED Waves’ cool white West End light bars in the cabinets now highlight the pieces in all their iconic, multi-faceted brilliance; the rest of the room feels warmer, with our Rhodes Warm white 40 degree bulbs replacing standard halogens.
The room seems to take a respectful step back now, offering a gentle invitation to take your time and choose just the right piece:

The small display case on the desk uses a “Broadway” light bar:

LED MR16 Delphi bulbs were used as accents in the window display:

As you might expect from an organization headed by an artist, Yael and her team designed and implemented this wonderful scheme themselves. Gorgeous pieces like this deserve great lighting - and now they have it.

Even better, Yael will be seeing big savings on her electricity bill: the new LED bulbs down 14 watts, as opposed to 75W for the halogens they are replacing. Add to that the fact that they last many times longer and you can quickly see that Yael has made a shrewd business choice, not just a wise aesthetic one.

And so, Beauty set the fearsome Bottom Line free with a kiss, and they all lived happily ever after.

You can visit Yael’s store at:

Yael Sonia Art Jewelry
922 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10021
T: (212) 472-6488

www.yaelsonia.com.br

Red State, Blue State, Green State, You-State

In recent years, there has been an interesting confluence of attitudes about energy conservation. Traditionally, conservatives have besmirched the “green” movement for being willing to sacrifice economic growth and personal liberty for what they see as nebulous claims on behalf of “the planet”, whilst liberals have been appalled at what they see as capitalism’s myopia when it comes to the environment.

These distinctions are disappearing with increasing rapidity. For decades now, an increasing number of conservatives have touted “energy independence” as a national security goal. In this view, buying oil from people that want us dead is a ghastly strategic blunder. In many quarters, this still leads to the “Drill, baby, drill” attitudes that drives liberals batty, but this is far from the whole story. Many conservatives are looking toward the end of oil, seeking approaches that preserve their values – and the last of the oil.

This means that even people who are deeply skeptical about issues such as human effects on climate change are actively seeking to conserve existing resources and, eventually, new technologies that can supplant the burning of refined primeval ooze. Thus, while there may not be much agreement across political lines on the ends of energy policy, there is increasing concordance on the best means. Unlikely alliances are springing up everywhere as this common cause is recognized – together with some surprising results when conservative and liberal states are compared on their renewable energy records.

This drama is also playing out on a more personal level. For years, energy independence was seen as the preserve of wild-eyed “back to the land” hippies who bought photovoltaic solar (“PV”) panels to put around their geodesic domes. Now though, these ideas are going mainstream, as middle-class North Americans in exurban sprawls are confronting bulked up utility bills in the age of $100+ barrels of oil. In a recent visit to rural Ontario, I checked out my Uncle Colin’s geothermal HVAC system in his new home and my buddy Al’s composting toilet. Obviously, not everyone is going to be able to implement those technologies right off the bat — both would be a tough sell here in New York City, I admit – but certainly we can all make incremental changes.

Personally, I just replaced a gas-guzzlin’ Buick with a diesel VW New Beetle, which not only burns fewer hydrocarbons, but is also a lot more fun. And of course, anyone can replace Thomas Edison-style bulbs with LED bulbs – the same goes for dangerously hot halogens and mercury-filled fluorescent tubes and CFLs –and here at LED Waves, we hope you do just that J. Our bulbs have appeal that is not only international, it crosses party “lines” – conservatives love that they are not buying oil that finances people and activities hostile to the US, whilst liberals get the warm feeling that comes from knowing you just reduced your carbon footprint – just by screwing in a light bulb. And everyone, regardless of political stripe, loves the way the bulbs pay for themselves several times over during their lifetime.

In their fascinating book The Deviant’s Advantage: How to Use Fringe Ideas to Create Mass Markets, authors Ryan Mathew and Watts Wacker discuss the evolution of markets. Their thesis: the real entrepreneurial opportunities occur when ideas move from the “fringe” to being the “next cool thing”, eventually becoming “social convention” like Edison-type bulbs are today. Certainly, LED bulbs are making that transition with astonishing speed, driven by cost/performance curves that bear a strong relationship to Moore’s Law – not surprising, considering that LEDs are semiconductors. Just a few short years back, LED bulbs were the preserve of hobbyists and tinkerers; today, we are talking to some of the biggest companies in the world about installing our bulbs in their facilities.

It may also be that we are approaching that transition moment for energy independence, both on a national and a personal level. This will provide the opening for capitalism to show itself at its best: harnessing self-interest for the greater good. As many green capitalists point out: if industrial capitalism caused the planet’s problems, only a rebooted post-industrial capitalism will have the scale to solve those problems. We definitely intend to be part of the solution.

Citygarden (St. Louis)

We are delighted to play a small part in the creation of Citygarden, a beautiful garden project that will augment the great city of St. Louis for generations to come, providing its citizens with a gorgeous place to relax and enjoy the fine arts, right in the heart of downtown.

Here is how landscape architects Nelson Byrd Woltz describe the project on their website:

“Citygarden is a three-acre, two block sculpture garden that opened to the public on July 1, 2009. Donated by the Gateway Foundation to the City of St. Louis, the Garden is free and open to the public at all hours, unbound by perimeter fences or gates, and contains no signs prohibiting the touching of sculpture.

The design derives from the cultural and natural histories of St. Louis and its environs. Acknowledging its position in the heart of the Gateway Mall a few blocks west of the noble Arch and the Mississippi River, the Garden is structured in three precincts delineated by two walls. The northern precinct represents the river bluffs and is most urban in character. The café is located here. The middle precinct represents the low floodplain. The southern precinct represents the cultivated river terraces with its lush gardens. The most pronounced design gesture is a 550-foot long arcing wall of Missouri limestone that defines the edge between the urban precinct and the grassy ‘floodplain’. Evoking the geologically expressive bends and bluffs of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, the wall is constructed of 1200 blocks of locally quarried stone. More information here: http://www.citygardenstl.org. Joint venture with Studio | Durham Architects, St. Louis, MO.”

We heartily recommend that you check out the project page on the Nelson Byrd Woltz site; there are some amazing photos, some of them showing the famous Arch in the background. Here is a picture of our contribution – the LED string lights on the trees in the background.

LED string lights are ideal for this kind of application, since they last for years (even in the fairly extreme St. Louis weather) and use very little electricity. They are also lighter than traditional string lights and look great as an accent for treescapes. We furnished both custom color and custom length to decorate a total of 22 trees. Lighting designer Fisher Marantz Stone used 15-foot runs for each of the 22 tree trunks and a total of 76 10-foot runs for branches.

Designer:  Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects
Architecture:  Studio Durham Architects
Lighting Design:  Fisher Marantz Stone
Photographer:  Steve Hall of HedrichBlessing

World Workplace 2009 – IFMA Expo

We just got back from World Workplace 2009, the trade show for the International Facilities Management Association, in Orlando, FL. The show was a tremendous success for us.

Though the show was apparently less well-attended than in previous years, we had a lot of interest from big institutional buyers – especially toward our T8 and MR-16 replacement products. The T8 is a plug-and-play LED replacement for the standard fluorescent tube. Just cut or remove the ballast, slot the tube in to the fixture and turn it on, for a tremendous savings in electricity use and increased longevity. The people who dropped by our booth were even more excited than we are by the product.

Facilities Managers, as you might expect, manage all aspects of large facilities – things like energy use, HVAC, logistics, etc. They have been waiting for a T8 fluorescent replacement for a long time. The excitement was helped along by a lecturer who extolled the virtues of LED lighting, but wasn’t sure that anyone had a T8-style product to market. You can imagine the buzz created by the fact that we were right there at the show!

There was also a lot of buzz about our MR-16 halogen replacement; we learned that facilities managers are often frustrated with the high operating temperature and short lifespan of the halogens; high-brightness LEDs are an ideal replacement.

In fact, the buzz got so high that a multinational competitor who was at the show sent two reps over to check out our products! I guess they couldn’t help but notice the threat to the incrementally-improved fluorescent product they were offering :-)

Another interesting thing that emerged: there is widespread reluctance to adopt compact fluorescent bulbs (CFLs) at scale in this market. The facilities managers we spoke to repeatedly voiced concerns over the eventual disposal problems involved with CFLs – they contain mercury and other toxins. They’re also not so happy with the possibility that one might shatter, filling the air with mercury vapor and requiring special clean-up procedures. Basically, they fear the increased liablility exposure with these. As regular readers of this blog will know, we have been very critical of CFLs – some have accused us of trying to start a “format war” – and we feel vindicated by these reports from the field. We are sticking to our guns: the CFL is the 8-track of lighting.

On a more personal note, we jaded New Yorkers really enjoyed meeting the attendees. Facilities Management seems to be a career that attracts singularly nice people – the attendees we met were uniformly cheerful and went out of their way to cheer us on. This is one of those fields that is rapidly evolving, with degree programs and continuing education offerings designed to help these professionals control costs and maintain knife-edge efficiency for the concerns that employ them. It was really interesting to learn about the challenges these folks face on the job; we are very much looking forward to deepening the relationships we began at the show – and finding ways that our T8, MR-16 and other LED replacement bulbs can save them money and time!