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Fluora Story - The Long Version

Dec 30, 2024 Posted by: Aaron Oppenheimer
The roots of Fluora can be traced back to a Burning Man art installation in 2013 called “The Sugarcubes”, made by a group of engineers, designers and fabricators living in San Francisco. 
 
The Sugarcubes were a beautiful mess of electrical wiring and extruded aluminum lined with LEDs. 

The installation was a hit, and people wanted the “cubes” at their events, concerts and brand activations. Soon after, a company called Symmetry Labs was started.

Symmetry Labs made a name for themselves building larger than life art installations with LED lighting, including a massive LED Flower Garden in Hawaii, and a 40’ tall LED Tree in Oslo, Norway.

This company is where Jake, my business partner, and I met, and worked together, along with some other team members of our current art collective, color+light (who created Fluora).

We got the chance to create experiences for people all around the world, at world class events like Coachella, and the US Open, and for major brands like Nike and Google. We always strived to use our dynamic lighting technology to create an experience and tell a story, and could tell that resonated with our audience. 

One thing that people kept asking us over and over again was if they could buy something for their home. We set off on our own and started color+light in late 2019. Soon after, COVID hit and we were stuck at home with no art installations to design or build. That’s when we decided to start working on a consumer product…

With a consumer product in mind and the world shut down, we started experimenting with product ideas in April of 2020. As mentioned before, inspiration for Fluora struck from a Monstera plant sitting in a friend's apartment in San Francisco.

 

Out of all the Art installations we had made up until that point, it seemed like nature inspired hardware (LED Trees, Flowers) did something special for our audience. So when we saw this perfect real houseplant, shaped by nature, something clicked.
We sent the picture of the Monstera plant to our designer and soon we had the first concept rendering of what would become Fluora.
We made a quick website with a teaser video, with an email sign up form on it. We sent that out to our network, and started running some social media ads to the page and watched email sign ups fly in.
 
That was when we knew we were onto something.

Although the first Fluora rendering was based on a Monstera, we ended up deciding to make a larger product first, and ultimately took inspiration from Ficus Elastica, also called the Rubber Plant. 

We began designing the first Fluora for manufacturing. By the end of 2020, we had run a Kickstarter presale for the original Fluora Floor plant and raised over $160k. By then, we were deep in product development.
 
Building something for people’s homes was a completely new challenge. We had been used to being able to troubleshoot or access our art installations if anything went wrong, but with a consumer product, everything needed to be much more buttoned up.

The two main challenges for the product were: designing an LED leaf that looked natural and could look good up close in someone’s home, while having great light diffusion and minimal LED “hotspots” - places where seeing the actual LED becomes a visual eyesore.
 
The second was re-writing our immersive LED animation software from the ground up to run on a much lower powered consumer product, instead of a full fledged computer. 
Overall, developing the first Fluora was an amazing journey, and took us about 18 months. We were finally able to ship 600 Fluora units to our first customers in April 2022.

 

We thought achieving this milestone was the top of the mountain, and everything would be smooth sailing from there on out. Boy were we wrong. We realized we had two big issues on our hands after getting the product out.

 

The first was - we were sold out of product, and had no money for inventory financing to make more. The second was: although we had a great customer base for the floor plants, the product was too expensive for many of our fans.

 

So we spent the next year and a half working on fixing these two big problems. We developed the smaller and more affordable Fluora Mini, and figured out how to get working capital for inventory.

 

We shipped 2200 Fluora Mini units out to customers between July and December of 2023. Even with our inventory capital, we ran into more issues and delays, and were not able to get more Fluora in stock until May of 2024. Since then, we’ve spent time focusing on our financials and supply chain with the goal of always having Fluora in stock!

 

We ended up fully selling out of product again earlier this month - but this time are only going to be out of stock for a few weeks - we receive more product at the end of this week!

 

Lastly, we are continuing to develop new products and technology. Monos, our third product is currently in the final stages of development! We are going to launch the presale in the next few months, stay tuned!

 

P.S. We just also released a video telling the story behind fluora. Check it out here.