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How Monos was Designed

Apr 04, 2025 Posted by: Aaron Oppenheimer
How Monos was Designed
You got the origin story of Monos earlier this week - today we’re telling the next part of the Monos story, and diving deeper into its design. Missed Part 1? See it here.
 
Our Mechanical Engineer & Industrial Designer, Gene was able to take the concept Cameron and Ryan had lovingly conceived and developed into solid prototypes, and bring it to a fully fleshed out, manufacturable product. Here’s what he had to say about Monos:
 
Monos has a clean aesthetic that focuses on geometric balance and the 'square' axial symmetry. 
Showing off Monos' five separated illuminated surfaces 
We wanted this product to impart a visual sense of equilibrium and harmony through the use of simple, symmetrical shapes.
 
This energy makes the product feel natural. Like it inherently belongs and wasn’t made by an outside creator, but just appeared as an organic part of the space. The square motif is present practically everywhere in this product - imparting stability and grounded energy to the product and the space it's placed in.

The Monos Core - the LED base inside the outer diffusing shell. What we love about Monos is that it can be used with, or without the outer Diffuser.

I take pride in forming the concepts and driving execution behind many of the distinguishing aspects of Monos' presentation:
 
  • The hands-off IR sensor that allows contactless operation of the device is sure to be appreciated by everyone.
  • One of the signature design elements of the product are its individually-visible diffuser faces. What this means is that each of Monos’ five faces can be individually controlled, and set a distinct, separate color. 
  • I was able to integrate a “button” into the product that can be pressed just by squeezing the base. This kept our internal electrical system simple and compact, minding the tight space available.
  • This diffuser snaps onto the core of the product with ease. This allows people to easily enjoy Monos with, or without the diffuser. We also plan on designing and releasing different diffuser shapes down the road that can be easily interchanged and still be illuminated by the core of Monos.

A cross section of the Computer Design File of Monos, showing off the Outer Light Diffuser, the internal LED core (LEDs are the green dots) and the internal Circuit board in orange. 

Monos is clean and simple, but also has a great depth to it's refined design. I'm stoked to have contributed to this creation and look forward to seeing it shine its light all around the world. Check it out here.

~ The Fluora Team ~

How Monos Came to Be

Apr 03, 2025 Posted by: Aaron Oppenheimer
How Monos Came to Be
As we prepare for the upcoming Monos pre-sale launch, we wanted to share the story behind how our new product came to be.
 
You may know our story - if not, you can watch a video here.
 
After we finished working on the Fluora Mini, we were looking for new concepts for our next product.
 
Our co-worker and talented LED Artist, Cameron and his friend Ryan were simultaneously exploring product ideas with Ryan’s new 3d printer.
 
They wanted to make a really simple consumer friendly lamp that leveraged the immersive LED technology Cameron (and all of us) loved. 
 
They explored architectural designs that inspired them, specifically minimalist concepts and styles. Ultimately they aspired to make a lamp that embodied a minimalist ethos, but also was as cool and dynamic as possible.
 
One image they kept coming back to was the striking scene of the monolith from the opening of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.

This image became a North Star as Cameron and Ryan toiled with different designs for months, iterating and refining their vision for Monos. Hundreds of 3D prints of cubic diffuser form factors, and the internal shells were made. With each iteration, they attached LEDs with care onto the internal shell, then covered it with the diffuser and evaluated it, toiling over minor details like overall size, proportions, brightness, and producing evenly lit lamp faces. 
 
Finally, they got the concept to a point where they were excited to share it with the rest of the team, and presented it.
 
The Fluora team liked the product, thought it had potential and wanted to get it in front of customers. We brought it to a conference in New York City we were displaying Fluora at last Summer, where it became the star of the show. Once we saw Monos resonate with random people that knew nothing about LED art or Fluora, we knew it was a winner, and our next product was born.


Fluora Story - The Long Version

Dec 30, 2024 Posted by: Aaron Oppenheimer
Fluora Story - The Long Version
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.