When LED light artist Chrispy came to us with his idea, we were immediately excited. As long-time festival goers, we’re quite familiar with just how incredible LEDs can be as a medium for art. The GlowFlock proposition was obvious: dead simple, wirelessly synchronizing LED lights. And the name, a creation of Chrispy himself, was perfect — it conjured both the visual and functional attributes of the brand in a single word. GlowFlock.
Developing the Brand
With the name as the inspiration, the next step was to write up a brief that would be the foundation for the media we knew we’d create down the road. Inspired by the same idea of murmuration that moved the technologists, we explored an abstract vision and then iterated towards a more concrete brand vision: Lighting in harmony.
Developing the Visual Identity
Brand brief in hand, it was time to dig into design. At the edge of the color spectrum, purple seemed to beckon with its ethereality and scarcity in nature. For an almost supernatural product, a nearly supernatural color. For a secondary color, we introduced blue to add the themes of security and reliability. Also, blue offered the possibility of a smooth gradient, underscoring the brand’s capability to render smooth transitions of color in the medium of LEDs. Visuals of a bird or birds, while obvious, were a must. Inserting a visual suggesting technology and light were as well.
At this phase we brought in external design support—an approach as a boutique creative house I always recommend—to ideate on the logo.
A brand revelation
After a trip to soft launch the brand at Portland Winter Lights Festival, it became clear that what was most resonant for the brand was a sense of cameraderie and love for LED art itself. The company’s founders had years of experience and credibility in the space, and it showed in their passion for the culture. In a sudden revelation at PDXWLF, the team realized that uplifting the stories of fellow artists was a deeply resonant first move into brand awareness. It felt true to the brand, and there was a sense that rooting down into that existing connection was the right first step. Artists Illuminated, a series of short films highlighting artists working in the medium of LEDs, was born.
Defining the product
As the company was getting started, there was a discussion about whether to launch in the home or festival space. As Artists Illuminated took off and GlowFlock deepened its connection to its existing community, the team came to the realization that this idea came out of the fertile creative soil of the festival scene, and it was most likely to fruit there as well. GlowFlock, then, would begin on its home turf—off grid, without high speed internet or smart home assistants. GlowFlock would just work.
Conjuring The Dream
Now that we’d defined the product, it was time to imagine it in action. We met up in Portland and built the ultimate GlowFlock tent experience—a bell tent from Life Intents decked out in a dozen different GlowFlock form factors—all perfectly in sync. While the technology wasn’t new, the implementation was, and the whole team had a moment of sitting back and staring at their product with a little bit of amazement. It looked really, really good.
Riparian Studios sprung into action, capturing the tent on film and quickly generating a few iterations of an ad for testing on social media.
Testing Initial product-market fit with Social
The team came together to explore who we were designing the product for, and settled on a specific type of festival-goer. Ultimately, there were fellow hackers aplenty who spent countless hours programming microcontrollers and soldering lights dark basements. We knew them. We were them. But what, then, of the festival goers who were NOT those hackers, but still had a deep appreciation for light art and wanted something more sophisticated than the cheap lights currently available on the market. The GlowFlock and Riparian teams worked together to carve out a market, and started a test campaign to test our hypothesis about our target.
Immediately, the brand gained traction on social despite the soft launch timing matching up with an increase in economic fears. We knew we had a viable crowdfund on our hands.
GlowFlock’s Bright Future
With the initial market segment tested, GlowFlock is now working towards a March crowdfunding campaign with the goal of delivering products to backers by festival season, 2023. Riparian Studios continues to work with the brand as they build toward the launch, and beyond.