#20 Chroma Team Growing, Recent Product Updates, and Roadmap

Good afternoon, if you are receiving this post you either signed up directly, or on our main website. I’m Michael, the founder of Chroma and use this newsletter to share my unedited thoughts, often going into technical minutiae or rambling about different ideas that make for rather lousy product marketing. I don’t touch any of the ads or marketing as I am a materials engineer and just like building the products I want, and until I met the guy who is running things now, things were just moving sideways, and I almost even shutdown the business at one point when sales were under a tenth of what they were now a year and a half ago. As I have always mentioned, if sales go up, my ability to build new products grows, as this business was bootstrapped from a time I was living in a van, and then moved into a 10x10’ office where I setup an electrical workbench to build the first prototypes (actually, I am technically still in that same van at the moment for the summer, mountain biking and rock climbing in British Columbia).

Anyway, we are now at the stage where our current team is getting overloaded with all the recent growth (as you may have noticed with the various backlogs we have had this year while trying to ramp up production… sorry about that, almost everything is back in stock and shipping now though). So we are looking to hire people to help manage and optimize that growth. Part time for now, but could become full time later.

The ideal candidate is a self-motivated and driven individual who excels in a dynamic environment where responsibilities are fluid and evolving. They should have strong technical proficiency and be capable of handling customer support inquiries. This role involves overseeing social media management, coordinating photo and video shoots, and supporting various marketing initiatives. Additionally, the candidate will manage the coordination, scheduling, and logistics for in-person events including conferences, ensuring smooth execution of all related tasks.

Send an email to matt@getchroma.co if you are interested, and please pass this along if you know other people who you think would be a good match.

In addition to needing help with Chroma, I am also working on launching an ingredient/cooking oil business where we could use 1 more person to help manage things as we approach launch. LoLa Oil is the company that will actually solve the seed oil problem because we are the only company that is interested in scalable solutions that transform the entire world. I will accept nothing less than being able to walk into a grocery store or restaurant anywhere in a country and knowing that all ingredients have <15% linoleic acid (bare minimum) without having to look at an ingredient label, look at an app and think about which menu items are acceptable, or have a conversation with a server where they are forced to inquire with the kitchen. The first product there will be consumer facing, and it’s a blend of 70% macadamia oil and 30% coconut oil in beautiful black glass bottles with 0 light transmission. Will be shipping in a matter of weeks…

Get notified of launch signing up with your email on the LoLa landing page

Follow LoLa oil on Twitter to get all the latest updates.

Chroma Product Updates: Better Electronics

I am thrilled to announce that we are finally using Gallium Nitride (GaN) power supplies across almost all of our devices! All the D-Lights, Lux Vitals, and Ironforges are shipping today with the new GaN power supplies, and the backordered Purple Wands that are just about ready to ship to us from our manufacturing partner are also now using GaN. The current Sky Portals are still running on traditional silicon power supplies.

What the heck is GaN and why does it matter?

Like silicon, GaN is a semiconductor that can be used in a power supply, a component that takes your alternating current (AC) from a wall plug and turns it into direct current (DC) at whatever voltage you need. Historically, everything has been silicon, and SiC and GaN have recently been growing at a tremendous rate now that it has become economically viable to manufacture. Different industries have been adapting it at different rates e.g. if you have noticed in recent years that your phone or laptop charger is quite a bit smaller and lighter, yet charges at a rather fast rate, it is probably using GaN. Overall, you get higher quality electricity, much lower thermal losses (more of the power goes into your device rather than being wasted, about 5-10% more). Here are a couple good articles that dive into the technical details and other factors.

https://epc-co.com/epc/gallium-nitride/what-is-gan

https://eepower.com/technical-articles/gan-vs-silicon-smackdown/

For LEDs, these were not readily available, and I was actually trying to get these last December, and then that was too early and caused some delays. We finally figured it out though, and I imagine it will be a while before anyone else switches over. These do cost more, but not too much more, and as production continues to grow, it seems possible that at some point silicon may stop being used entirely in power electronics. Other red light therapy companies don’t do this because they get generic panels that they slap their logo on, while we actually control more customized products where we are working directly across multiple lower tier component suppliers for quality control and other requirements. With the smaller power supplies, we have also resized cases on Lux Vital, D-Light, and Ironforge, along with a slight improvement on all the cables.

(Additionally, the new power supplies offer greatly improved AC-DC isolation, which means we now have the best in class “low non-native EMFs” for those who care about such things, as everyone else has their power supplies all together in a vented aluminum box, whereas our lights have a hermetically sealed aluminum enclosure and a long cable separating the LEDs and power supply.)

Game-changing new product inbound…

A few months ago we tweeted about the idea of making a new sort of floor lamp that would absolutely flood your home with an absurd amount of light…

(follow the Chroma Twitter account here)

Well, now we are getting an absolutely giant heatsink custom CNC machined as we work on our first production prototype. You know those giant UFO lamps in overhead warehouses? Pretty bright, right? Those are typically 200 watts. We are doing double that just in the white channel, and you will be able to run 100 watts in the amber channel at the same time! Turns out even the large oversized lamp bodies cannot handle it so we will need to have custom molds made to die-cast the aluminum heat sinks in production. This thing is going to be an absolute beast.

Moreover, I initially wanted to have a simple on/off switch for each channel, possibly with an intermediate mode, just to have absolutely no dimming, since dimming is almost always PWM (pulse width modulation), which means you rapidly turn the light on and off. LEDs can do this tens of thousands of times per second to be imperceptible in theory, unlike hideous fluorescent lights, but in practice, this might still have some biological effect. From a naive engineering perspective, PWM makes sense — it optimizes the longevity (which is very high in LEDs regardless), and ensures consistent color output.

When you dim an LED by driving it with less power, rather than full power for some fraction of the time, you actually get a slight shift in the spectrum… which is funny, because the spectrum of most LEDs suck, and on top of that, there is a biological perceptual effect where dimmer lights appear more blue shifted. This is the reason a not-that-bright 5000k color temperature bulb might feel too blue and cold indoors, but outdoor midday sunlight is around 5600k and you perceive it as warm!

Anyway, we are diving into the sub-components, and are going to have constant-current-reduction on this lamp, with two dimming wheels so the white and amber channels can be independently controlled. There will be no bluetooth, WiFi, or any “smart” features. Smart appliances usually suck. LED power draw is highly sensitive to small changes in voltage, so we control the current. This is real flickerless, zero flicker, whereas most lights you buy that use those terms really just mean “PWM at a high enough frequency you won’t consciously notice it.”

This lamp will transform your home. I never considered this product before because I was focused on getting LOTS OF POWER to actually be hitting your face for circadian rhythm optimization, hence, the Chroma Sky Portal. It was obvious that matching the Sky Portal’s intensity across an entire room would require an obscene amount of power draw. Moreover, given the principle-agent problem in building construction, there has never been a good way to integrate better lighting into buildings since no one wants to deal with retro-fitting. But an upward facing floor lamp is actually a superior form factor than a fully custom build because there is actually no other way to get light this diffuse (though in principal you could also make a ceiling mounted reflected light luminaire), and I have noticed in recent years an increasing number of establishments that have LED spotlights, and the glare from these is horrendously unpleasant, on top of the lousy, harmful spectrum that comes with the blue phosphor pump. Absolutely ridiculous. No one takes pride in their work and actually creating delightful experiences. From what I hear about Japan, maybe that is the only place where craft and thoughtfulness commands a sufficient degree of respect.

With these lamps, you have so much power draw relative to your existing lights, it negates the sunk cost fallacy you run into there! I realized that there is a spiritual battle going on in the world where this lamp fits in. Everyone knows evil has been growing as of late, and those who value human life are finding fewer and fewer allies. Beauty and health are being portrayed as threats, and they are threats to those who impose tyranny upon us, for living a beautiful life is its own shining city upon a hill and it as the most rigorous proof that one can strive for more and refuse to be crushed by evil. That is what I hope to bring with this lamp, so I have flipped my “concerns about inefficiency” to being thrilled about how much energy it consumes — we have figured out how to channel way more energy into improving the experience of life itself and that is a glorious thing! Oh, how the communists will howl in pain at the beauty of this light. Let them scurry away like the rats in a bucket of degeneration they are… while perhaps a stray ray will draw some of them away from their evil ways and into the light.

I am thinking this lamp will need to be such a focal point we will need to spin out an entirely separate brand to focus on it and connect with the many people who might not be on the frontiers of health enough to have taken an interest in red light therapy or think explicitly in terms such as “circadian optimization.” If this lamp transforms the home the way I think it can, it will represent one of the first major transformations to the nature of the modern human dwelling, an area that some have bemoaned has seen insufficient “innovation” over the last decade. I would love for it become an iconic product like the Herman Miller Eames chair, and why shouldn’t it? — anyone can buy a chair that they know is comfortable, but not everyone will buy these lamps right away. Yet, they will be far more visually striking for guests who enter into your home, they will add far more value to your life and the comfort of your guests, and they will signal that you actually do know something interesting before it becomes common knowledge, and ultimately, the best flexes boil down to this, for knowing novel things is greatly superior to unchecked consumption for the pure sake of signaling ability to consume — the marginal value will always diminish rapidly in this way if it is not well thought out. This is why I would say you can purchase a $100m home, and some regions will be rather pleasant because of the windows, but I assure you the lighting will be lousier than what one should expect in this year for any home at a fraction of that price!

Anyway here you will have your “innovation” to the dwelling. I sort of hate that word. I do not feel innovative, or that I am some sort of inventor, I even shudder a bit at the thought. I am simply an intolerant man who takes certain things very seriously that others may consider frivolous, and I do not wish capitulate! If you are serious about things, the answer appears plainly in front of you. I do not wish to glorify this process as innovative, for it creates an artificial separation between innovator and non-innovator, a totally absurd concept that serves no other purpose than to discourage people from doing useful things. Anyone can do useful things if they so choose. And if you cannot do useful things, you can always simply be a discerning consumer, which directs more resources to those who build a world that is nicer to live in more quickly: