As a reader of LEDs Magazine, chances are that when you head to The Home Depot, Lowe’s, your local supermarket, or wherever you happen to buy light bulbs when not online, you more or less know what you’re looking at amid the panoply of bulb shapes and sizes, stem types, light source technology, lumens, CCT claims, efficiency ratings, and so forth.
But even you — yes, you (full disclosure: that includes the writer of this article) — might occasionally succumb to the occasional head-scratching moment as you sort out the CFLs, LEDs, Edisons, A19s, E26s, 2300Ks, and so forth.
Certainly the general buying public suffers from this on a regular basis. Whenever I wander past the light bulb section, invariably there is at least one furrow-faced man or woman eyeing one box then another and another and then the first one again, smacking palm firmly to forehead, lowering eyeglasses down the nose, and possibly even trembling with abject discombobulation.
Often, if I stroll past the same spot 10 minutes later, the person is still there, by now phoning home to someone equally — and, I must say, understandably — clueless. The blind lead the blind in bafflement. There’s perhaps a 30% chance the correct bulb will come home, a 30% chance the wrong one will, and a 40% chance that the dazed would-be buyer will just give up and return empty-handed, except for the discounted AAA batteries he spotted at the check-out counter as he fled his halogen horror.
However, help has arrived.
Toward the end of 2020, Signify released an app in the US that sorts out the common confusion and much more. The app is called LightFinder.
“We realize that consumers, when they have to make the choice of a light bulb today, they face a lot of choice and very little help,” Signify CEO Eric Rondolat told analysts at the company’s virtual Capital Markets Day gathering last month. “So the objective of that app was to help consumers to make the choice.”
As a sign of how daunting the selection can otherwise be for mere humans, according to Rondolat LightFinder even makes use of artificial intelligence (AI) to help make some of the buying decisions.
“We know and we have made surveys that indicate that consumers, when they buy a bulb, very often they’re disappointed and 30% of the time they go back to change it,” Rondolat said, noting that LightFinder helps to eliminate that headache.
LightFinder is geared at sparing you the trip to the store in the first place, allowing you to purchase from the comfort of your own artificially-lit home. It lets you take a photo of the bulb you might be replacing, and uses the picture to identify the correct form factor for ordering purposes.
The free downloadable product is not the world’s first light-bulb buying app, but it is probably one of the fancier ones. Hold the phone’s camera up to the room, and the app even displays how a bulb and its illumination will look in your home, at different times of the day or night. This, in turn, helps the buyer further winnow decisions related to color, color temperature, and intensity.
Rondolat said it’s part of a drive by Signify to further digitalize company operations throughout internal processes, the supply chain, and customer-facing activity.
LightFinder is currently available only in the US, Signify told LEDs Magazine. The company did not indicate whether and when it might release the app in other territories.
Meanwhile, US consumers who use it will probably notice that prices are holding steady in the home market, at least for the moment.
The same could not be said for Signify’s professional sector products in the US.
According to a customer communiqué first released publicly by Edison Report, on Feb. 15 Signify will raise prices by an average of 3% on LED lamps and electronics, 5% on conventional lamps, and 6% on luminaires, ballasts, and on retrofit gear known as EvoKit.
In the customer letter, Signify attributed the increases to “increasing pressures felt throughout the supply chain, including raw materials, commodities, and logistics.”
The move is part of the many adjustments Signify is making in the pandemic-stricken economy. It elaborated on some of the others at its virtual Capital Markets Day meeting with analysts in December, when, for instance, Rondolat revealed the company will shrink its headquarters. At the same highly informative confab, Rondolat also provided an update on the ups and downs of Signify’s IoT lighting efforts, and on plenty of other aspects of company operations.
LEDs will be bringing you additional insights from the gathering in future articles.
MARK HALPER is a contributing editor for LEDs Magazine, and an energy, technology, and business journalist ([email protected]).
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