How it all started

In our family we have always had trouble going to bed at night. After a power outage one summer evening, we got the idea for an experiment. We decided that for one week, each night after a certain hour the only light anyone could use was a flashlight. It made every task just hard enough that we wanted to go to bed. It showed us reduced lighting could help us go to bed, but could we make the experience a little more enjoyable? We tried candles and oil lamps but after a close call with fire we deemed them too dangerous to use with children.

One night while sitting around a fire pit, I wondered if a small nightstand lamp could give the same effect. Being an electrical engineer, I whipped up a proof of concept. Even though it was ugly, we ended up using it every night for a year! The idea was sound but it needed a lot of work.

We built fires with pine, we built them with hickory. We burned them on calm days, we burned them on windy days. We took measurements, the brightness, the color, the rate they flickered, the rate they died down. We built a lot of prototypes and wrote a lot of code in an effort to get it just right. This has been a much longer journey than any of us thought it would be…and we are just getting started.

We are a small operation trying to make the world a little better. We design our own circuits, write our own firmware, we use 3D printers to make the cases and we assemble everything right here in the USA.

We hope that when you use a Flicker light, you feel all the love and work that went into making it.