A founder’s manuscript
The Serious Way
We have spent forty years thinking about light.
We obsess over mattresses, nutrition and exercise. Yet light reaches us for every waking hour of every day, and most people never think about it at all.
Everything we see is light. Change the light, change what you see.
Two balls of wool, two different colours. In ordinary light, can you tell them apart?
4.5bn
years the sun has shone
50m
years our eyes evolved by its light
It began by accident.
A student who worked better under a good light. An order from Singer, then Levi Strauss. Then his mum, losing her sight, asked for a reading light, and nothing out there was built around the light itself. So he made her one.
Forty years later, over a million people in 90 countries have one.
We spend our waking lives under a copy of the sun. And a cheap one.
Ordinary bulbs are built down to a price: thin, uneven, heavy in the blue, a long way from the light that made us.
Most LED lights are built on a blue LED. They spike in the blue and leave gaps across the rest of the spectrum.
We build on a violet LED, layered with phosphors that fill in what ordinary LEDs miss. Daylight Wavelength Technology™: a fuller, more even spectrum, much closer to real daylight.
People don’t buy lamps. They buy what better light enables them to do.
One light fits nobody.
Every retina is unique. Your eyes are unique, even from each other. That is why there is a range, not a single light, and each one is set up around how and where you see.
If something is worth doing, it is worth doing well.
We were researchers from day one, and we never stopped asking questions. Every light is repairable, upgradable, made properly.
And light works far beyond sight: our sleep, our body clock, how we feel. See the research.
Seeing is believing.
Claims don’t cut through, so try one, in your own home, with your own book. 99 in 100 who try one keep it. If you don’t love it, we collect it and refund you.
See the differenceLight matters.
Far more than we ever imagined. The journey of understanding light has only just begun.
Alex Pratt OBE
Founder, Serious Readers