How Emily Brooke, Creator of the Laserlight, Rode the Ups and Downs of Building Life-Saving Bike Gear
As Beryl launches its third Kickstarter campaign, the founder reflects on the lessons she’s learned and why her priority is to make the product more widely accessible.
In 2012, Emily Brooke created a Kickstarter campaign for the Laserlight, a bike attachment that projects a laser image of a green bicycle onto the street ahead of a cyclist. It drastically improves biker visibility, addressing the frightening fact that 79 percent of cycling accidents are caused by motor vehicles turning into an unseen cyclist pedaling straight. The first project funded in just five days, and before long Brooke was penning deals with bike-sharing services like London’s Santander fleet, New York City’s Citi Bike, and Bixi in Montreal.
Her latest campaign, the Laserlight Core, incorporates new advances in laser projection technology that Brooke thinks could help improve safety for even more bikers. But getting to this milestone hasn’t always been a smooth ride.
In this guest post, Brooke explains what her team has learned on Kickstarter from two previous campaigns — and why they’ve come back for a third.
What We Learned on Kickstarter (and Why We’re Going Back)
A guest post by Emily Brooke
We launched our Kickstarter campaign for the world’s first laser-power projection light, then called the Blaze Bike Light, in 2012. (We’ve since changed our name to Beryl, for legal reasons.) At the time it was just myself and one employee, Will Dunk, who’s still with the company today.
I was filled with nervous excitement as I shared my invention on Kickstarter. I had spent many months obsessively researching and developing it while I was at university, and then spent another year working on it with an industrial designer after I graduated. I felt overwhelmingly vulnerable about sharing my design so publicly. I fully believed in my bold new concept, but had absolutely no way to know if other people would feel the same.
As backers started committing to my project, I was flooded with excitement. It was all becoming real, and the scope and scale grew with every pledge. Many people in the UK hadn’t heard of Kickstarter before—we were among the first creators to launch there—but we were able to raise £55,000 (around $71,200). My idea was growing into a fledgling business.
In 2015, we started designing our second product, the Blaze Burner rear light. We returned to Kickstarter, where we found support from our own loyal community, as well as the many cyclists who’d come to the platform since, who were eager to support small startup businesses making innovative products.
Our first two Kickstarter campaigns taught us a lot, and they really shaped the direction and ethos of the company. Above all, we learned these three things:
The power of our community
First and foremost, we saw the collective power of our community. Our backers were eager to give us feedback as well as praise, and they helped us make some key product decisions — such as delaying our delivery date in order to improve the laser component — in our early days.
Our community also helped us see how important our product could be. Many backers shared stories about the times they believed the Laserlight had saved them from a collision, and how it made them feel more visible and safer on the road. These stories, combined with a Transport Research Lab report demonstrating the efficacy of the light, made us more certain than ever that we needed to make Laserlight available to every cyclist, in every city.
But at the time, the laser technology we used was new and expensive. After our Kickstarter campaign, we needed to sell it at a premium price point. This didn’t sit well with me; as an important safety innovation, I felt it should be accessible to everybody. So we focused on bringing the innovation to more people by partnering with bike share programs. We built our core laser technology into the city bikes of London, New York, and Montreal, helping to keep thousands of cyclists visible on the road.
Working with the city here in London, we were able to see how the Laserlight and its safety benefits could encourage more people to choose cycling as their primary mode of transportation. If this shift were to occur at a larger scale, it would create much healthier, more sustainable urban environments.
Through these experiences, we managed to articulate our mission: to build a better world by getting more urban residents on bikes. Making the tech to tackle a common barrier to cycling — personal safety — was our first step. Integrating it into thousands of city bike programs was the next. And now, a few years on, with the price of the laser finally falling, we’ve been able to re-engineer the Laserlight, to make a new generation of the product at a more accessible price.
We’ve come back to Kickstarter to say thank you to our backers for their role in this journey, and to offer them the newest version of the product first.
The importance of transparency
Launching our first product taught us about the challenges of manufacturing and the importance of a watertight supply chain. Shortly after we launched our campaign for the Blaze Burner rear light in 2015, our UK-based manufacturer went out of business. Legally, we were unable to talk publicly about it. We struggled to communicate the delays to our backers; every day we couldn’t deliver was another day that we let them down, and they (rightly) became frustrated that the promised delivery dates had been pushed back yet again. It was one of the hardest periods in the business.
The experience taught us a very important lesson: if you go on the platform, you need to be able to be fully truthful with your backers. A big part of the joy of Kickstarter is bringing many people along for the ride, updating them on the journey’s inevitable ups and downs, challenges, and successes. They knew something wasn’t working and we were unable to tell them the full story. While you can’t always plan for the bumps in the road, you need to be able to communicate them to your community.
Transparency now means two things to us: transparent communication and transparent practices. We decided to begin the long process of becoming a certified B Corporation, committing to ourselves, our board, and our backers that we would establish a solid supply chain that could sustainably deliver.
The truth about making things
Hardware is hard. Not only does a hardware business face the same challenges as any startup, it also has to understand and manage a supply chain, manufacturing, a fluctuating raw materials market, quality control, fulfillment, working capital, inventory storage, and many other considerations. Making things for the first time has a steep learning curve, and we have been very grateful for the patience of our backers and community as we have climbed that hill. We hope they agree that holding the product in your hand (or affixing it to your bike) makes all the tough moments worthwhile.
Returning to Kickstarter to launch the Laserlight Core was a natural choice. Six years on from our first campaign, we have more clarity, more confidence, and more collective wisdom — all from our Kickstarter experience — that we funneled into the product.
We would love for you to join us again; we’re in for a fun ride.
Laserlight Core is live on Kickstarter through November 6, 2018.
