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Yes, we can see the irony in a company called Innr creating Outdoor articles. That’s why we asked Innr’s co-founder Jeroen about his vision and design choices for Innr’s new smart Outdoor lighting category.
After years of working at Philips – mostly managing lighting products and the sales department in Asia – Jeroen started seeing the light. Or rather, he noticed the way people use lighting was changing. With the advent of ‘smart technology’ more and more consumer products were able to connect with each other. Plenty of industries were embracing this new technology but lighting remained behind. That’s when Jeroen decided to start Innr together with Rob in 2012. Their goal: using smart technology to make lighting as beautiful and easy to use as possible. Eight years, and a large amount of smart lights and fixtures later, their Outdoor category came to life.
Maybe it just wasn’t easy enough to install outdoor lighting yet? Well that sounds like a problem smart lighting could solve. And so we did.
Well, indoors most people already have lighting and fixtures installed. In their garden however, things are different. Some people only have a few lights in their garden while most don’t have any at all. We could’ve concluded that this means people don’t want lighting in their garden, but we believe the garden is an extra room in your home, deserving of its own lighting. And we noticed a lot of people that agreed with us. Outdoor lighting is becoming a trend! Maybe it just wasn’t easy enough to install outdoor lighting yet? Well that sounds like a problem smart lighting could solve. And so we did.
The tricky thing with outdoor lighting is safety. Having cables with 120V/230V going through them running through your gardens means you have to make the fixtures, cables and connectors watertight. One small lawnmower accident and things could get messy very quickly. LED technology solved this problem because it only needs 12V to 24V to work properly, making it safe to install yourself. Innr could’ve gone in two directions from here. The first option was to create LED bulbs to screw into existing armatures, the second was to create the fixture, enclosure and bulb in one. We choose the second option because this way we could make sure the enclosure is watertight but doesn’t create any connectivity issues. The next step was to figure out which styles of lights to create.
To come up with the perfect Outdoor products we consulted an Outdoor lighting expert, who concluded that most users wanted a spotlight that you can point wherever you want, and a pole you can stick in the ground. We translated the users wishes into the Spot and Pedestal products. The Flex LED strip was our own idea. Whatever we’d create, we wanted to focus on one thing in particular: to make smart lighting as easy to install and use as possible.
The system is fairly easy to describe. Every set of lights has a power supply and a control box. The control box connects to the Innr app on your smartphone, and you can set every control box exactly the way you want. A set of Spots or Pedestals starts with 3 lights, but you can buy more to expand the set up to 5 lights. Want even more lights connected to this single control box? Then you can upgrade the power supply for more power and add up to 10 lights. When lights are connected to a single control box you can control these lights as a group, but you can’t set the individual lights in the group..
This way you can extend your set up easily and place all the lights exactly where you want; it’s plug and play.
Using this system it’s also possible to extend the cables. While the sets come with 5 meters of cable with the lights spaced 2 meters apart, it’s possible to extend the total length up to 30 meters. This way you can place all the lights exactly where you want, it’s plug and play.
We’ve only just begun with our Outdoor category. There’s already a few products lined up for release in 2021 and we’re working on more. Keep an eye on our socials for updates and more inspirational stories!
