Why we exist
The socket was an open standard. Any bulb, from any maker, fit any lamp, anywhere, for a hundred years. You bought it once and owned it outright — no account, no app, no permission. Then lighting got "smart," and somehow got worse.
What we're angry about
Now your lamp wants an account. Your light lives behind an app. The cheap stuff is landfill in eighteen months; the premium stuff is an elegant cage. A cloud you don't control can switch your room off. Firmware gets abandoned. You don't own your light anymore — you rent permission to use it.
What we believe
The thing in your home should be yours — fully, permanently, with no company standing between you and your own lamp. Openness isn't a feature we added; it's how it always should have worked. We just stopped letting people take it away. A designed object should outlive the company that made it.
The product is the argument
Open — WLED-compatible firmware. It works without us, forever. Modular — one light module, magnetic swappable diffusers; replace a part, never the whole thing. Made to keep — Bisqlite™, our bone-china-white material, built to be owned for decades. The lamp is just where the belief becomes an object.
Who we're not
A nice silhouette is table stakes. Ownership is the whole point. We aim up — at lock-in, at disposability, at the incumbents who normalized renting people their own light. Never at the customer, and never at the makers and the open-source community. They're our people.
Who's behind it
Three threads, one person: he's designed office furniture, worked in game development, and prototyped hardware at Meta — industrial design, interactive systems, and rigorous physical prototyping, all in one background.
gadz.tech is where those come together: products designed to last and made to be truly owned, with open firmware, modular parts, and a material built to keep.
Read the dev log