Lightstrip Sale & Discontinuation

Hey all,

I promise one day we’ll have some good news, my goodness. But as the saying goes, “one man’s loss is another man’s gain”.

This one hurts a bit bc this is such a cool product and the potential behind it could’ve been huge (I’m still convinced it is) but with the tariffs, need for capital for switches due to increased lead times, and market competition in the lightstrip category, we’re having to discontinue the Z-Wave lightstrip until further notice. I do hope to one day bring this back once the economy stabilizes, but until then, goodbye Rainbow Aurora, you will live on in our hearts.

So, we’re putting up the lightstrip + controller kit for $50, and the strips are 1/2 off. Accessories are full price as there aren’t too many left.

We will, of course, always support the lightstrip and will honor any warranty claims (if there’s no more product, a refund will be issued).

Any questions, please let us know!

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Sorry, but I can’t “like” the above post… :frowning:

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Well dang, also hoping you’ll be able to bring these back but get the reasoning. Went ahead and ordered some in advance for future remodeling plans.

Did you mean to say, we will not be restocking the light strips until supply lines return to normal? I like the sound of that much better, plus it allows more time to improve the firmware before the next batch. :wink:

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Sad to hear the news. Order placed to complete my kitchen and another project. Hope you guys can get some new investors so you can continue developing new products.

@Eric_Inovelli any chance of getting firmware source code so the community can make our own animations to add to the controller?

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Even we don’t have the source code! We’ve been trying to get it from our manufacturer for years. Maybe you’ll have better luck than us. :sweat:

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I had a feeling that would be the answer. Thanks for the response!

Sorry to hear this. Ill be one of the first and last light strip orders :frowning:

I just ordered some more extensions and strips. And I used points to order a new red series smart led strip kit. (Will that still be fulfilled?)

I’m very sad to hear this! If the firmware source code isn’t available, will y’all continue to work on firmware updates for existing owners?

Yes - we should still be able to have the manufacturer make firmware updates when requested.

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Well this is devastating. To be honest, this news makes me a little uneasy about investing further in your products or recommending them to others, knowing that they could just be discontinued within a couple months. I really hope things start looking up for you soon.

I was still waiting for you to have both left and right 90 degree turns… Are you planning on a Blue Series of the light strip?

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I mean, part of the beauty of Z-Wave is that Inovelli’s products will continue to work regardless of whether or not Inovelli continues to support them. This announcement doesn’t render any hardware you have less functional than when you bought it, and this announcement doesn’t seem to be much different than them being out of stock indefinitely.

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Not that I’m aware of.

I think the main thing with these is that we had to price them so high they weren’t really considered by most people in any markets. We were supposed to receive them before the tariff took place but that didn’t happen, so then we had to price them almost 25% higher than we originally planned and they just never took off due to the cost associated with them. We still love the product and we aren’t against bringing it back in the future if tariffs ever go away, but as of right now it was the option that we found to be smartest for us. We have so many left it will still probably take us months to sell out of them even at the steeply discounted prices. We also always hold onto extras for replacement purposes, so we should have replacement parts for years still.

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Out of curiosity, is the tariff on the controller, on the LED strips, or both???

I understand that what I already have will continue to work, but if a product is discontinued and I want to buy more of them to have matching products as I expand, I can’t.

It’d be like if I want to replace all of my light switches over time with inovelli red series, and I get half way through and they discontinue it. I won’t have the money to buy up what I need if I’m doing it in phases, so I’ll probably look elsewhere and probably end up selling/replacing my inovelli to match.

Does that make sense? I understand they can’t keep products around forever, but this was just launched last holiday season.

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Could also take advantage of the sale and stock up! I understand where you are coming from, though.

I understand where you’re coming from… I guess I just don’t know where this “elsewhere” is that you mention. With manufacturing, you have to either buy everything at once if you need it to match, or be OK with it not matching. Especially with anything that includes a microprocessor these days; I do very much get the frustration of having a product pulled out from under you, but you make it sound like it’s not just as much of a gamble with other Z-Wave IoT manufacturers, and I’ve been in the tech industry too long to buy that. Everything with a microprocessor refreshes and changes on a 12-to-24 month cycle these days it seems. If the plastic colors happen to match, and the design happens to match, and the LED colors happen to reproduce the same between devices bought more than 6 months apart… that’s just getting lucky IMHO.

In any case, I hope to see these light strips resumed in the future when conditions are better. I still haven’t found anyone making a similarly-featured product!

Yes, but these were released January of this year. A product being available for only six months before closeout and discontinuation raises some flags. I understand that it pains them to do this, maybe it would seem better to have a better commitment to bringing them back once conditions improve than “we hope to”.

I know someone that bought a couple of these on release and they’ve been sitting in the box in their summer home until they go back to it. I’m sure they’ll want more as they install them, but I doubt they will even install them knowing they won’t be able to get more. I also recommended them to someone who visited recently, but now they probably won’t buy seeing that they’re discontinued.

Building on what Courtney said – I understand the devastation @BrenenP – trust me when I say I feel the same. It’s never fun having to discontinue something. Especially something you believe in personally.

But, on the other hand, at my days at Kellogg, we basically ran under the assumption that 75-80% of innovation fails. It’s not that it’s a bad product or the proper research wasn’t done, it’s just that many market variables are always working against you and it’s hard to account for all of them.

Often when we do our product research, we look through a couple different lenses.

  1. Consumer – would our target market want this (and furthermore, would we want this as we’re the targets)?
  2. Competition – how does this differ from the competition? At what angle can we compete (price, features, value, all of the above)?
  3. Marketing – this is nerdy, I know (and helps me in the competition lens), but I’m a big believer in the 4-P’s of Marketing (Product, Place, Price, Promotion) and what P can we capitalize on?

In this example, #1 was easy – heck yeah we wanted this in our house and we all do. It’s by far the coolest product we’ve ever launched IMO.

#2 really hinged on pricing/value and if we could pull that off or not. Our major competition was Philips Hue and all other Chinese manufacturers lol. Philips carried the name recognition and quality products, while the Chinese manufacturers all over Amazon carried low pricing.

Our strategy has always been to give the best features at a price that signals value. We used to be able to pull off the lowest pricing, but that’s unfortunately changed, so we have to rely on value.

The lightstrip, IMO has some of, if not the best, features available. No need to go into them all, but from a hardware standpoint, it competes at the top and from a firmware standpoint, it is best in class.

If we could pull off this lightstrip at a $50-55 price-point, I truly believe this would’ve been a hit.

Which leads me to #3, where things fell apart, unfortunately. There was a series of events that happened here that Courtney basically hit on from a pricing standpoint that priced us out of the market. The only way to combat this is to show people that the value is worth it at that price point.

In order to show people the value, marketing money needs to be spent to showcase everything. As everyone pretty much knows by know, the lead times have increased dramatically in the last few months, causing us to have to spend money on inventory vs marketing, overhead, etc. So, we couldn’t put efforts behind innovation items (or anything for that matter). This sucks bc now we have an expensive product that only a small amount of people know about.

Lastly, as @darthandroid pointed out, while normally we could keep these coming (even when they’re selling extremely slow) with 12 week lead times on our fast moving products, unfortunately that money needs to be spent to start the process of our fast moving products as the manufacturer requires 30% down to acquire raw materials.


Anyway, I understand the frustration @BrenenP and if your friends would like to return their products, I’m happy to take them back. We do have plenty of these left, which I will assume last us until the end of the year as at even the $50 price point, these just aren’t selling and without the proper marketing spend, the only way to get rid of these is to discount them even more, which we’re not planning to do as we’re already breaking even at the $50 price point.

Hopefully the fact that the only other discontinuation announced was the Black Series (and you can still buy the Red Series, so I wouldn’t count this as a true discontinuation) we’re looking at a 88% success rate for innovation, having the lightstrip being the only one.

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