PLED UB
My second youth enterprise, while still in high school. PLED sold custom LED lighting tuned to support circadian rhythm: warmer, melatonin-friendlier light in the evening; cooler, alertness-supporting light during the day. It was an excuse-to-learn project dressed up as a small business, and a useful counterweight to Hexaglow, which had been about look-and-feel.
What we sold
- Lamps and panels with addressable LEDs and a controller programmed to shift spectrum on a schedule.
- Presets aimed at the boring parts of the day (wake-up, work, wind-down, sleep) rather than the colourful party effects every LED product reaches for.
- A configuration layer that let the user override the schedule when life did not match the curve.
What I actually got from it
A reasonably grounded understanding of the gap between "LEDs that light up" and "lighting that does something useful". Most of the work was reading enough of the biology to know which spectrum claims were defensible and which were marketing. That habit ("is this claim load-bearing or is it ornamental?") has stayed with me.
UB was also where I first hit the truth that a product is a hundred small, annoying decisions that someone has to make. Packaging, instructions, returns, the colour of the box.