Hi, my name is Mark and I’m the inventor of the Fireflyz (US Patent no. US11412587B2 ). I am an Industrial Designer and Product Designer living and working in Silicon Valley. I have lived on the West Coast most of my life but in the early 2000s, my family and I moved to the New England area. There I saw, for the first time in my life Fireflies. Up to that point, my only exposure was Disneyland’s Fireflies which are prominent at the Pirates of the Caribbean ride queue, and Blue Byou restaurant which fascinated me as a young boy ( just ask my mom as she struggled to keep me at our table instead of wandering all over the restaurant leaning over into the trees as far as I could in wonder). We had a large front lawn in Massachusetts and I have fond memories of sitting on my porch in the summer evenings watching them appear right after dusk which I became enamored with as part of my East Coast experience.

After living 8 years in Acton MA (20 miles east of Boston) we returned to California. There are many things I miss about East Coast living but most of all, my fireflies. About 2015, I set my mind to rectifying this problem: “Could I recreate a realistic-looking Firefly novelty lighting product that could be first for myself but eventually affordable and sold to the masses ? “.

After approximately 50 prototypes and 50 different ways to reproduce the effect, I landed on a solution that I thought would be a good compromise between a convincing illusion and cost and complexity. Given my background in Product Design, Electronics, and Arduino programming, I designed and produced 18 working prototypes that were very close to the product you see today. I filed a Provisional and later Utility patent (US Patent no. US11412587B2) and then set out to try and license the product with a retail company in the lighting space. With the help of Trident Invents, I formalized an agreement with Bethelem Lights to sell the product on the QVC Home Shop Network. The first Generation was selling in the spring of 2021 and approximately 4000 were sold that year. The reviews were very good and customers were delighted with them and their novelty. They were discontinued for the next season for reasons that I cannot disclose.

A year or so passed and I reasoned that the idea was too good to let die so I decided to endeavor to produce a next-generation product in a limited edition.