Our Story
NeonSmith started the way most good ideas do - out of frustration, at 2am, with a dead string of lights and a headlamp.
We'd been bringing cheap pixel strings to burns and festivals for years. Every season, same cycle: order a set off Amazon, test them at home, watch them work fine, then watch them die in the field. Moisture. Dust. A connector that rattled loose during setup. One set just stopped mid-build for no reason anyone could figure out. Three sets in one year, all dead before Sunday.
The professional stuff existed, but it was built for concert tours and permanent installs - locked-down controllers, proprietary software, and price tags that assumed you had a production budget. We didn't want a lighting rig. We wanted a pixel string that could survive a week on playa, run off a battery pack, and look good doing it.
So we built one.
The first HexCubes were hand-assembled for our own camp. Frosted geometric housings because we were tired of bare LED strips that looked like a wiring job. WLED control because we wanted open-source software the community had already been building for years. IP65 sealing because we'd learned what alkaline dust does to exposed solder joints.
They survived the week. Then the weekend after. Then a warehouse season. Our campmates wanted sets. Other camps started asking. Someone said we should sell them.
We did.
HexPanels came next — hexagonal wall modules for the DJ booths, camp frontage, and venue walls we'd been rigging with janky strip builds. Same philosophy: frosted diffusers, WLED control, built for the conditions they'd actually be installed in.
We're not a lighting company that discovered festivals. We're festival people who started making lights. Every product we ship has been tested in the same conditions you're using it in — because we were there too.
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Values
Built from the scene, not sold to it.
We're participants first. Every product decision comes from actually being in the dust, on the dance floor, and up too late building camp infrastructure.
Open-source by default.
All our gear runs on WLED - free, community-built, no vendor lock-in. Your gear, your rules.
Radical welcome.
The scene is for everyone. No gatekeeping, no "you're not rave enough." If you want to light up, you're one of us.
Quality over hype.
We'd rather ship one product that lasts three years than drop a new SKU every month. We don't do limited editions for scarcity. We make gear that works.
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We're still out there - building camps, rigging lights, dancing past sunrise, and testing every piece of gear we sell in the same conditions you're bringing it into. If you see a booth glowing in geometric hexagons at 4am, that's probably us.
Come say hi. We'll probably have extra lights.
