Hasta La Gadget!

The Lumo Lift is the second product from startup Lumo BodyTech, and the second to help users with their posture. The Lumo Back was the first, and it raised around $200,000 in 40 days on Kickstarter. This time, Lumo opted to do the crowdfunding themselves, and the trajectory of the latest device has been quite different: Lumo Lift is at over $900,000 raised as of this writing, just under a month into the pre-order period.

That adds up to nearly 13,000 pre-orders, and totals about $32,000 per day raised thus far. The original Lumo Back campaign managed around $5,000 per day, or roughly one-sixth as much. Interest isn’t really waning the way it has a tendency to do with these kinds of campaigns, either – between Jan. 28 and Feb. 3, there were 3,149 pre-orders in total, which was close to on par with the very first week after a couple of weeks of slower, but still strong interest, as you can see from the chart below.

“It’s going well for a couple reasons,” explained Lumo founder and CEO Monisha Perkash in an interview. “Lumo Lift really differs from other wearable tech because it’s customizable to different fashion tastes. It’s really wearable tech that’s more than just tech: It’s fashionable tech. Also […] it focuses on bringing out the more confident, more attractive, the healthier you and that requires both staying active as well as good posture and we’re the only solution in the market that can do both.”

Interest in the campaign has produced some interesting demographic insight, too. Lumo has found that the majority of pre-order interest is from male customers, who are responsible for just over 67 percent of all orders. The U.S. is the big market for the Lift, unsurprisingly, with 86.7 percent of all orders, while 92.5 percent of sales come from the combined English-speaking countries of the U.S., U.K., Australia and Canada. White is the most popular color choice with 54 percent of purchases, while 26 percent preferred black and silver trailed both with just 20 percent.

The difference between the initial campaign and this one is staggering – Lumo Lift will almost certainly exceed $1 million in pre-orders, likely before the week is out, which is five times what the startup accomplished on Kickstarter for the Lumo Back. I asked Perkash about how the two experiences compare.

“There are pros and cons of going in either direction [Kickstarter vs. self funding],” she explained. “What we’ve found is that because your customers interact with you on your website, you end up having a closer relationship with your customers. You can engage them more without having a third party between you, and you can also develop your own brand and messaging, […] and make it consistent with what you want to communicate.”

Perkash says Lumo is still happy with having used Kickstarter in the beginning, since it helped them reach a wider audience with a brand that people didn’t really know to begin with. Also, she says that going alone a year and a half ago when they first started out, crowdfunding was still a relatively new concept, so there wouldn’t really be an opportunity to build a big following using your own platform vs. partnering with someone like Kickstarter.

Despite massively exceeding their initial expectations, Perkash says that she doesn’t anticipate any hiccups with initial production, since they’re confident in the manufacturing system and relationships they built with the original Lumo Back. There are only three more days left to get the Lumo Lift at its discounted price of $69 before it goes back to $99, so we’ll likely have a better idea of what kind of initial shipment volumes they’ll be facing once that price change starts to affect pre-order demand.

Palo Alto-based Lumo BodyTech is revealing its second product today, the Lumo Lift. The Lift, like its original Lumo Back, is a device designed to enhance a user’s posture, but with a radically different take. The Lift is small and stylish, and is designed to be placed unobtrusively on the collar or shoulder.

The upper body Lift detects curvature at the top of the spine, rather than at the bottom like the original Lumo Back, but co-founder and CEO Monisha Perkash explained in an interview that the end result is mostly the same. Adjusting based on improper posture at the top of the spine ultimately straightens the entire skeletal system. With the Lift, when your spine curves, you get a small buzz that provides a gentle physical reminder to straighten up.

And the Lumo Lift goes beyond just posture correction – it can also track and detect movement, and physical activity including steps and calories, just like the Fitbit and other gadgets. The ability to detect and analyze core body positioning is unique to the Lumo Lift, however, and Perkash says that its algorithm and software for discerning that information is the key ingredient to Lumo BodyTech’s long-term prospects for success.

“We’re open, but what we’re passionate about is on the data side: How can we take data and use that and turn it into something actionable for health,” she said. “The hardware is a vehicle for us to do that. The sensors are a hook for the software and the services. Do we feel like we have to continue on the hardware side? No, but in terms of where we are we design the hardware right now in a way that’s very specific to our use cases.”

The clasp on the Lumo Lift is magnetic, with the sensor going underneath the shirt, and just a small square metal clasp showing over top. I suggested there might be an opportunity for Lumo to create new accessory clasps to work with the Lift, and Perkash confirmed that was indeed the plan, with accessories likely rolling out down the road.

Lumo will continue to sell the Lumo Back, too, and says that they’re aimed at slightly different customer segments. The Lumo Back is still designed to help people who want more from their posture sensor, and who are stationary at a desk for longer periods of time. The Lumo Lift is much more compatible without someone who moves around more during the day, and it’s a lot less cumbersome. Eventually, Perkash says she envisions Lumo BodyTech pushing into many different form factors, including eventually ones that integrated completely into clothing and other accessories. Currently, Lumo is also working on a sport specific sensor designed to leverage what it has learned about posture and body positioning, which Perkash says we’ll see later this year.

The Lumo Lift is being crowdfunded by Lumo itself, and should ship in late spring 2014, with early backer pricing ranging from $59 to $79, with a companion app to be released for iOS initially.