$617,000 to Watch a Light Bulb Float. Then We Read the Reviews.
Two thousand people funded the floating bulb in 2015. The reviews that fault it start with the trouble of getting it to float.
Did not pass
Six hundred and seventeen thousand dollars. That is how much money 2,000 people gave Simon Morris on Kickstarter in 2015 to watch a light bulb float.
They were not wrong to give it.
The FLYTE Light Edison is, by any visual measure, extraordinary. An Edison-style borosilicate glass bulb with a star-shaped LED filament hovers above a sustainably sourced oak or walnut base, powered wirelessly through electromagnetic induction. No batteries. No wires to the bulb. You lower it slowly toward the base until the magnets catch, and then it just hangs there, rotating gently, glowing.
Touch the corner of the base, it turns off. The bulb keeps floating.
Morris designed it in Stockholm. He holds the design patent. The name combines “fly” and “light” with a nod to the Swedish word for float, “flyta.” FLYTE went on to run two more Kickstarter campaigns, a levitating timepiece and a levitating pyramid, raising roughly $1.5 million in total across all three.
OPUMO Magazine called the product “a head-turner” that tips toward being an art installation. Art of Play, the Brooklyn curiosity shop, stocked it at $364.
We scored WOW at 9 out of 10. The highest in this evaluation round. GLOW and MOMENT both earned 8. By those three measures alone, this is one of the strongest candidates we have evaluated in books and objects.
Then we ran the trust verification.
Forty-Three Reviews Over Eight Years
The FLYTE Light Edison has been available on Amazon since December 2016, sold directly by FLYTE through Amazon Fulfillment. In eight years, it has accumulated 43 reviews with an average rating of 3.7 out of 5 stars. Forty-nine percent of reviewers gave it five stars. Fourteen percent gave it one star.
The five-star reviews are genuine and enthusiastic. One verified buyer described it as “the type of product that absolutely nobody needs, but everybody loves.” Another purchased it as a Christmas gift for an electrical engineer and called it “beautifully made and easy to set up.” A third said, simply, “expensive, but very cool.”
The lower-rated reviews raised concerns about the learning curve for achieving stable levitation and about long-term durability. The overall star average of 3.7 placed the Light Edison below the 4.0 rating threshold our system uses as a healthy baseline.
The Trustpilot profile for flytestore.com carries a 2.1 rating across 9 reviews. The brand site itself has no customer review section for this product.
The Numbers
GLOW: 8 out of 10. The bulb is genuinely beautiful. The warm wood base and Edison glass create a visual that photographs well from every angle.
WOW: 9 out of 10. A levitating light bulb, funded by 2,000 Kickstarter backers, designed in Stockholm, patented. This is a discovery by any definition.
MOMENT: 8 out of 10. The setup ritual of lowering the bulb until it catches is itself a gift experience. Every guest who sees it becomes a demonstration audience.
Trust: 3.5 out of 10. Our floor is 4.0. The confidence score of 35 out of 100 reflected the Amazon rating of 3.7 across a relatively small review base, combined with the Trustpilot rating of 2.1. The strong press coverage and Kickstarter history contributed 15 points to the external echo factor, but the sentiment data across review platforms pulled the overall score below the floor.
Final SleekNova score: 7.68. Our threshold is 8.0.
Why This One Is Worth Explaining
We already recommend a FLYTE product. The Buda Ball, a levitating chrome sphere on a walnut base, scored 8.5 and sits in our desk accessories collection with 54 Amazon reviews at 4.4 stars. Same designer. Same Stockholm studio. Same electromagnetic platform. Different trust profile.
The distinction matters because it shows what our system actually measures. We do not evaluate brands. We evaluate individual products against individual evidence. The Buda Ball at $159 has a stronger review base and a higher rating than the Light Edison at $329. Both come from Simon Morris. One passed. One did not.
That is the system working correctly at the product level, not the brand level.
The Light Edison’s WOW score of 9 is earned. No one unwraps a levitating light bulb and shrugs. But at $329, our system requires confidence that the experience holds up over time, and the current review data does not provide that confidence.
What Would Change
A stronger review base with an improved average rating would shift the confidence score. The WOW, GLOW, and MOMENT scores are already high enough that a trust score above the 4.0 floor would clear the 8.0 threshold comfortably.
The product is remarkable. The review evidence, at this price point, is not yet where our system needs it to be.
