OAKLAND, Calif., Nov. 24, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Robotics startup LUUM, announced today that it has provided eyelash extensions to paying customers at its Lash Lab in Oakland, CA during 2021 and has started a crowdfunding campaign (www.startengine.com/luum). LUUM’s Lash-Technology uses two robots to delicately apply lash extensions, using a technique similar to that of a human technician. The lash applicator uses a unique safety system which they claim makes it safer than human applied extensions. Their goal is to give lash artists a tool that will allow them to provide their clients eyelash extensions in a fraction of the time currently possible.
“We started the year with a consumer test that went better than could have hoped, resulting in a measured net promoter score of 82%,” said Rachel Gold, Co-founder, CMO, Head of Product at LUUM. “Participants then asked if they could pay to continue coming for refills. This was incredible for us, because the prototype equipment used was still only able to operate at a similar speed to human lash artists,” added Ms. Gold.
“We started doing a few appointments a week with paying clients, just to demonstrate that we could do it, much earlier than planned,” said Nathan Harding, Co-founder and CEO. “When we saw how well the public responded to the technology, we decided that crowd funding was a good idea for us, so we temporarily closed our Lash Lab to concentrate on crowd funding and designing our next generati on equipment.”
LUUM started its crowdfunding campaign on startengine.com on Monday. “Advances in Computer Vision and Artificial Intelligence are allowing us to provide tools to estheticians that will transform beauty services forever, and I think that the general public should get to invest in that,” said Mr. Harding.
LUUM was founded by Lynn Heublein (Co-founder and CEO of Skin Spirit), Nathan Harding (Co-founder and formerly CEO of Ekso Bionics), Rachel Gold (formerly of Elephant, elephant.is and Adobe Systems), and Dr. Kurt Amundson (formerly Ekso Bionics and University of California, Berkeley) and includes a veteran team from Berkeley Process Control (acquired by Moog).
About LUUM
Wink Robotics, Inc. doing business as LUUM develops robotic equipment for the beauty services industry, initially focusing on eyelash extensions, a widely popular beauty treatment. Eyelash extensions are non-medical, unregulated, booming in popularity, and have a global total addressable market of at least $20B. Pioneering a patented combination of robotics, AI, and machine vision, LUUM is developing equipment intended to apply a full set of eyelash extensions (typically 2 hours) in a fraction of the time, eliminating the labor costs and imprecisions associated with human application, and ushering in a new category they call “Beauty Experience Automation.”
A video accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/c5efa365-2539-4852-9eb0-99e844ffce37
A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/fa87e32e-ff19-4c0c-852e-cedb86b7a96e
