First light
It was the first night in our first home that
we'd had a chance to sit down and read. Lori saw it immediately.
As she later wrote: “There we were in our new living room, in the house
we’d stretched for, and there wasn’t enough light so both Steve
and I could read. We started joking around, fighting for the seat next to
Grandma’s old dinosaur floor lamp. Then it dawned on us.”
We looked around and saw that a revolution of sorts had just begun in lighting
technology. At the time, though, few people—few Americans, at least—were
aware of this new type of bulb called halogen. It would be, we decided,
an excellent source of lighting for serious readers. And thus in January
of 1987, thanks to a small, cozy, but poorly lit condominium in the Boston
suburb of Belmont, the idea of Levenger saw its first light.
Serious Lighting for Serious Readers
Lori and I pooled our retirement funds, sold our first new
car (a 1985 Mitsubishi Montero) and with the money we netted, combined
our surnames of Granger and Leveen to form Levenger.
Like many companies, we started small and lean and went through the now
archetypal garage phase. The first Levenger brochure was one sheet of
paper folded twice, in black and white, and featured halogen lights. The
fulfillment center was first our den, then that garage (our neighbor’s).
We ran small ads in the Boston
Globe, The New York Times and The New Yorker offering
Serious Lighting for Serious Readers, and when the phone rang, we talked
to customers from our call center—in the spare bedroom.
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