Chevy Chanpaiboonrat is the founder and CEO of Buddy, a New York-based wellness lighting brand she built from her Parsons School of Design senior thesis into a commercially launched, iF Design Award-winning product line. Born and raised in Bangkok and trained as an industrial designer with a merit scholarship and Honors Graduate from Parsons School of Design, she creates objects rooted in the belief that the things we surround ourselves with quietly shape our quality of life. Her debut collection of portable analog mood lamps, Teddy, Puppy, and Arvin, uses gradient colored lighting and a tactile winding key mechanism to support daily mood regulation without a screen in sight. Launched in July 2025, Buddy has been featured in Designboom, Yanko Design, and T: The New York Times Magazine.

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Buddy started as my capstone project at Parsons School of Design in 2023. Growing up in Bangkok, my house had sunlight in every corner, so every winter in New York the contrast hit hard. My apartment window faced another wall, and I started feeling stressed for no obvious reason despite always getting eight hours of sleep. The capstone prompt was to reflect on four years at Parsons and make something that captured the essence of my time there. I went back to why I chose industrial design in the first place: to turn mundane everyday objects into well-designed products that improve daily life. In a city with New York's pace, I wanted to design something that made a big impact while asking as little as possible from the user.

Lighting turned out to be one of the most underrated answers. It affects mood and shapes how we engage with everything we do daily. SAD lamps exist for a reason, and pretty table lamps always sell, but nothing was both. I also became interested in how having a pet contributes to emotional wellbeing, and I wanted to marry those two ideas into something functional and comforting.

The result was Teddy, Puppy, and Arvin: three portable table lamps each with their own quiet personality, unified by a design language built around warmth and softness. Gradient colored lighting was a deliberate choice over solid colors because the transitions feel gentler and more organic, closer to how natural light actually moves through a space. Each lamp uses a winding key as its main interface, and that decision was very intentional. When people are stressed, they tend to disconnect from their surroundings. A boring button is easy to ignore. A winding key feels like fidgeting with a childhood toy, which lowers the barrier to actually reaching for it. And because the lamp is portable, it follows you around your home rather than waiting for you to go to it. The name Buddy came naturally, because that is exactly what each lamp is meant to feel like a small, familiar presence that is just there with you. Resulting in “form follows feeling”.

Designing for manufacturing introduces constraints at every stage, from ensuring parts release cleanly from injection mold tooling, to managing costs when most components are custom made. As a bootstrapped company, I had to balance both without compromising the experience. Two constraints shaped the final product more than anything else.

The first was battery life. Portability was non-negotiable, but gradient lighting and brightness adjustments mean different colors draw different amounts of power. Battery also introduces heat, so I had to find the right balance between a battery life that felt genuinely untethered and safe heat dissipation for a lamp someone might leave on for hours while winding down at night.

The second was standardizing shared components across all three lamps. Launching three products as a first-time hardware founder is something no one would advise, but I believed the trio reinforced the brand story around what a buddy actually means. To make it financially viable, I had to standardize as many internal components as possible, including the custom-made light globe housing. This directly shaped the proportions of each lamp body, since Teddy, Puppy, and Arvin all had to accommodate the same housing while still looking like their individual forms made sense. It forced a design discipline that I think made each lamp stronger in the end.

The biggest debate was whether the lamp should be analog or smart. The most common early feedback was a request for more color customization through an app. Going that route would have turned Buddy into another smart lamp in a crowded category and put a phone back in someone's hand at the exact moment the lamp was supposed to help them step away from screens.

My thesis was that Buddy should support mood and stress relief, especially as part of a nighttime ritual, and that meant leaning fully into analog interaction. The winding key is nostalgic on purpose. It feels like a childhood toy, not a tech device, and that feeling matters for the context in which someone would actually reach for it.

Since launch, feedback has split almost evenly. About half of our users ask for an app, and the other half specifically say they are grateful there is not one. The second group often compares Buddy to the Hatch Restore, noting that having used both, they find the absence of an app makes the experience feel more intentional. Holding that line was the right call, and the fact that users draw that comparison on their own confirms it landed.

As a first-time hardware founder, I kept the specifications as focused as possible. The honest answer is that I did not cut many features. The harder decision was actually adding something most advisors would have pushed back on: making the lamp portable with a rechargeable battery instead of keeping it wall-plugged. That added complexity and cost, but it was essential to what the product needed to feel like.

The one thing I genuinely wrestled with was the winding key itself. Early feedback pointed out that the lamps could be difficult to turn on with one hand, especially at night when the lamp might tip if handled carelessly. That is a real tension when you need something light enough to carry but stable enough to sit on a surface. I explored replacing the winding key with something more conventional.

I am very glad I did not. The winding key is the reason Buddy ended up featured in Yanko Design, Designboom, and T: The New York Times Magazine. Sometimes the thing people question is the thing most worth protecting.

My mission started with improving ordinary objects, but spending time with Buddy and getting to know our customers has shifted how I think about the work. The goal is not just better-designed objects. It is making people genuinely happy in the small moments of everyday life.

What will never change is the commitment to everyday objects that carry emotional weight without demanding attention. The lamp should make someone smile the moment they wind the key and the light comes on, not because the feature set is impressive, but because the experience feels warm and familiar in a way that is hard to explain.

From here, I want to push further into what it means to have a companion object at home, especially as loneliness becomes one of the defining challenges of this generation. My goal has never been to replace human connection, but to make the feeling of comfort and presence more accessible to more people. We have something in the works although it is super early, but the idea is to hopefully take this concept further, exploring what happens when a companion object becomes more attuned to you and your environment, while keeping the soul of what makes Buddy feel like a buddy in the first place. More on that soon!

Both of these people are mentors I genuinely admire, and they represent very different paths to making great hardware.

Lucas Lappe co-founded Doris Dev, a product design and engineering consultancy that takes consumer ideas from concept all the way through manufacturing, including supply chain operations through their platform Factored Quality, which serves brands like Loftie and Flaus. Lucas spent formative time in Hong Kong learning how designs actually become manufactured objects, and even ran a Kickstarter project called the Fondoodler just to learn the full process from zero to one. From that foundation, he bootstrapped Canopy with his co-founder, a home wellness brand known for their filtered humidifier and showerhead now sold at Target and Sephora. What I find rare about Lucas is end-to-end mastery across design, manufacturing, logistics, and brand, without outside capital. That kind of ownership at Canopy's scale is almost unheard of. @lucaslappe

Sahand Dilmaghani built Terra Kaffe while studying at Wharton, approaching hardware from a business background rather than an engineering one. And yet he has built one of the most design-forward espresso machine brands in the category, working with designers who previously worked at Apple, growing the company to a Series A. Building a super-automatic espresso machine is one of the most mechanically and experientially complex things you can attempt in consumer hardware. Sahand did it without a traditional engineering background, which says everything about the clarity of his vision and his ability to build the right team around it. @sdilmaghani