Chevy Chanpaiboonrat is the founder and CEO of Buddy, a New York-based wellness lighting brand. She transformed her senior thesis into a commercially launched, iF-Design-Award-winning product line. Born and raised in Bangkok and trained as an industrial designer at Parsons School of Design, Chevy creates objects that are rooted in the belief that our surroundings 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 screens. Launched in July 2025, Buddy has been featured in Designboom, Yanko Design, and The New York Times.

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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, but my apartment window in New York faced another wall. So, the dark winters hit me hard. Despite always getting eight hours of sleep, I started feeling stressed for no obvious reason. My capstone prompt asked me 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 busy 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 in our daily life. SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) lamps exist for a reason, and pretty table lamps always sell, but nothing combined these markets. I also became interested in how pets can contribute to emotional wellbeing. I wanted to marry those two ideas into something functional and comforting. The result was Teddy, Puppy, and Arvin: three portable table lamps with their own quiet personalities, 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. 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 reaching for the lamp. 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 it’s exactly what each lamp is meant to feel like— a small, familiar presence that is just there with you. “Form follows feeling.”

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

The first constraint was battery life. The lamp’s portability was a non-negotiable element, but integrating gradient lighting, brightness adjustments, and different colors consumed varying amounts of power. These power requirements also introduced heat, so I had to find the right balance between an untethered battery life and safe heat dissipation, especially since these lamps might be on for hours while someone winds down at night.

The second constraint was standardizing the shared components across all three lamps. No one would advise a first-time hardware founder to launch three products at once, but I believed the trio reinforced the brand’s story. 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’s body. Teddy, Puppy, and Arvin all had to accommodate the same housing while looking like their individual selves. In the end, it forced a design discipline that made each lamp stronger.

The biggest debate was whether the lamp should be analog or smart. The most common early feedback was requests for more color customization through an app. However, that route would have turned Buddy into just another smart lamp in an already crowded category. It also would have reintroduced a phone during the exact moment when the lamp was supposed to help people 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 fully leaning into analog. The winding key is nostalgic on purpose. It feels like a childhood toy, not a tech device, and that feeling matters.

Since launching, feedback has been split. One half of our users asked for an app, and the other half was grateful that there wasn’t one. The latter half often compares their experience with the Buddy to the Hatch Restore; while they’ve used both devices, they found that our lack of an app makes the experience feel more intentional. Holding the analogue line was the right call. Moreover, the fact that our users draw such comparisons on their own confirms the decision.  

As a first-time hardware founder, I kept the specifications as focused as possible. Honestly, I didn’t cut many features. The harder decision was adding something that most advisors would have pushed back against. I made the lamp portable with a rechargeable battery instead of keeping it wall-plugged. This decision added complexity and cost, but it was essential to what the product needed to feel like.

I did, however, genuinely wrestle with the winding key. Early feedback pointed out that the lamp could be difficult to turn on with one hand, especially at night when it might fall over if handled carelessly. This was a real tension: we needed something light enough to carry but stable enough to sit on a surface. I explored replacing the winding key with something more conventional, but I’m glad that I ultimately didn’t take that path. The winding key is the reason Buddy ended up featured in Yanko Design, Designboom, and The New York Times. Sometimes the feature that people question is the feature 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. My goal is not just to create better-designed objects. It’s to make 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. Our lamps should make someone smile the moment they wind the key and the light comes on; this isn’t 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), and the idea is to 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 that 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 he even ran a Kickstarter project called the Fondoodler just to learn the full process. From there, 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 his 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 and growing the company to Series A. Terra Kaffe’s super-automatic espresso machine is one of the most mechanically and experientially complex things that 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 a product. @sdilmaghani