Photo: Mikal Schlosser
Photo: Mikal Schlosser

Lantern start-up testing market at Roskilde Festival

Electronics Innovation and product development Entrepreneurship
DTU students are testing the market for the festival lantern GLØD which is soon ready for mass production.

Over the past five months, a group of students from DTU—and one from Copenhagen Business School (CBS)—have been developing a lantern for camps at Roskilde Festival, so they are no longer in the dark when night falls.

But the lantern can light up the area in more than one way. Its bright LED bulbs can produce different colours and even flash to the beat of the music.

GLØD, as the lantern is called, was introduced at last year’s festival, where the students wanted to find out whether their idea could fill a need of the festival-goers.

“Our workshops attracted a lot of guests who were allowed to take 125 free lanterns back to their camps. People were queueing for up to three hours, which indicated that there was indeed a need,” says Mads Dalum Hesseldahl, who is studying Design and Innovation and has just completed his Bachelor’s project about GLØD.

Since then, the team has worked on developing the lantern from this first prototype:

“We have found some really efficient LEDs, which means that the lantern can provide more than eight hours on one power bank,” says Chris Cornaby who is studying electrical engineering.

“And we have worked hard on making the lanterns even better at listening to the music and adjusting the brightness and how quickly it flashes to the dynamics of the music.”

New design
This year, GLØD has been made of components that are better suited for the application while the price has been kept down by using standard industry components. The lantern’s design is also made for the specific purpose, and production can easily be scaled up, so that GLØD in principle is ready for mass production,” explains Mads Dalum Hesseldahl.

“One of the things we have learned in the process is how many aspects you have to factor in for launching a finished product. If you really want the product to take off, everything from design and electronics to user needs and marketing must be considered, so frankly I wasn’t sure we were able to come through.”

And GLØD is not quite there yet. The original plan was to produce 500 lanterns for this year’s festival, but in the process, the group realised that was not possible due to time pressure, and ended up producing 140. But according to the group, being at Roskilde Festival this year fits their purpose for now.

Collaboration with Volt
The goal this year is to see if there actually is a market for the lanterns. Therefore, they have been put up for sale through another DTU start-up Volt—which has been a part of Roskilde Festival since 2012.

This year is the first time that Volt sells other products than their own: a mobile phone charging service where festival-goers can exchange batteries to recharge their phone. And the background is not just that they both are DTU spinoffs:

“We think that GLØD is a very exciting product and that light is a very exciting product category for festivals. And because the GLØD lanterns are battery-powered just like ours, we thought there were some good synergies between us,” says Trygve Aabye Dam from Volt, and adds:

“For us, it is also the first step in a strategy where we look at what else we can offer a festival. We have been at Roskilde since 2012, where we have provided charging, which we do really well. We have had some 30,000 users of our product every year over the last three years. Of course, there are no certainties, but I think we are in a place where we provide a good service, but where it is also interesting to look at what else we could deliver.”

The group behind GLØD gets access to making Volt’s many customers aware of their product.

“It is the most clear-cut way of finding out whether you have an awesome product,” says Mads Dalum Hesseldahl.

“If people don’t want to pay, it’s not going to fly. We would like to get past the challenge where 100% want hand-made furniture, but only 2% are willing to pay for it. So we’re pretty excited to see whether festival-goers will embrace GLØD. If everything goes well now, we can start investing in it with greater certainty—and we’ll have plenty of time to set up a real production in time for next year’s festival.”

Roskilde Festival and DTU

  • In 2010, Roskilde Festival and DTU entered into a formal collaboration about using the Festival as a future laboratory and create innovative engineering solutions to some of the Festival challenges.

  • The students will earn five ECTS points in the course of the project period. The collaboration has also ensured that DTU students behind the start-ups Volt, DropBucket , Kubio (Danish website), PeeFence, and GLØD have had a platform for testing their technology before they started their businesses.

  • DTU’s own coverage can be followed on dtu.dk, Facebook, and Instagram.

DTU’s journalists are present throughout the Festival. For more information about the projects and interviews with students, contact Tore Vind Jensen, +45 3026 7710, tovi@dtu.dk