Luminous

Luminous wasn't originally a product.

In 2015, Jani Gyllenberg (formerly of Marine Connection) was trying to bridge the gap between seeing a boat in person and the rich photography, video and lifestyle content customers were increasingly using online.

That became Distinct Digital Displays — large-scale touchscreen experiences for boat shows and showrooms that brought the manufacturer's best digital content into the physical buying experience.

It worked, but rapid growth exposed a much bigger problem underneath the industry.

Every new dealer and manufacturer meant more models, specs, options, pricing, photography and video — with no common format and no standard way to share it.

As the problem grew, Victor Gonzalez (Sportsman and Phenom Boats) joined Jani in solving it. Together, Jani and Victor found themselves spending more and more time collecting, cleaning, structuring and updating product information by hand.

Eventually, it became 20-hour days, seven days a week.

Not because the displays were complicated. Because the industry had never solved the data problem underneath them.

There were only two choices: keep feeding the machine by hand until they burned out, or solve the problem for good.

For one week, everything else was put aside — and the two held their first hackathon with one goal:

Stop rebuilding the same information over and over again.

What came out of that week started small: common structures, normalized data, one reliable source instead of another copy, and tools to streamline the work around it.

But it changed everything that came after.

By solving the hardest problem, everything built on top of it became easier.

Configurators. Real-time pricing. More than $2B in quoting. Websites. And much more over the next decade.