Previously suspended OMLAMP is back

We are rather surprised to see OMLAMP back on Kickstarter. They ran another campaign last year that was suspended by Kickstarter seemingly due to fraud.

Kickstarter:

OMLAMP

Ultimate water-resistant DuPont™ Tyvek® Paper.

Best Dark Walnut Wooden,

Awesome Design Patterns.

All we do is just to give you the most comfortable experience and it is just soooooo cool!

That is such a dodgy and unprofessional campaign description. Are we surprised? Not really. We wrote about OMLAMP last year. It was a memorable campaign video where a Caucasian actor introduces himself with a Chinese name.

There isn’t much to talk about for this product. It’s just a folding lamp. It is exactly the same as the previous product, but in a different shape.

So we’ll dive right into the juicy bit.

Background check

The previous campaign was created under the ZBOLE OMLAMP account that claims to be run by Zhengming Technology from Shenzhen with their founder Jiaming Gong as the creator. The campaign’s location was Hong Kong but the team admitted in the comments that it is a Shenzhen company.

This time, they are using a new account called OMLAMP OFFICIAL from South Florida, FL with Shiya Lin as the creator.

OMLAMP presents the team with photos and first names without revealing the last names. I wonder who Shiya Lin is.

The OMLAMP brand is owned by Shenzhen Zhengming Science and Technology Co, Ltd. So we are pretty sure that this is a campaign run by the same company behind the suspended campaign.

In the product timeline, they conveniently omitted the suspended OMLAMP campaign. An attempt to cover up the previous fraud? At least you can see the lamp from the last Kickstarter campaign featured prominently in their website’s hero image.

It will take quite a bit of effort to best the terrible video from the previous campaign. That said, this video is a rather cringey production done in Shenzhen and most of the photos in the campaign are stock photos.

Is it worth it?

Shenzhen Zhenming Science and Technology Co, Ltd have a store on the Chinese Alibaba site 1688.com.

The OMLAMP sells for RMB 145 on 1688.com, that is around USD 20. The OMLAMP was priced at USD 45 on the Kickstarter for early bird backers. Non early bird price was USD 59, almost three times the wholesale price.

The OMLAMP retails on their website at USD 69.90 after a whopping 58% discount from the retail price of USD 120.

Are they taking the piss here? Nope. You can actually get more discount if you buy multiple items during their anniversary sale.

Get up to 30% off if you buy 4 items, that is, on top of the 58% off the retail price. The margin must be really low indeed!

There are many origami lamps on Amazon at pretty reasonable pricing. At least you get buyer protection on Amazon should the seller deliver poor products.

With OMLAMP, given the poor track record of a suspended Kickstarter account and the extremely dodgy pricing, it doesn’t instil enough trust in me to recommend it to anyone.