Who we are
LitBuy US is a lighting review desk based in Portland, Oregon. We were founded in 2019 by Nathan Cole, a former architectural lighting specifier who spent a decade writing fixture schedules for schools, clinics and grocery chains and got tired of buying retail lamps that matched nothing on the schedule. What began as a shared spreadsheet of measured lux readings became a public site with a light booth, a calibration log and three editors who sign their names to every score.
We are a small publisher, not a marketplace. Our testing team orders the products we write about, opens them at the unboxing bench, and keeps them in rotation on the bench until the retest date arrives. Reviews carry a five-point score, with 5 / 5 meaning excellent and 1 / 5 meaning very poor.
What we cover
Table, floor and desk lamps, including task and reading lights
Screw-in LED bulbs, from 2700K warm dims to 5000K utility lamps
Smart bulbs, strips, panels and bridges from Matter, Zigbee, Thread and Wi-Fi systems
Under-cabinet, closet and stair lighting, plus plug-in accent fixtures
Dimmers, smart switches and the compatibility headaches that follow them
How the desk works
Three editors run LitBuy US. Nathan Cole sets the protocol and signs the final score. Priya Raman runs the day-to-day hands-on bench, orders, and app-latency checks. Elena Marsh handles spec research, price tracking and standards documents. Every published score passes two of the three before it goes live.
We work from Southeast Powell Boulevard in Portland, where the booth, the dimmer wall and the unboxing bench share one room. Readers can write to editorial@litbuyus.org with a correction, a product suggestion or a request for a raw measurement sheet. We review messages according to their urgency and the available evidence.
Reading our coverage
For readers comparing lamps and connected lighting, the useful differences are measured output, flicker, dimming behavior and pairing reliability, alongside the model and settings used on the bench.
