A production description is a brief paragraph that describes the product to entice buyers. In the online space, one of the critical aspects that a product goes viral is because of its attractive, accurate and informative description.
A good piece of product information is not only meant to cater to your customers, the great search engine Google also loves it, especially when the copy is written in a unique, authoritative way. Remember, indexable text content is still, will be for a long long time, the dominant factor to analyze the content of a web page.
Let's go straight to the point. Many people in the marketing and sales positions find it extremely difficult to write a copy for lighting products. Admittedly, it would be boring to contemplate something for a luminaire that looks very commonplace in design and simple in functionality, if you're not fully prepared to devote yourself to your challenging role, this tough industry and competitive market.
Here is how the Illuminating Engineering Society of North America (IES) defines a luminaire: "A luminaire is a device to produce, control and distribute light. It is a complete lighting unit consisting of one or more lamps and some or all of the following components: optical control devices designed to distribute the light; sockets or mountings to position and protect the lamps and to connect the lamps to a supply of electric power; the mechanical components required to support or attach the luminaire, and various electrical and electronic components to start, operate, dim or otherwise control and maintain the operation of the lamps or LEDs."
What we can conclude from above is that, a typical lighting product includes these parts/components: Light source, optics, mechanical components, electrical and electronic components. When it comes to a LED luminaire - be it a bulb, a tube, a flood light, or a high bay light - can be broken down into these parts: LEDs, housing, optical system, thermal management system, driver and lighting control circuitry. By comprehending the design purpose of these luminaire components, you'll have an inspirational mind to produce an exciting description copy.
LEDs
From discrete SMD LEDs to integrated LED modules, DC LEDs to AC LEDs, low power to high power, single color to RGB, chip-on-board packaging to chip scale packaging, the entire variety of LEDs are designed for one single purpose: to deliver the highest lighting performance for the longest possible lifespan at the most affordable manufacturing and operational cost. There's a lot of parameters you can elaborate on to make a convincing illustration to your customers. These include luminous efficacy, color rendering index (CRI), junction temperature, lumen maintenance, color temperature, color consistency, and spectral power distribution, etc.
Taking CRI as an example, this is one of the most important parameters to measure the color quality. Nonetheless, most salesmen are only able to tell the Ra value but can not provide more details if a client asks why CRI matters. CRI is used to measure the white light quality of an artificial light sources. Sunlight has a high CRI (Ra of approximately 100), with incandescent bulbs being relatively close (Ra higher than 95), and fluorescent lighting being less accurate (typical Ra of 70-80). If a white light yields a high CRI compared to sunlight and/or a full spectrum light, then it is considered to have a better quality in that it is more "natural," and more likely to enable a colored surface to better rendered. The efficacy and CRI tradeoff in LEDs is an issue in the lighting industry. The most commonly used LEDs on the market are phosphor excited LEDs which tend to have either good efficacy but unsatisfactory CRI or high CRI and low efficacy. White LEDs made with this method typically have a CRI Ra of between 70 and 80.
Illumination with a CRI Ra of less than 50 is very poor and only used in applications where there is no alternative for economic issues. Lights with a CRI Ra between 70 and 80 have application for general lighting where the colors of objects are not important. For most interior applications, a CRI Ra>80 is acceptable, a CRI Ra>85 is more desirable and the CRI Ra>90 is preferable for greater visual comfort and color quality.
Housing
For LED lighting, the design of a luminaire housing is subject to aesthetic, architectural and thermal management considerations. The housing functions to support other components of the luminaire and provides a mounting mechanism for the attachment of the luminaire to its support. The evolution in both commercial and residential lighting has been characterized by progress in two directions simultaneously: along with improvements in luminous performance, functional efficiency and system features, there is ongoing development in the styling and aesthetic aspects of housings/enclosures. Focus on the functionality and design. Transform your engineer's genius and designer's creativeness into descriptive words!
Thermal Management
The thermal management system, or specifically the heat sink, is often the main part of luminaire housing for LED luminaires. Generally, LED performance, in terms of luminous flux, luminous efficacy, color, and life, is affected by the LED junction temperature. During operation, the LED junction temperature can reach as high as 150°C. At such temperature, the amount of thermal energy transferred to the ambient environment via radiation is very small. Therefore, conductive and convective thermal energy transfer techniques are employed to limit the LED junction temperature within the upper limit for the luminaire design. Active or passive heat sinks or combinations of these are typically used to effectively control the LED junction temperature to the luminaire design value.
We have reached the critical point that a professional buyer will most likely be concerned with. There're four types of cooling mechanisms for LED heat dissipation: natural convection by heat sinks, forced convection with air velocity generated through the incorporated fans, fluid phase change which typically employs closed loop heat pipes, and liquid cooling. Heat sinks are the main thermal transfer medium and a further explication will add more weight to a product illustration to help technical and business-level audiences understand your products and processes. Aluminum is the most popular choice for heat sinks because of its relatively high thermal conductivity and ease of manufacturing. There're stamping aluminum heat sinks, extruded aluminum heat sinks, die cast aluminum heat sinks, cold or heat forged aluminum heat sinks. Can you tell the differences for them? For example stamped aluminum heat sinks are the lowest cost thermal solution but less efficient than extruded heat sinks and die cast heat sinks. The extrusion process is advantageous at manufacturing complex fin profiles which allow greater heat dissipation through increased surface area. Die cast heat sinks offer one-piece construction and can be molded with many features included to eliminate secondary operations such as machining and assembly to reduce costs.
Higher the purity of aluminum, higher the thermal conductivity. Extruded and die cast aluminum heat sink production often involve alloying elements for easier processing, but these impurities are negative to the thermal properties. That's why you see terms like 'high purity die cast aluminum', 'low copper die cast aluminum' in product descriptions. Forged heat sinks have a very high aluminum purity and accordingly have an excellent thermal conductivity - usually 20% higher than the extruded and die cast heat sinks. But the manufacturing cost of forged heat sinks are much higher than its counterparts. As the cost/performance ratio is often the key consideration in system design, forged heat sinks are used less frequently than other types of heat sinks.
A good thermal design for LED luminaires also involves board-level optimization. Consult your engineer or system designer for firsthand knowledge. Every piece of information means a lot to your clients.
Optics
Optical components such as a reflector and a lens are designed to shape the radiation pattern, or beam pattern. A lens is attached to the LED package substrate by gluing its edge onto the substrate and may be made of plastic, epoxy, or silicone. The LED lens is typically pre-assembled into the LED package by LED manufacturers. All luminaire manufacturers starts from the same place with outsourced LEDs. Accordingly other optical components play an all more important role in deciding the success of a light fixture. These optical components include reflectors, refractor, diffusers, baffles, louvers, and filters. In addition to providing accurate beam control, they are designed to address the well-known light pollution issue: glare and spill light, and halo effect light. Find the optical features of your products and proudly share them with your audience.
Drivers
Drivers are the most neglected part when doing a copywriting. We all know drivers are the most critical component in a LED luminaire. The LED driver rectifies commercial AC power into DC power which is then converted into a predetermined magnitude of DC power through a switch mode power supply (SMPS) for LED operation. However, the SMPS driver operates a high-speed switching circuit to cause much noise, thus leading to interference, which adversely affects the surrounding circuit elements. The SMPS generates the predetermined magnitude of DC power through a high-speed switching operation to cause much noise, thus leading to interference, which adversely affects the surrounding circuit elements. In order to offset this adverse effect, other circuit components including a noise filter and the like must be additionally included, which in turn leads to an increase in volume and weight and thus increasing the manufacturing cost and system volume. Such type of driver typically has a storage capacitor in an intermediate bus for balancing the power supplies. The use of electrolyte based capacitors introduces disadvantages for the luminaire design, such as long startup times, additional cost, added component size, and most detrimentally, shortened overall lifespan especially at elevated temperatures. Thus the electrolytic capacitor is unreliable and its operational lifetime is at least 3-4 times lower than that of a LED. If your products use this driving scheme inform your customer the reliability and lifespan of this component.
Linear driver is another major, and increasingly popular driving scheme for LED lighting system and has advantages of simple design, low component cost, small form factor and immunity to electromagnetic interference (EMI). You may need to put more efforts into explaining the technical features about the driving topology because linear driving ICs have some intrinsic shortcomings such as flickering and a high amount of heat generated due to the low circuit efficiency.
There's a variety of driving schemes and features. A professional buyer or an industry insider cares seriously about the reliability and lifespan of the driver. A knowledgeful illustration will definitely be a punchline.
A variety of other facets can be utilized to take your product descriptions to a whole new level and further reinforce your customer’s confidence - light control, housing finishes, ingress protection (IP), weather resistance, operating temperature, mounting, product warranty... Never forget to let your customers see the sparks of your products.