Lightwedge leaving Nantucket

Lightwedge co-founder Debbie Bennett e-mailed this week to let me know that the company is closing its small headquarters office on Nantucket, and moving its downtown Boston office to less-pricey space in Newton. "...[T]he economy of 2008 and especially forecast right now for 2009 makes it imprudent to keep extra offices open," Bennett writes. "We have been greatly affected by the changes in the economy but are hanging in there and it’s all interesting and challenging still."

I wrote about the company last summer; they make a line of really nifty book lights.

There's quite a debate about the significance of the move over at YACK ON, a Nantucket community site.

Rethinking the Book Light

The most recent Globe column was a fun one to do... profiling Lightwedge, a Nantucket-based start-up run by husband-and-wife entrepreneurs.

When you talk to entrepreneurs, you never know what fascinating secrets they're going to spill -- ways they've discovered to get their companies growing fast. For Lightwedge, one of the secrets was collaborating with their customers (companies like Barnes & Noble, Wal-Mart, and Borders) to design their next-generation products. (Author and analyst Patty Seybold talks about this as "co-design" or "co-creation.")

Debbie and Jamey Bennett explain how it works in the video: