Somewhere backstage at Altuzarra this week, between the steamers and the models having their hair blown out for the fourth time, a floor lamp was folding clothes.
It is called LUME, it is made by a Palo Alto startup called Syncere, and it spent New York Fashion Week doing the least glamorous job in fashion: keeping the backstage laundry in order. When it wasn’t folding, it went back to being a lamp. Which, frankly, is more admin than many of us managed this week.
The idea is this. You dump the washing on the bed, you walk away, and a slim robotic arm unfurls from what looks like a very expensive piece of Scandi lighting and folds the lot. It makes the bed, too. Then it tucks itself back in and glows at you, as if nothing happened.
The catch, is that it costs $2,699, you need an invitation to buy one, and it’s not shipping until next year.
What LUME Actually Does
Syncere announced LUME properly on 12 September, timed to coincide with the NYFW shows. According to the company’s own product page, the current to-do list is short but useful: fold laundry, make beds, reset pillows and “tidy around home”. Everything else, the company says, arrives later via software updates, with no need to swap out the hardware.
Folded up, LUME is about 11 by 15 by 45 inches, so roughly the footprint of a standard floor lamp, finished in anodised aluminium and high-gloss colour. The arm is hidden inside illuminating “leaves” that double as task lighting when it’s working and ambient lighting when it isn’t. There’s also something called a Personalization Band, which learns how you like things done during set-up, so it folds your T-shirts your way, not the shop’s way.
With the ‘Personalization Band’, Lume learns your preferences so every chore is done the way you like it.
Founder and CEO Aaron Tan explained “LUME is a lamp that does your chores… We’re building technology that gives people time back. LUME folds your laundry, makes your bed and then returns to being a beautiful lamp in your home. And this is just the beginning.”
“Ultimately, we’re not trying to give people more technology. We’re trying to give them more time.”
Why Was A Robot At Altuzarra?
The company says LUME worked backstage at both Altuzarra and Advsry during NYFW, and that its presence there was meant to connect “the worlds of fashion, home, design” and technology.
It appears to have been a lonely gig. Writing on The Digital Runway, Janey Park noted that LUME was the only robot present at this season’s New York shows, and asked a fair question: does putting the tech backstage say something about where fashion thinks machines belong? Out of sight, doing the folding.
Fashion week is one of the few places on earth where laundry is both constant and high-stakes. If this lamp can keep a backstage rail tidy with 40 people shouting, a Tuesday-night at home should be just fine.
The Price, The Invite, The Wait
LUME starts at $2,699. LUME Duet, which is two of them working together as a pair, starts at $5,199. The product page lists a Park Green colourway for an extra $179, a LumeCare plan at $489 covering lifetime hardware repairs and battery replacements, and a one-off $679 fee for lifetime access to future software features, which is otherwise $79 a month. First-batch customers get a 365-day return window and a lifetime warranty.
Ordering is by invitation only, with early access prioritised for New York and the San Francisco Bay Area. Initial deliveries are expected in the first and second quarters of 2027, so spring at the earliest.
Worth knowing: this is not the price it launched at. When Syncere first opened pre-orders in April, Humanoids Daily and TechEBlog both reported LUME at $1,499 (Duet $2,499) with a refundable deposit and shipping pencilled in for summer 2026. Five months later, the price has climbed by around $1,200 and the ship date has slid into next year. Syncere hasn’t explained the jump publicly. Early depositors presumably have opinions.
Will It Actually Fold Anything?
A healthy question, because laundry-folding robots have a long and expensive history of not folding laundry. Fast Company’s Jared Newman covered Syncere’s first reveal in September 2025 and pointed to the graveyard: FoldiMate, which promised a sub-$1,000 folder and vanished, and Seven Dreamers’ Laundroid, a $16,000 cabinet that went bankrupt in 2019 before it ever really arrived.
Syncere’s claim, per that piece, is that LUME folds a single garment in five to ten seconds and gets through an average load in under two hours, with the processing done on the device rather than in the cloud.
On the safety side, the joints are covered in soft fabric, the motors slow down when they meet something that isn’t fabric, and sensors shut the whole thing off if a child or pet wanders into range.
The team behind it describes itself as design-led, blending robotics engineering and furniture design with people drawn from Stanford, Harvard, the University of Toronto, AMD and Apple.
Can I Get One In The UK?
Not yet. Invitations are going to New York and the Bay Area first, and there’s no UK pricing, shipping or launch date. At today’s rates $2,699 is a little over £2,000 before you’ve thought about import duty, a plug adaptor or the fact that a British wardrobe is 60 per cent knitwear, which nobody has demonstrated LUME folding.
If you’re the sort of person who has a laundry chair (we all have a laundry chair), the interesting thing here isn’t the robot. It’s that the first genuinely covetable home robot might turn out to be one you’d buy on looks alone. It’s a lamp. It’s a nice lamp. The folding is the upsell.
Invitation requests are open at syncere.com.
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