Loop8 is being built by a small company we’re setting up here in Sapporo, Japan, specifically for it: Syzygy. That’s not the default path for a hardware product like this, so it’s worth explaining why, name included.
I’ve been an industrial designer my whole career: factories in New York, California, Salt Lake City, Switzerland, and Italy, then a move to China and years working across factories there. We already run a small assembly shop in China for a different product, so a large-scale contract line was always an option here too. We chose not to take it.
This is a small-scale product, and we want to stay hands-on with it: fine-tuning details ourselves, building to the quality and attention to detail we actually want, in our own small workshop here in Sapporo rather than handing it off. Where that takes the company from here is genuinely open. For now, this is exactly the scale we want it at.
The name itself comes from astronomy: a syzygy is when celestial bodies fall into a straight-line alignment, the general term that covers eclipses along with the ordinary cycle of new and full moons. The Japanese word for it, 朔望 (sakubō), literally means “new moon, full moon,” and it’s the actual standard term used here for the sun-moon-earth alignment cycle, not a loose approximation of the English. It’s just a word we love.