SnapPower

In second grade, Jeremy Smith spent so much time on inventions that his principal let him work on them in a corner of the school library once his other work was done, Forbes reported in 2014. He never stopped. His company, SnapPower, now sells night-lights built into outlet covers from Vineyard, Utah.

The idea came on the job. In the late 1990s Smith was an electrician in Provo, installing stair lights in a client's house, and he noticed that the hookup was complicated and expensive while the screw terminals on a regular outlet sat close to the wall. Lights built into the outlet could attach to those terminals with simple prongs. By Forbes's account he bought some lights and a wall plate and started assembling one.

Then the idea sat on a shelf for years. Forbes said Smith tried several other business partners without success, and the idea took hold only after he teamed up with Sean Watkins. SnapPower says it was founded in 2012. In March 2014 the pair took the GuideLight to Kickstarter hoping for $12,000, a modest goal that Watkins said was set low in case the campaign failed, and it passed $269,000 in the first week. Entrepreneur later put the total near half a million dollars.

The GuideLight looks like any other wall outlet but carries three LEDs along the bottom. Two metal prongs draw a small amount of electricity from the outlet's terminal screws, and a photo sensor switches the lights on in the dark. SnapPower says one lasts up to 25 years, and its blog says it has sold over 2 million of them, which is the company's own count. The same blog names the problem it solves "home night blindness," which is the condition of stubbing a toe on the way to the kitchen.

The line has since grown to switch plates and motion-sensing covers, plus a dock that turns a recessed can light into a mount for smart speakers and cameras. Where the covers are built is the open question. The company calls itself a manufacturing and retail company based in Vineyard but does not say where its plates are made, and when Forbes reached Smith in 2014 he was in China finalizing production costs for the first 25,000 GuideLights.

The pitch is a night-light that looks like every other outlet cover in the house, which is a lot of engineering aimed at the one part of the wall nobody has ever admired.