about us

Janet Cooke Hansen is President and Chief Fashion Engineer of Enlighted Designs, Inc. She founded the business to create her own "dream job" as a light-up clothing designer.

Janet's eclectic designs combine her lifelong interests of fashion, art, and technology. She learned to sew at age 7, and installed miniature lights in her own dollhouse. Over the years, her costume-making hobby began to incorporate electronics, with illuminating results.

With more than ten years of experience in this highly specialized field, Janet is well known as a pioneer and innovator, and is arguably the most prolific lighted clothing designer in the world. She has created thousands of unique lighted garments in her studio; several hundred examples are documented in the archives on this site.

Do you need to be a rocket scientist to design clothes like this? Probably not, but it doesn't hurt, either. If you're interested in details about Janet's extensive formal training in engineering, including a PhD in biomechanics, you can look here.

Her other artistic interests are also inspired by technology. Janet paints in an abstract geometric style, and creates illuminated wall panels and sculptures, in addition to the lighted clothing described on this site.

Enlighted is based in Encinitas, California (in the northern coastal area of San Diego County), and we sell our lighted clothing exclusively through our own website, enlighted.com. We create custom designs for a wide variety of international clients, including professional entertainers in the music industry, as well as for applications in art, theater, dance, television, film, and advertising.

We've been operating as Enlighted Designs Inc. since early 2000. For several years before that, we were called Eclectic Electric Cyberwear, Originals by Janet Hansen. We've also sold a line of hats under the name EFHED (pronounced f-head), and music-reactive light panels called Sit 'n Stare.

We spell it this way on purpose. OK, we admit that it doesn't show up in very many dictionaries because we made up this word in a dream, or in the fuzzy waking moments after a dream. It sounds like enlightened (from enlighten), but our word is enlighted (from enlight, an archaic form of enlighten).

enlight: to illuminate; to enlighten [Obs]

enlighten: to give light to; to give clearer views to; to illuminate; to instruct; to enable to see or comprehend truth; to free from ignorance, prejudice, or superstition.

Our favorite part of the definition is highlighted, for emphasis. We're not sure how to achieve this by dressing up in blinking lights, but we're working on it.

The yin-yang logo symbolizes the merging of opposing forces into a balanced whole. We strive towards this type of balance with our designs, which combine a variety of "opposites": fun and function, right brain and left brain, art and technology, fashion and engineering, and so on.

We've replaced the traditional dots with rectangles that are suggestive of an electrical outlet (in the US, where we are based). This also makes it look more like the letter e, for enlighted.

E-mail: info@enlighted.com

Phone: 760.505.3343 (US Pacific Time Zone, 9am-6pm, email strongly preferred during other hours)

Mailing address: (not recommended for packages, please contact us if you are mailing something)
Enlighted Designs Inc.
PO Box 231548
Encinitas CA 92023-1548

Physical address: Please call or e-mail first if you would like to make an appointment to visit our Encinitas studio, if you are sending clothes to be modified, or if you need a street address for FedEx, UPS, or DHL shipments.

We also have an e-mail list for announcements - you can sign up for that on our contact page .