I near my eyes, and I can picture 5 arms reaching my bathe curtain, spritzing my body with hot hairspray. I’m genuinely getting moist. However, it slightly feels like water. When I open my mouth to catch the aerosol, it seems to evaporate as it hits my tongue. I’ve hooked up the Nebia 2.0, a $500 luxurious bathe system that makes use of 50% to sixty-five % less water than a regular shower–and I’ve immediately bought into all the hype.
Nebia was born as a prototype designed to reduce down water utilization in Mexico’s biggest athletic club chain, where one of the company’s co-founders, Carlos Gomez Andonaegui, become CEO at the time. Soon, it made its way as a beta product onto the campuses of Google and Apple, with the fledgling startup ultimately wooing prestigious Silicon Valley buyers inclusive of Tim Cook and Eric Schmidt.
It promised the revel in of an extravagant bathe without diverting Niagara Falls to get there. It’s simply the sort of pitch that resonated with the liberal electricity brokers of the Bay Area and our very own Innovation through Design Awards. When it eventually hit Kickstarter as a real product in 2015, the bathing system raised over $3 million. Nebia has offered 16,000 gadgets to this point. The business enterprise is debuting its 2nd-technology product on Kickstarter today. The re-engineered model sprays warmer water at a higher pressure than the first model–it also comes in black. Nebia is likewise launching a $forty stick-on shelf with a mainly formulated 3M adhesive that helps you stick it onto your shower wall.
This time, it’s backed with the aid of a brand new wave of partnerships, which includes Moen and 3M, alongside another round of all-megastar buyers, Joe Gebbia (co-founder of Airbnb), James Park (CEO of Fitbit), and Barry Sternlicht (CEO of Starwood Capital Group). With an undisclosed amount of recent investment, Nebia desires to do things: hold to construct its emblem name in the luxury shower space and, sooner or later, scale its opulent, low-glide era to less highly-priced merchandise for greater people.
“[Nebia 2.0] remains a premium product, and we’re okay with that,” says CEO Philip Winter, likening the enterprise’s future approach to the manner Tesla added prices right down to build the Model three. “We’re charting a path to make it more reachable to open around the sector.”
What’s special
So what’s new with the Nebia 2.Zero? For the most part, it’s the identical system it usually becomes. Its center is an aluminum tower that slides up and down depending on how tall you want your bath to be. It nevertheless functions as a wand that sticks to the shower wall with a powerful magnet, serving as a body sprayer most of the time. And it’s the only bathe gadget available on the market that may be set up without screws or drilling. An astonishing combination of equipment and video tutorials approach that most people ought to be capable of installation the Nebia inside its 10-minute declare (I’m positive I could have, even though I opted to make a brief name to Winter in preference to dig thru FAQs once I hit one hiccup).
The largest replacement is that the brand new Nebia is 29% hotter than the original model. That might sound like an abnormal characteristic–a warm shower!–however, in truth, the temperature became the single maximum commonplace complaint of Nebia 1.0.
As Winter explains, Nebia became the first agency to convey water atomization to showers. Atomization technology turns fluids into tiny droplets, and it’s a commonplace in distributing insecticides in the agriculture enterprise or injecting fuel into automobile engines–pretty plenty any location you need a chunk of the precious liquid to move a protracted way. Its value, but, is heat. These tiny droplets lose their warm temperature quicker than large droplets do. So in the breakup 2nd, it takes the droplets to leave the showerhead; they can arrive feeling cool.
Nubia’s technical innovation lies internally about an inch-long term of nozzles that are built in the showerhead. Using a thermodynamic modeling software program, the team could refine the design between 1.0 and 2.0 to maximize warmness retention. One key’s that there isn’t simply one nozzle repeated for every factor of spray–the Nebia uses numerous nozzle designs, 5 of which might be patented, in live performance.
“The manner we’ve mitigated [cooling]–because it’s physics, you can’t reverse it–become using a ramification of spray sorts, droplet velocities, droplet sizes, and spray angles,” says Winter. “It’s a combination, the way the droplets overlap and coalesce, that makes it a great experience. And that’s required a ton of iteration–plenty extra than we idea changed into necessary.”
I haven’t tried Nebia 1.0. However, the rather Frankensteined 2.Zero beta unit I turned into despatched became plenty warm in my small shower stall–even though it definitely had to run for approximately a minute to warm up first, due to the fact there’s no way to avoid the mist once it starts offevolved (like you would with an ordinary showerhead).
Along the identical traces, you can perspective the wand (which doubles as your frame sprayer) in almost any direction you want because it sits on its post thru magnetism. The warmth is likewise controllable via the tool’s UX, in preference to your bath knob. Because the warmth has a rapid falloff from the showerhead itself, you could also boost or decrease the water temperature through a small tug or push of the showerhead on its music, shifting its warm temperature nearer or further out of your pores and skin. In any case, I located myself interacting with the Nebia as a changeable, ergonomic machine–greater like I would a bit of furniture than a normal showerhead.
New partnerships
While Nebia 2.0 is sincerely a refinement of the primary model–it additionally is available in black!–Winter believes that the company’s future isn’t in selling costly showers to tens of thousands of human beings of relative means, but scaling it to grow to be something of a middle-magnificence splurge.
“What’s superb is that almost no person is aware of what emblem, not to mention model, of showerhead we use regular,” says Winter. “People are more likely to understand what kind of vacuum they’ve. ‘I even have a Dyson 7z94!’ Why is that? There’s this big opportunity–humans love a top-notch shower.”
The actual key to building the Nebia brand may additionally, paradoxically, be thru deals with some other brand: its new investing associate, Moen.
Nebia and Moen, which sells less expensive plumbing hardware than competition like Kohler and sells extra faucets inside the U.S. Than another enterprise, started out speaking a bit over 12 months ago. The relationship culminated while the president of Moen’s discerns group, Nicholas Fink, flew out to Nubia’s San Francisco workplace to try the shower for himself.
“He popped within the bath, spent half an hour leaping among Nebia 1.Zero and a prototype of two. Zero,” Winter recounts. “He absolutely cherished it.” (Most of Winter’s stories–from wooing early companions with Nebia showers the crew pirate-established into rented resort rooms to pitching at Y Combinator–culminate inside the words, “after which they hopped inside the bathe and cherished it!”)
Moen is leading Nebia’s series A funding round and consulting and taking part in future products. At the same time as Nebia will percentage a few middle components off the manufacturing unit line with Moen, which needs to lessen Nebia’s production prices.
So at the same time as Nebia, 1.Zero and a couple of of.0 are top-class shower structures aimed at a totally pick out part of the populace, the company is poised to expand merchandise that extra folks can be able to manage to pay for soon. It’s smooth to assume a Nebia bathe device in the $2 hundred range being the equal sort of irresistible, home impulse splurge as a Dyson vacuum or Nest thermostat–and Winter agrees.
“These first products are approximately validating, confirming a marketplace, constructing expertise and know-how,” says Winter. “We don’t want to construct a luxurious logo simply.”
