How to Launch a Consumer Tech Product That Actually Matters with Emilie Williams

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Emily, really good to see you. Thanks for making the trip over. We're in New York, in Manhattan, I think. Yeah, that's the area that we're in, in a studio called Lounge Studios. So really awesome space, great to have you here. I'm gonna do my little intro now. But first, just wanna say thank you so much for having me in your studio yesterday. So it's great to visit and see you and some of the team.

Get a sense of how you're all working together. Give me bit more context for today. So really looking forward to diagramming. But for those that are tuning in that don't know who you are, I'll do my best to give that intro. So you're Emily Williams, co-founder and creative director at Hydrific, which is a connected hardware brand on a mission to help people use water more wisely at home.

As I mentioned, don't know if I mentioned this actually, so we'll cut that, but you're currently stuck into developing your first product, which is the Droplet. And today we're going to go through your design journey, what Hydrific stands for, how you're building something new with a tight-knit team inside a huge organization, and what you're learning along the way. Wonderful. Well, so yeah.

Great to have you. As we always start with these podcasts, we start with the question, why design? So whether it will be game for you or first got you into design.

Yo, those are great questions. But thank you for having me on. This is really fun. It's really interesting to reflect on all of this and podcasts like yours, there's just not enough of them. They're just so good to dive into. But yeah, why design? This is a good question. I ask myself this daily now. It's one of these things, I don't know if you're just, some people are wired this way. Thinking about when I was a kid, I would look at something and say, huh, why is it like that? Maybe it could be better.

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why isn't this more efficient? And I would ask my parents, what is a job where you make something better? And they go, it's an engineer, engineering. And so that's sort of where I think that all started. of course, growing up, I was very interested in music. I got interested in the early web design world in the mid 90s. So I started building little websites for things in the early days of the internet.

and that quickly turned into design. And I thought I wanted to do web and graphic design and there wasn't a ton of majors or things in that area at the time. So I went to college for graphic design thinking that I would be doing that kind of stuff because I'd been doing it as a kid. And I had my first internship before college doing that kind of work, working for a design consultancy right before I started college.

You know, when I got into design school at graphic design, I realized it was more like print design and like typography and illustration. And I was like, I don't want to be hunched over a computer all day.

What's up? What should I do now?

which you know didn't quite work out and you know the industrial it i went to nc state and at the time it was like architecture on the top floor landscape architecture right under that you had some other then you had like graphic design kind of on the mezzanine and then in the basement where like the industrial design kids like covered covered in bando and sawdust and they looked really stressed out and

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He wouldn't go down there, they were scary, you know. And then there were the art and design kids, like in a completely different hall, know, the art and design kids he didn't, yeah. So I spent, you know, a semester trying to figure out which design discipline I wanted to be in, and I'm like, you know what, let's do industrial design. And, because I like to make things, I like to make stuff. And I think that combo of I like to make stuff, I like to prove on things, and that's sort of been a theme of.

I just want to make things a little bit better than how I found them. And I think that's kind of the driving force between a lot of what I do, even if it's aesthetic, right? It's a little bit better. But a lot of the work I do is maybe more than just a little bit aesthetic.

You've got a creativity just so you call having you and then place it to make stuff. Yes. Just always inbound to screen.

and curious about stuff. Like why are things the way they are? think that question of why design is like, why is it like this? And then when you get into industry, like, I know why, because somebody had to cost reduce it and to manufacture it has to have this amount of draft and here's the reality of wall thicknesses and the way that things are injection molded or, you know, once you learn deep dive into the manufacturing process, you really see how much of that drives the final thing. So as a designer to get something through the sausage machine of product development.

you have to learn all these different facets, not just is it a cool product? Is it manufacturable? Does it work? Is it, do people love it? Does it have, you know, desirability, but also is it doesn't make business sense? So you kind of have to have all these little facets to just get something on the market.

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Why is kind of, it's like a layered thing as well, isn't it? Because the first, it once and you might get a veneer of an answer, but then you keep asking and you'll uncover different whiteness. like we were talking about yesterday, it's like some of the compromises you have to make just to get a product to market. The why, well, that's just what we can do. That's the limitations of manufacturing.

Yeah, yeah, there's a, it's an interesting question too, because when I think about design, it's just a series of solving problems. It's like product, know, non-physical, physical. It's like, there's a lot of different ways to solve these problems. And through the design process, you can do that more effectively. And I think that's how I transition between different disciplines in a sense, but yeah.

I talk a lot to people, especially in consultancy environments around kind of resilience and curiosity and question, especially when comes to the sales of, you know.

keep going, don't have no fear. And it hurts at the time when, like with toddlers kind of learning to walk, we don't give up after before every once we get up and try and try again until we get it. And I'm just thinking, you know, with why, again, that got back to the toddlers and the small children nagging their parents, like, but why? Why? And it's so irritating, isn't it? And you just go, because it is. But actually now as a professional designer, it's like, well, actually, I want to know, want to get to the right.

Don't lose that. I there's an element of playfulness that's really important that you can channel that inner that is also the fresh pair of eyes that somebody comes in and fresh and they're like, why are we doing it like this? It's like those questions are magical. Bringing in a new intern on the team, somebody brand new on the team. And they're like, hey, I'm going to ask the stupid question. Why are we doing it like this? And then it kind of helps other people break out of maybe the patterns they've been in. And that's another superpower of designers, I think, is just being kind of.

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these disparate things, sometimes maybe there's a threat of ADHD in there combining things that are a little bit random at times. And that's really powerful way to look at things, to be able to connect those dots in ways that are kind of novel and yeah.

Yeah, that is true. I don't think we've dived as deep into why so far in series, but I've enjoyed that kind of intro. So we could go from a complete tangent list. Let's keep her. So your career journey then. So you started off as an intern in GSK as a in UX. That was.

philosophy. go it.

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one of my first corporate gigs, let's say that, because I was doing a lot of freelance contract work before, for like years. I like a teenager. I was the kid that couldn't go to the, you know, the offsite because my mom had to drive me there. So that was when I was in my contractor phase as a teenager. then GSK, I started as a basically an interaction designer before the word interaction design started, because I was in the graphic design world, developing internal systems. It was very boring. I didn't like it. I realized at that point, this is not what I want to do with my life.

That comes full circle later because now we do UX.

You've kind of bookended your career at one point. But yeah, spent, so you did like your three years with the GSK, you moved very quickly after that into kind of Delta, full-sits early. And you've not strayed too far really, as I've heard from kind of the water movement, taps, kind of full-sits, bathroom products.

Yeah, it's been over 20 years now. It's just kind of crazy to think about too. So basically right after I graduated college, so I was doing interning at GSK. I got a full-time job there. I was kind of getting in that cushy mode. I'd graduated college realizing that this wasn't the path. Like I wanted to make physical things. My degree was in industrial design. I wanted to do industrial design. And I had a really chaotic portfolio right out of college because I just did so many different, I had like soft goods. had this

ds. Like at the time, this is: 2003

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Somebody at Delta Faucet saw my portfolio online, called me up. I had just actually registered for graduate school. So I was planning to go to grad school. was like, I think it was actually in the parking lot after registering for classes for grad school when I got the call to come to Indianapolis and interview. And I was like, well, that might be my dream job. I never had thought of plumbing before. But little did I know at the time they were actually expanding into some of the first.

commercialized digital faucets, like the touch faucets, some of the earliest. So I worked on some of the very early iterations, was one of my first projects, was redesigning some components of this touch faucet. It was very CAD heavy. was very, very CAD heavy. And I don't know if I had first CAD, it was digital sculpture. It's where I was excited. But also, the tool we used had a very steep learning curve. So I spent a lot of time, I Creo, majority of Creo. Yeah, the time I was pro engineer.

ry early version per engineer: 2001

complicated. There's a lot to them. Sealed systems and faucets are incredibly complicated when you see what's inside of them. The valves, the tolerance stack up. So there's just a, it's a whole world. It's not just faucets, it's kitchen and bath products. So anything in a bathroom, anything in the kitchen. You're talking bathtubs, toilets, vanities. We did lighting. We would do all sorts of products. So yeah, yeah.

And that was used at Indianapolis. So that was a bit of a relocation. It was from North Carolina

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Yeah, yeah, Yep, so moved across country and then Delta's owned by Masco. So they opened at some point, they had a global design studio, everything's changed since then. And the global design studio was cool because it was connected to other products outside of plumbing. So spent some time in the plumbing world, went up to Chicago and, know, Hot Springs Spa is at Watkins Manufacturing does hot tubs. So would work with the teams and the hot tub teams. They did a lot of interesting.

work and components. had the AeroFastener at the time, so there would be a few like power tool projects here and there. I still did a lot of plumbing work. We worked on some Target Home brand products that were like home hardware. But yeah, variety of different things.

Did you know when you took the job, did you know how varied it might turn into?

No, and I kind of, you know, when you're coming out of school, you're also like, I'll do anything that anybody lets me do. Like just let me do something as a student. And sometimes when I talk to students today, it's sort of like, it's really important to do something that you're actually passionate about. And if those two things can mash up, that's great. And I think I never would have thought that the plumbing industry or like home and kitchen and bath hardware was a place where I would find like a really strong interest and passion, which is funny because many years later I'm like,

I love this industry and I really missed it when I left briefly. I missed that world and yeah, so.

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It's interesting, yeah, because I speak to lot of, I have done, spoken to lot of juniors over the years and they're, yeah, precious about their first job, you know, they don't know, it's a lot easier nowadays with research and whatnot, but you know.

They don't know what they don't know. They don't know much about the companies. some will turn down opportunities because on paper, though, was just another plumbing company. actually, when you throw yourself into it, you can turn into so much more. We've had that call up a few times on the podcast where it's like, don't discount the boring or less glamorous. They're the ones where you're going to learn a ton of stuff.

and bring your perspective to this. I think that's the other thing is there's, you can just do the job on paper, what you're told to do, and then you can kind of push a little. You can be like, well, I've done my job, but then there's this idea, and how do you kind of upsell that within an organization? That's really interesting. Sometimes you're not gonna get people to buy in, but you can help people. It's a stepping stone to other ways of thinking. Sometimes you can even tell yourself, this might just be a portfolio project that I really love.

even if it's not a core duty of yours at your job. But it's, I think there's something special about that. Like my best projects were not the ones that were assigned to me. They were ones where I was like, I'm going to do this anyway. And I'm just going to present it as an aside like, Hey, I did what you asked, but also I did a little bit of this and I'm just going to set it on my desk on the side until somebody notices. It's actually funny because those have been the top seller. Honestly, one of my best performing kind of top.

Go down.

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selling products, collections, that I did back then, which I felt like was kind of a golden era. It was sort of sitting collecting dust for about a year, because it was a little bit extreme at the time. It was a twisty faucet called Verrage, and it's a beautiful, I mean, it's kind of an iconic collection, and it always did very, very well. you know, got knocked off, you what a great, your company's knocked off that style. It was kind of funny.

You developed that in your spare free time.

It was part of, yeah, it was like at the time the way we did projects, was kind of like a theme and then we designed within a theme and so I had other safer designs. We kind of totally would take them all to testing. But this one in particular was very like a statement piece and it was just, it was like on the border of.

outside of the realm of normal, like normal, but for the particular brand at the time, it was a new luxury brand. It actually made a lot of sense. And yeah, but actually I think what happened at one point was somebody was on a tour and they got really excited about it. And then I think once they saw customer buy-in that changed the story a little bit. And I think that's superpower with design research is finding your customers who are really excited about this particular product, whatever it may be. But when you can showcase that and you say there are

people who need this and want this, it's not just, you know, on paper, it's there are customers for this and how you can prove that. That's maturing that way of proving that is really, I think that's like how I ended up in Kickstarter land, for example. Do we have a customer?

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Yeah, it's really interesting. am two years ago. I am I was with a client in England, Moff Richards. I know if the brand was made over here, but it's an iconic kind of British kind of homewares brand. But they've every one of their products up until a point was, you know, plug you had to plug it in. That was that was almost the only kind of criteria. I'd say I'm probably doing them to service. But

The design manager that was showing me around had a design. He showed me this non-electronic device. It was a toasty maker. And it was one that you could make a toasty, like a grilled sandwich, pop it into this kind of clam shell. was bright orange clam shell. And then you pop it in the microwave.

I think I've seen these. Yeah.

But some of the young designers had pitched this to the leaderships, like, no, it hasn't got a plug. It's not in the Morphy Richards range. So what they did was they kickstarted it. That's funny. And they did this self-promoting inside. And then once the orders started coming in and they overachieved them, then the leadership went, maybe it can be in the Morphy Richards kind of range.

You know, they've done a range of them, which is super successful.

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That's really funny. It is a really good example, actually.

We're back to your journey. So aside from a kind of a brief departure from water, it's predominantly been kind of water-based products, isn't it?

Even when I went to Contigo, right after I left Masco, I spent a couple years, Contigo brand beverage ware. So it's very housewares driven, but it's still beverage. It's like, I was actually working in filtration and like water infused. kind of like health and some entertaining type products, but it was funny because they're still sealed systems, just like a faucet. So when you think about, Contigo is really known for being

like leak proof and they're really over engineered products. Actually, it's kind of like the most over engineered coffee mug you might ever find. at one point in time was the most popular coffee mug brand around. now we've got like the Stanley craze and there's always been sort of like Nalgene bottles and the different like hydro flasks. It's funny to watch the kind of beverage industry now that I've left it, but it's similar.

problems that you encounter with like a plumbing system or a sealed beverage container on the go with like needing a locking mechanism or like how do you clean it easily? And there's a lot of like interesting nuance there. And these all Contigo is known for their auto seal buttons so that you don't spill it. So there's a button to drink, but there's a couple other, yeah, they're just doing interesting ways of consuming a beverage. So it was just a fun, was actually really nice because also it was a little bit more of a high,

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faucet you install, you're going to have it for 20 years. But a Contigo product, might, it's not that they're seasonal, but they would have a little more like of a fashion accessory element as well. So you might do like a Target collection that has, you know, maybe it's a seasonal Target collection in a certain color ways. So there's a lot of like CMF type stuff, which I also find very interesting. So that was a really nice ad in an area that I hadn't really explored much in that sense. So I, you know, I learned a lot at Contigo.

I worked for a really great team. My boss at the time was amazing. I really enjoyed my little stint there in the housewares world.

And it's also a good lesson in anyone that's kind of thinking about taking up a role and wondering, am I going to be kind of siloed or typecast for want of a better term? Actually, there's always something that can transfer you out into another industry or a similar kind of.

Yeah, you know, I was at a conference somebody was talking about, you you might be in an industry or have kind of like, I don't know, like you said, get typecast in a certain way. But when you take a step back and you look at, you know, back to problem solving in a design way, it's not necessarily the thing, it's maybe the process or the way that you've approached something. And you can kind of back out of if you're thinking through your career journey and like, OK, now what do I do? You might, you know, reframe what you did.

Yeah, I think this is a good portfolio skill is to be able to say like there's a practical thing of what I did, but then the purpose of it or, you know, how I did it. It's like the storytelling of, you know, it wasn't just a new housewares product. It was a new way to drink water or a new way to, you know, keep hydration on the go. But you can kind of reframe these back to philosophical design. But it's true. It's like not necessarily the thing is not necessarily the story all the time. It's like what you did. So you can you can.

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Tell that like I can do that in other industries. You can apply it to other industries. Back to being fearless, go for it.

Absolutely, I've spoken to lot of people recently about the value of design, industrial design in particular, in different areas of business and industry and having design leadership at the right table. At the end of the day, your problem solvers are storytellers. Yeah. And that's what most businesses really need.

Yeah.

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Yeah, I mean to have somebody there to just stop kind of just to ask honestly, this is funny. But I've seen this even in where we are today, you know, you can kind of stop and say,

we'll hold on, what are we solving? What is the problem that we're solving for? And is this the way to do it? Or if this is the way to do it, maybe how we get there, we can think through and just solve that problem in a way that's maybe a little non-traditional that's going to get you like up on things. And I think that's, you know, I've had a really awesome opportunity to be involved early on and what I'm doing now, you know, and I have an amazing team and they're all, I mean, even in, you know, everybody's coming from different disciplines, but it's a very creative team. And sometimes I'm,

extreme, like I will go to an extreme level and I always tell people like you can tell me to back it down a notch, but that is I'm going to go there and then back down because I want to get us here so that we don't end up in the middle of boring town here to do something a little different. And that's, I had this theory at one point of like, if this is the normal accepted like circle of acceptance and like the middle is the most average you could imagine. And then as you get closer to this border, it's

gets more and more novel or more and more different, more and more risky. And then like we talked about like high art or fine fashion, it's like outside of the circle, completely bonkers. know, the more bonkers you get, the further out of the circle. And like, I thought this was a new idea. It turns out like Raymond Loewy or somebody came up with this theory early on. was like, oh, that's not a new idea at all. But if you can kind of hit that sweet spot outside of the border or kind of like on the edge where you're not so extreme, but you're not so boring and you're kind of doing something interesting and new, you can do, you can apply that method to like an aesthetic thing or a new way of.

making a product or a completely new industry that's never been, maybe it's a completely new innovation. So it's kind of a funny way of like, you you can be here or you can push a little more extreme. And if you can get your team comfortable with thinking that way, that's cool.

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It's a lot less crowded.

There's more risk. mean there is more risk. You might be more niche, but yeah, there's balance. There's balance.

But I mean, again, to harken back to conversations I've had over the last week, it's, you know, you could play it safe and then have a hard time because you're of hundreds.

Yeah, makes you different? Yeah, commoditized.

And there's always there's always a buyer out there and for your stuff, they just you just got to know where to look and how to kind of storytelling and get them excited about it. Even even, you know, there's a guy that makes these hundred and twenty five thousand dollar watches and there's a market for it. know, it's kind of crazy, but there's a market for it. So let's talk about hydrific. But before I before.

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is.

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Yeah.

Let's talk about the Lixle connection because correct me if wrong but you joined Lixle first and then Hydra if it was like a venture spin out.

right after Contigo, this is: 2014

kind of done that in my Masco days, my Delta Fossa days, and then to have a chance to do that with this Heritage brand, American Standard brand, 150 years of legacy, some incredible, just cool stuff. mean, they were pioneers 150 years ago. Plumbing was a new industry. Indoor plumbing was, people didn't even have that for many, years. So it was kind of an exciting prospect. joined American Standard, and then not a few couple years later, Licks Hole bought.

the American Standard brand assets in the US. So that was exciting because we were now part of this global organization with other sister brands. We have a gray brand. it's just, back to having a lot of new resources, new team, new ways of being integrated into a bigger organization. And yeah, so I worked on a lot of core American Standard products. There's a luxury brand, DXV. So again, just kind of channeling a lot of the stuff that

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you know, doing a lot of retail work for big box retailers and a lot of new like platform development. I worked on a lot of like platform optimization, which maybe is not as, you know, the outside stuff, but the outside stuff is so dependent on what's going on on the inside. If you can create a modular platform that works for all of your future designs, that was kind of the idea. Like let's have the platforms that make designing for the future flexible. And that was something I was also very excited about too.

unlock these future designs. So a lot of the stuff that kind of got set up, there's just tons of cool stuff on the market now that's like hopefully benefiting from that. So all of my colleagues who now design over these platforms, it's really exciting. So, and I work very closely with our mechanical team to, know, oh, can't we make that a little thinner so that we can make like a very thin, know, imagine the smallest diameter you can to get that waterway in there.

And thinking like, oh, if we make that modular here, then we can do L shapes, this shape, any shape, you know, so. But kind of thinking through that as a system. But yeah, and then, you know, COVID happened and Lixle had been working with the Tuck School of Business on kind of like leadership training for like innovation projects. And out of that came a relationship with Mach 49, which is like a Y combinator for corporations.

they do startups, venture startups inside of a corporation. Let's, you know, they find, you know, candidates who might be good for that cross functional. So we have, you know, when we did this exercise with 49, you know, we got taken over everyday jobs. was people from all over. There were five of us originally all from all different walks of life, engineering, sales, marketing, and then I was the design. So it was really, really cool cross section of people from globally.

all coming together in this venture to, and blank sheet of paper. mean, our mission was water sustainability. What are we going to do with water sustainability? Starting from zero, starting from scratch. We did not know what we were going to do or where this was going to lead us. And the process we followed was kind of a classic design thinking process of find the pain, do a ton of interviews, talk to people, prototype ideas, test those prototypes, learn, pivot, update assumptions, start with a ton of hypotheses.

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validate or invalidate them. I mean, just following this process is so, it was so powerful. kind of like a dream come true to be able to do this and start by following what do people need? Where is there a pain? And yeah, that it was a really incredible process and it was about six months with the initial venture incubation period. yeah.

So that was still very much Lixol we were exploring in and then it kind of then we found the idea.

So we were essentially, we kind of treated ourselves like a shark tank. So our independent team, we had like a venture board that we pitched to kind of in a shark tankish style. But we were really independent. I mean, that was kind of the Mach 49 methodology is, know, you know, step away, be your own, kind of get the isolation and not protection, but the ability to really.

explore unencumbered. And then essentially we had our, you know, our VC pitch that we put together, tons of validation that we went through. I mean, we, we had several concepts other than the one that we ended up essentially pitching, but this was the one, every other idea or concept or thing to make an impact in water sustainability, we needed this base level. was very clear before you could do any of these other things, you needed

what ended up becoming Droplet, you needed the kind of the brains of the operation first. everything kind of, once we realized everything laddered out of this and also we had to start somewhere small. And this was, to call this small is a gross mischaracterization. But we had to start with, you know, understanding what is happening in a home. Like we can't save water with any of these other things if we don't have a, help people.

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Manage water today better and there were just there was so much opportunity in this space So that was kind of that's kind of how we ended up where we are now

That's really cool. are there other kind of hydrifics kind of that have been spun out, probably through that same process as well?

Yeah, well, you know, there are a couple other initiatives, I believe, but ours is sort of the kind of the most, I would say, independent version of it. So, I mean, essentially we're, you know, parent company, Lixel, we're kind of our own entity. We're more of like a team within Lixel at this point with our first like kind of branded product. But yeah, we're sort of still, you know, we're still very early on. So kind of, you know, how do we operate and how does this product fit in? Because it's

very different from the core. Like we're not a core plumbing product, but the amazing part is Lixil makes all of these water delivery products in your home. And now we can provide people with a way to, hey, what's going on with that 45 minute shower, Mikey, did you just took, I didn't realize the garden hose was left on. all of these, you know, maybe somebody leaves a bathtub on and you want to talk about water damage in a home. That's a lot of, there's a lot of costs in water damage in a home. And if we can help people.

make better choices or maybe they don't realize they have a broken old toilet, now we can tell them and tell them what to do. That's the other thing we uncovered in research. People don't know what to do. And now we can have this education tool to let people know what to do. That was a major finding from our early incubation is just how does anything I do help? I don't know where to start. So there's a ton of these kind of things we can solve with a product like Triplet.

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Yeah, absolutely. We were talking yesterday about the journey and Sarah going from having a lot of physical product that works, but then it's the goal is data that you're tracking. How do you communicate that? And I guess the next step is gamified as well. If we're looking at the 50 leagues at home, you know, but.

That's fantastic. I'm not sure whether the show and tell for those watching the episode. If you're not watching, get on YouTube. We'll do little shorts of this as well. But yeah, we're going to do a little unboxing, think. Yeah.

I brought one in. Yeah, this was so we did a Kickstarter last year and this was our this is our first product. This is the first pack. So I know another fun thing, right? I guess it's design packaging. Yeah, also, you know as the Yeah, so we have our little like startup card a little note from our CEO and you know, the product itself is a very hard part of what you know, we did as a kind of a mini design team on this project was

design.

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established a set of brand values, essentially product values. So, you know, clear, transparent. So it's like the sea glass. Very simple, transparent, this idea of transparent, this idea of simple, clear, trustworthy. Like we want to make sure people feel like the data is, you know, we want to make sure that it's easy to understand, but it's also technically robust. So how do you make something, and this is honestly, this is an incredibly complicated product. And how do you make

this kind of information easy to understand. And I think that was kind of our hardest challenge with this. But also there's a lot of technical issues with how do you set a variety of different pipe sizes. So there is just a ton of like physical design challenges. But essentially just clamp it on your pipe. The light turns blue, was basically an orange light when you plug it in, means it's not getting a signal. You plug it in, it turns blue. It has all these little fun water jokes built in. I don't know if you noticed the packaging. It's actually water waves turning into sound waves. And if you look at where it's.

over top the sound waves going through the pipe. so there's just a lot of little hidden jokes, I would say, in this. It's sort of a River Rock inspired design.

You definitely get the designers kind of appreciate that. Maybe not the everyday kind of landlords.

The flaps of the waves here to kind of keep it, which are also functional because it keeps it safe during shipping. then. It's all recycled. That was another component is we wanted to and we're talking about water sustainability. needs to be, you know, packaging is a good example, but also it's refurbishable. So we designed it with circularity in mind. So that was another thing I was very, you know, kind of passionate about. This is a really easy.

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It's all cardboard, there's

(: 34:09

product to refurbish, to assemble, to, we make it in the US, so it's local, again, like little bit of logistics-wise, we're not spending a lot, you know, to get this into people's homes, we're only in the US right now. But yeah, there's just, you know, there's like these little waves built in, there's a little seashell feature that's kind of hidden in here, the sea glass thing. Yeah, so it's just kind of, you know, when you have a lot of, know, things you're trying to solve in kind of a fun, cute way to also make something.

not just a boring tech product. Like I'm so tired of boring tech products. So to have something with a little more personality, maybe that's my own little sneaky.

When you gave me the tour of the studio yesterday, you showed me the piece of sink asset. It matches the colour really nicely. You'd had that for some time, you?

Yeah, I grew up in Seattle before I moved to North Carolina and we lived on the Puget Sound basically when we were kids and pick up sea glass and seashells. And when I was back home not too long ago, I found my like Carabers lunchbox full of my treasures from childhood and I could not believe the sea glass pieces that I had found that were like, I mean, you could probably scan it and it's identical color ways. You know, I was kind of shocked in the same little seashell design and I'm like, huh.

Funny, somewhere back in there was this like stuffed away. But so I brought into the office and was like, this is so funny. Like, because this dialing in the CMF was a whole process in itself. This is a custom, know, cool, cool, very light, cool, gray color in the sea glass color. We went through so many iterations on that too, the production team. And it was like, too, no, it's too green, it's too opaque. Aqua's a tough color.

(: 35:57

And even the texture of it, you know, we dialed in this kind of soft texture, this kind of the river rock texture. This is the X-ray version, so you can see what's going on in the inside. Yeah, I kind of want to commercialize this transparency. The idea originally was to be a little bit retro with the translucence of this to highlight the technology inside, back to kind of make it simple and approachable, but know that there's technology built in that's really powerful. That was kind of the original.

Yeah, that's really cool.

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idea. But this is fun. This is like very retro. Like we joked a lot about this being like IMAX or like my first cell phone in college.

Absolutely. But you can see, the, we talked about bill of materials yesterday, especially like having screws in there. Simple. Simple product, it's sustainable, you know, with a minimal bill of materials, and cost effective to Hanna Franchi as well.

And thinking about it from day one, working with the mechanical team, it's like, well, I know we don't want to have a ton of assembly. We want to make sure that the draft, I mean, I built in the draft from day one, that it could be like a stack up. It's funny when you want to think about, again, back to the platform, manufacturing a platform that can be flexible for the future, make something that's going to be easy to assemble or very straightforward and not too over-complicate, not too many components. We know we want to keep the costs low. That was another thing.

for this type of high tech product, didn't want to be a $500 sensor like some of the other products on the market. We wanted to be the most affordable, the easiest to install. We wanted this to be just a no-brainer. It's like a must have for your home. mean, it's a Fitbit for your home. It's a health tracker for your home. And the pipes of your home are like the vein in your body. Are they healthy? And now we can see.

Yeah, that's fantastic. So. I'm all right thinking that this is available now. Yeah.

(: 37:46

Yeah, we launched at CES in Las Vegas in January 2025. We had the Kickstarter the year before. We had just started shipping right before CES. We really didn't start. We had batches and we kept selling out. So we had the original Kickstarter batches that we were kind of ramping up production. And then it really was about three months ago that we've been selling direct.

Essentially, you order it, we ship it from the factory. So, yeah, but it's, you know, we were just getting started with this and it's gotten a lot of great, a lot of great, you know, coverage. We had a lot of great coverage at CES. We had a cool demo because it's ultrasonic. So it's reading through the pipe wall. It feels a little magical. Like how? People often ask the first thing they go is like, wait, how does that work? I don't understand. How do you clamp it on? And it can do anything. But imagine like a medical ultrasound reading through, you know, your body. It's basically the same idea. So.

Yeah, you showed me a cool video yesterday on the company Instagram page, think. It's a really good kind of demonstration of that. So I'm going to check that out. But how does it feel then to go from, you know, pre-order to buy now?

Okay.

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It's like real, I know. It's been such a journey and every test, this is one of the scary parts is you're like, we did all these small validations along the way, like, did we build up the pre-order list? know, launching a Kickstarter, we had a whole campaign to get the Kickstarter backers, the really exciting community who wants to integrate this in their smart homes, so we're working on like an API access that's coming very soon and building all the correct features that are really needed. And there's just so much, there's so much, when you,

are building this product of, you know, getting in front of people, getting feedback and doing, you know, NPS and CSAS scores and all these like kind of metrics. And when it keeps coming back really high and you keep getting kind of exceptional numbers and you're thinking like, is this true? Are people really going to buy this? You know, and to see that we, you know, our Kickstarter hit its goal within 11 minutes and we, you know, went a thousand times over what we had a rate of went out a thousand. We went way over what we were expecting. Like our

kind of expectations for the Kickstarter, really that was another data point. It was just another data point that there is a need for this. And then as we kind of get out there and scale, mean, just looking at the people who get excited about this kind of product, why hasn't there been something like this out here before? And there are some similar things, but this is a very unique version of what we've kind of done here. And again, listening really closely to people who need and

But I mean, that's the other thing is we're really connected closely with people who are buying this and wanting to buy this, all the questions they're asking, really good clues to what we should be developing. continuing to listen and follow the community of people who are using this to help fill, fit their needs. I think that's the other thing is like, we didn't just do this one thing. Once you get the hardware, all the software is still build, build, build into to leverage what's there with the hardware. So it's a really cool product because it's not

just the faucet that you install and you just put it in for 20 years and you never touch it again. You install it and now you've got an app that can do all kinds of stuff. And so that's the exciting part is it's like the journey is just beginning. Like we are just getting started with the first iteration of this. We've already actually released like two major app updates. We actually just released a patch today that's very exciting. We brought some new stuff on board. So it's fun because it's kind of never ending. Back to the UX component. It's not just the hardware. There's also this digital component.

(: 41:26

Yeah, and it's the feeling to just go in and, you know, I to a lot of startup founders and leaders that, you know, you'd never really know how many products are going to perform. You can do all the testing in the lab and give it to your friends and family and test out the prototype until it's in the hands of customers, until they break it and the different ways that they You don't know, you?

And the things that they're expecting, I that's the thing too, is looking at it for the first time and people ask these questions, you're like, that's such a great point. And like even keeping like the touch points in the app, like here's our app, it's a very meditative, I don't know. So the top, we have this really meditative wave, it's surface level and the whole concept, even back to the water, kind of the water themes, when you dive deeper into the breakdown of the information and as we add more components here, you deep dive into the ocean. So again, you get like the surface level.

Yeah, you can see right there, yeah.

(: 42:17

summary of what's happening and then you can dig in deeper into the data. So if I go, let's say, even like to the year view, I can go back in time and see all of the usage for different years and then you can dial in and dig into the data and as you dig in, you kind of dig deeper into the ocean. it's like, thematically part of what I've been trying to do with this is it's not just, it's every touch point. Every touch point kind of tells the same story of.

whether it's the app or when you buy it or the packaging or the physical product itself, you've got this kind of water experience that kind of has this theme all throughout. And it makes you, I mean, I want to make it kind of fun. Like I want the app to be kind of fun. I want the packaging to be fun.

Yeah. Do you get a wave when someone flushes the toilet?

See, okay, I can't show these screens because we're working on them right now, but there are some really fun things that we're building in. you know, we're like, let's do some funny, yeah. But, you know, using an app or using, you know, it's very utilitarian. A lot of plumbing stuff is very utilitarian. Or even, you know, health trackers, we benchmark a lot of similar kind of modalities that people use and it's like.

Yawn like I just you know how and we know this is a low interest category. You know a lot of people are just waiting for that leak alert to tell them something's going on or they set you know setting a certain way but it's you know I I would when you talked about gamification I think that's the starting point is just make an engaging experience in the app that you know might just be your boring water usage for the day but can you make it a little more fun you know what can you do to make this this fun and I think that's actually our challenge is how do we keep it.

(: 43:58

an engaging thing to make it a low interest thing more interesting because that's another lever for getting people to help save water. And this is something we learned from water utilities. They said the only thing that gets people to really do something is through humor. Humor is very powerful thing when you're talking about sticking in people's minds. And that was something that I'm, know, we're not.

Duolingo level, like you were with our, you know, maybe we'll try that one day, but it's, it's, there's just something about not being just another boring box, you know, and just utilitarian numbers on the screen. And that stood out at CES. mean, people came by that didn't know what we were and they just saw like our big splash. We had like a big wave. I got to design the booth, which was another fun thing is like a random aside. but.

you people were like, I just saw you from across the room and had to come see what this was. it, you know, having they're like, how refreshing it's not just like another, you know, frosted aluminum box, you know.

It has the potential to be super boring. It's just anything but.

Yeah, and you can research water monitors and go have, go fall asleep, know. And, you know, they provide a really important thing, but it's like, it doesn't have to be boring. It doesn't have to be boring. That's why this could be a little bit better. It could be a little more interesting. And my hypothesis is, you know, if we want to reach a lot of people, we don't want just the

(: 45:27

kind of the tech, you right now people who purchase new technology, tend to be, you know, I like to buy a lot of new tech and play with things cause I'm a nerd, you know, that's, but most people, you know, kind of don't, they're best followers or they're kind of like, make sure other people vet it first before they'll jump on board. And if you can kind of win over both segments where you've got kind of the leading edge people who are really critically looking at all the different information that you're providing, but then if you can kind of capture the hearts and minds a little more of like, you know, people who might not.

care that much. Maybe it's subtle. Maybe it's like a not, you know, top of mind thing. You're not really cued in, but it's just a little something.

Yeah, I mean, you've got me thinking, I mean, you could imagine another ring on the watch you could have. Like I've got health insurance rewards me for to do over 12,000 steps or exercise every day. So I get free coffee. Yeah. Discounts on the gym membership and stuff. Yeah.

Yeah, I know.

(: 46:24

When there's big corporations that are pushing for like Probs and Gamble, I think, and doing the 50-meter home challenge and challenging their brands to how can we help our consumers reduce water usage. You can put a tool there to monitor that and gamify it with wards. And at the right cost point, it doesn't become a utilitarian thing for the landlords anymore, it's for everyone.

Yeah, and that's what's kind of cool is making it work for these different segments in different ways to help. really, I mean, talk about counting every drop is like kind of this tagline. It adds up fast, like one leaky toilet. mean, we actually had a couple of people who wrote in about the leaks that we've stopped. with certain amount, we can see now the volume, right? They can tell us, hey, this leak on my toilet, this was leaking a gallon every couple of minutes.

That adds up over 30 days. If you didn't see that until your water bill came, you might've had a two or $300 water bill quite easily that you just paid for this with one like week. And to see these stories real, playing out in real life, you know, that's actually really, that's really cool. Yeah. And to do it in a way that's not, I don't know, it doesn't have to be boring.

No, even you know even the hardest of kind of the the water utility and kind of engineers. They're still a person

Yeah, but what's crazy about this particular product compared to anything else, even like a smart, there's a lot of smart water meters now, AMI infrastructure, they'll take a reading once a day, once an hour, once every 15 minutes. Dropula takes a reading every 50 seconds, or 50 times a second. So it's like, it's high resolution information. So it's kind of like best in class technology, most affordable, like keeping not just.

(: 48:16

easy and simple, but also like back it up with the data, back it up with the power of it. And that's sort of the marriage of the two. Like it can be both.

We also show in when and how much is used as opposed to just this is how much you've used today.

And you can see your live graph. mean, you can see when you log in is water flowing or not flowing. And now once we have these new API integration coming along with like home assistant integration, you're going to be able to build your own tools using this data to do all sorts of cool stuff. I would love to run a competition. Like let's do a competition for people to build like, that would be so cool. Yeah. So, yeah. But I, know, it's just really fun because also what, what other things could we do with this for what's useful for people? What do people,

we have this magic wand question that we asked in the incubation. It would always be like our last question. We'd say, now that we've gone through whatever the topic was or the script or whatnot, I'd say, now, if you could do anything, technically feasible or not, what would it be? Just use your imagination, magic wand. And you would hear the most fascinating stuff coming out of that. And it's like, how can we keep that idea going as we continue to build out this product? It's like, there's so many cool things you could do.

So yeah, it's a good question to ask as well, depending on what I do for a If you had a wand, what would you change about your current employment? Because then you'll start uncovering where they rather than like, I'm looking for a new challenge. You then get into, well, if my boss turned into less of it.

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But you don't get a refrigerator full of soda and a constant supply of chips, you know, the foosball table? Well, I'd really be happy, you know. Yeah.

are nice, but yeah.

(: 50:06

But you know though that there is something about having an unlimited supply of snacks at the office. It's very motivating

Well, it's quite convenient for the employees. It also means that as an employer being completely cynical, your staff are in the building more than they're not popping out on lunch. So, you know, productivity may have dipped and we're all back in the office and we're not glued to our desk all the time. Get them sacks, keep them their desk.

You

(: 50:30

I have been bribed with packs of sugar for a Red Bull before. I know we got this big presentation and like, is this four pack of Red Bull doing here? I'm gonna drink all of them right now.

I like to this pizza. yeah, we've got a crunch on everyone's head till midnight. So talk to me about the setup now, where it's, hydrophic, small, scrappy-ish kind of startup. Yeah, very much Super passionate style, but within this larger global business. What's been the hardest thing about kind of building something new in something old and

Yeah, it is a little interesting with kind of our teams independence or kind of doing things differently, for example, onboarding new suppliers. There's like a whole supplier process that's typical within the typical structure is like we're doing something a little different, know, sourcing new suppliers or even our gate process, right? We had like a very kind of rigid gate process that I was used to going through new product development. You have to hit the gates. We were doing this agile scrum process. So it's very different.

take on what you can and it's hard then how do you communicate dates when the dates are fluid. So we kind of ended up now developing our own process and to be able to do that within a bigger organization as an experiment. We always approached this with, we may not, this may fail. Like we may fail and in fact we want, I mean we always hear it like fail fast but this is true. You want to do, I wanna do a small test now, fail miserably and learn a lot from it.

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And we have, and we have had our moments. mean, the whole incubation almost did not happen because we had to pivot kind of halfway through. And at one point we had a presentation before the bigger pitch of like, well, our initial theory didn't pan out. And so we're going to take what we learned and try something different. And we actually had a moment where we're like this, we might not have something to pitch here if we don't tease this out a little more.

But to have that independence in our team to be allowed to fail in a kind of a secure way is really, think that there's something about that, you know, and all these, you know, sort of the Mach 49 line is these big corporations have all this talent internally, but how do you put them in a new situation to bring that out? And how do you empower that in a way that is trying new things? It's scary for people. Like you kind of have to

maybe select for a personality type that's going to be comfortable with that. I think that's part of the process. don't think everybody's going to thrive in that kind of insecure environment. But to build in the guardrails of you've got the support of the larger org, you've got all the benefits, you've access to a lot of different things, but then to keep a little bit of isolation to where you are allowed to experiment in a new way. And Lixwell is an amazing incubator for that because that's a core tenant of

There's like do the right thing, work with respect and experiment and learn. And those are like the three core tenets of any Lixol employee, any Lixol. Everything's based in these three things and experiment and learn is like my lifeblood. know, like this is, this is the magic formula. Of course, working with respect is equally as important and doing the right thing is equally as important, but like to be able to experiment and learn to this high degree with sort of, you know, the bigger, you know,

resources that you might be able to tap into if you need them, but then we have like the smallest budget, right? So we're trying to do a lot with a little. That's one of our core team tendencies. How do we do a lot with a little? And that is a design challenge of itself. Like how do I do a Kickstarter without a ton of resources? And you know, that's actually a really cool, like I've got a lot of stuff that I can do as a designer.

(: 54:33

You know, I can render stuff in key shot and create an animation and do an exploded view and play with all of the different like ways of, and I don't have to do photography. can do a render, you know, back shots. don't need to rent out a $50,000 studio. can sketch it up in Vizcom, render it exactly what I want, throw in the themes, like the, you know, the themes for a product that follow our brand language, which is even better. And then, you know, getting early sense of it's

this the right way for us or not. And then we can do the photography. So we actually are refreshing our photography right now. It's the same thing. Like, I mean, we just probably saved ourselves, you know, several months of hassle by kind of having a better plan at the beginning in a smaller way. And that was actually a big learning too, along the way of it doesn't have to be perfect. Like as a designer, I think we get perfectionitis. Like I struggled with this so much and our,

our venture lead, know, Atif is amazing. I'm like, Atif is incredible. it was like, Emily, you see how your stick figure prototype drawing got the same feedback as the perfectly polished one? I'm yes. And he's like, you would have spent another week polishing this, wouldn't you? And I'm like, yes. He's like, you don't need to do that. Get the ideas fast. Get a gut sense of where you're going and then keep going, keep going, keep going. Don't waste your time doing all this. And that was such like a like.

.

(: 55:59

In my brain because that was the opposite of everything that anybody had ever done in our career It always had to be exactly perfect all the time like this high level of crafter, you know You would never show an early idea scrappy. I do that for myself I would never show other people that let alone get feedback in a research session on it's like it's not that bad But it's you know, so I'm showing the black and white sketch for support fully polished render But that's the same idea doing a lot with a little you can learn

before going way, way, way far and then your sunk cost fallacy way down in the depths. Don't fall into that trap, you know, be more agile. And I think that was one of my biggest learnings actually with this whole thing is you can just really learn a lot with a little, like very quickly. Even the Kickstarter's a really, really good example of that.

But you've got a great kind of marketing person as well haven't you?

Yeah, so we've been building, that's kind of the exciting part of our team is, know, my core, you know, working with, as a designer, thinking through what is the customer experience? What is our customer experience from discovering us on social media, learning about us more through our website, clicking that buy button, getting it in their home, installing it, the install process, we spent a ton of time on like making that a simple, simple process. Again, it's very complicated, different pipes and conditions that you might run into. How do you make that seamless?

all the way into when you're using it. so finding good people in these different disciplines, Dan is a great example of our new social media manager, just like telling the story of Hydrific. We work with a marketing consultant now that I'm like doing marketing, which is, know, something I've always watched other people own, but now having the ability to say, well, how do we talk about this? How do we communicate this? And then working with a really good marketing consultant to help craft that vision. It's like, this is.

(: 57:49

This is amazing. This is so much fun. And then building a really wonderful UX team, like award-winning UX team, and just working with, you know, maybe more, again, smaller independent people versus big agencies. This is another philosophy of ours. We're working with maybe a little bit more independent or, you know, these smaller teams. And we're just like so close to it. And I think that's, I never had that before. I was never so close to.

our buyer is so close to our team, no silos. Usually I'm in like my own little silo, kind of desperately trying to talk to other people in other departments, like, hey, who's doing the packaging on this? You know, can we do this? You might get a little bit of that, but it's, we're in it. Like it's our team, you know, and somebody, know, Diana on social media is going to be talking to the UX team about stuff, right? We're not siloed, we're right there together. And that's...

There is one team on here.

cross-functional, that cross-pollination is so powerful because you're hearing things that you might not have thought about from another perspective. So like that diversity of thought, that diversity of getting, and it's not all the time, you know, you're on your job, you're doing your one particular thing, but then we have, you know, weekly and bi-weekly kind of different mashups with the team to talk about what we've been doing. And then you hear from, you know, wait, you're doing this. We're going to do this. Let's, you know, collaborate.

I think it can be scaled up inside of an organization. We're growing, so we're already figuring out, like, hey, how do we take what we had as a very small team and now do a much bigger team? So there's some growing pains there with figuring out how to do that, because I can't do everything our other team members can't do. We wore so many hats in the early days, but now it's more about focus and then how do we get people to focus and not lose that magic? But yeah, it's interesting when you talk about trying these different things. Did that work?

(: 59:39

Try it for three months, and then being, we call them retros, right? We do a retro and say, hey, what worked but didn't work in a constructive way. Like, this really worked well, let's do more of that.

Yeah, there's something there, on time, something to be said about kind of having that small kind of team mentality, but within a larger organization as well. We talked about it yesterday, I read Creating a Tink not too long ago, I took away too much on the podcast, but you know, that idea of kind of having each product as its own production or movie, you know, within the Pixar.

Yes, yeah.

and analogy there. But then pulling in externals from other teams. So good for those kind of weekly or monthly kind of brain trusts to critique and feedback on the product. Have that kind of sense of candor. So we're just trying to move forward in there and we're doing the best for the product. I think when you've got silos within bigger organizations, essentially you're done with your bit thrown over the fence. Yeah.

see it again.

(: 01:00:45

I said yesterday, so I am really disappointed with how the website turned out for that because they haven't touched it. So then it's having that regular touch points across the department.

Yeah, and it's cool. I really love to hear from, like if I were left alone to my own devices, things get weird, you know I mean? It's really helpful to have the balance of different ways that people are thinking through things because it's not just, our little team might be representative of a larger population that we're building towards. And if our team has, we call it dog fooding, you eat your own dog food, if our team has this question, you know people out there are gonna have this question. So it's really like, your own resources.

and they're going to have a really great team. Our team is such a cool team. We have a really cool studio office team culture and we're global. We have our team here in New York, a lot of our software teams in Finland, we've got people all over the place in Europe and elsewhere.

That's really cool. We're rapidly running out of I could sit here for hours and minutes talking you. But in terms of just final thoughts, what are you most looking forward to in the next six to 12 months?

That's all I have.

(: 01:01:54

Ooh, six to 12 months. my gosh, getting ready for CES again. What's next? We're doing so much stuff with this first product with Droplet here, and there's a lot of roadmap stuff to happen, but this is just the start. So there's lots to come here. We're having a lot of fun with working with creators online. We're sending these out for reviews for the first time to get some.

you know, real world, put it to the test. So I'm really excited to see that. But I think what I'm really excited about is like, it's not that this is done because this still, this is still going, but there's just the start. So I'm super excited about taking this and just like shh to the moon, know, so yeah.

Finally, I stopped asking this for a while, but I got told off by Jordan Lohmann last week for not asking. books or podcasts that you're reading or enjoying at the moment.

gosh, that's, there's like, I'm like constantly like research, like learning stuff. You know which one that I really liked, which is a little bit older now, How to Start a Startup series from Stanford, actually really good. It's old, it's apparently Sam Altman running it. I didn't even know, I didn't even know when we watched it. Yeah. But these are like seven, eight year old content basically, but still very valid at Stanford. But.

watching these early on starting, this gave me so many ideas. And it was funny realizing later that that was Sam Ong's like, ooh. Yeah, I know, I didn't realize. But there's a lot, there was something else that, you know, actually IDSA,

(: 01:03:28

at the time I was going all these stupid...

(: 01:03:41

IDSA in the US here has a Vimeo channel that's really good, with tons of like previous really recorded stuff. So I like to go on there and like just keep up with what's on there. I like to browse the forums online about topics. That's like my big thing. Stumble across something interesting. But yeah, I like to go to lot of meetups too, like not just like content online. Like I want to go out, there's like hardware meetups in New York. We're really lucky to have that here.

I time my trip here terribly because it was last week or the week before, wasn't it? was like tug week and design week. Yeah, I'll do better next time.

Yeah, definitely. Design Week's so much fun. Yeah, yeah. They're really, Christina, who actually has a podcast from MakeLab that's really good talking to other, like, design and people working in the hardware space. yeah, that's, you know, you just learn so much from other people trying to do, and we all have very similar. Yeah.

You go to the hardware meetup, Steve.

(: 01:04:40

you can just learn a lot from just watching somebody else's presentation or talking about what you've been up to and people like, we had the same problem. Here's how we fixed it. here's, here's our supplier that worked on that for us. And I think there's something to be said. It's, you know, it's tough and, you know, talking outside of design. The one thing I've been trying to do is doing like there's design and there's all this other stuff, entrepreneurial or hardware and women in robotics or whatnot. And just doing, just going out to different.

different events and things and talking to people.

Yeah, it's super powerful just getting out to the trade shows, going out to events, then site events and hardware meetups have just started like a few months ago in London. And yet you literally have a forum to talk other hardware geeks about the hardware you're producing. Talk about timing. There's one there like today, think in yeah.

cool!

(: 01:05:39

Yeah, there's just so much content online that's still incredibly valid from like a couple years ago. Like sometimes I'll just be on YouTube just searching for something else and I'm like, wait, what is this? What is this goldmine of information that's just like hanging out here with 300 views? Like this is incredible. Yeah. So I don't know. I like to stumble on stuff. Yeah.

Awesome. Well, Emily, it's been absolutely wonderful having you on the show. Thank you for coming out. Thank you. And joining me in this studio here. I'm looking forward to catching up later. Did ask you why,

Thank you. Keep asking why.