Ex-Amazon engineers put heads together to create ‘Tandem Shower’ and raise $525K on Kickstarter

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The Tandem Shower, from Seattle-based Boona, delivers the capability to very easily set up dual showerheads managing off the exact drinking water line. (Boona Image)

Brett Skaloud and Jeff Feiereisen equally labored on some of the most slicing-edge technologies ever developed at Amazon, with specific concentrate on helping to start out the company’s cashierless Amazon Go advantage merchants.

The engineers have now released their have startup and the very first solution is a dual showerhead termed Tandem Shower. Aspect of the attraction of the contraption is the skill — if you’re into that type of detail — to invite a close friend to shower with you. And no, that friend is not a certain Amazon AI.

“We each labored at Amazon, and I was contemplating, ‘Should we convey to persons that we labored at Amazon?’” Feiereisen laughed. “Because they are gonna be like, ‘Wait a next, are there solution cameras or microphones? I really do not want an Alexa showerhead in my toilet!’ We really do not want that possibly. Consider me.”

Feiereisen and Skaloud’s Tandem Shower is way less complicated than the components that held them hectic at Amazon. And they say reaction tends to be very humorous, mainly because the notion of showering with each other is a bit taboo.

But it’s cleaning up on Kickstarter, the place a crowdfunding marketing campaign released previous week has currently lifted $525,000 from 2,400 backers as of Friday.

Brett Skaloud, left, and Jeff Feiereisen are the co-founders of Boona. (Boona Photograph)

The genesis for the plan arrived during a dialogue on shower behaviors and individual interactions between the two mates. Feiereisen reported he appreciated taking showers with his companion, but admitted to sensation guilty about getting a warm h2o hog. Skaloud said he was significantly less of a fan of showering with his wife for the reason that he was caught in the chilly all the time and that he was staying pressured to put in several showerheads for the duration of a rest room remodel — an enterprise that can get instead costly.

The two adult men did some quick research and arrived absent shocked that a very simple, affordable alternative experienced not presently been mass made. So they constructed a fast prototype and decided that it delivered a great practical experience.

Their new company is identified as Boona, and though Tandem Shower is the first solution, the hope is to style and design long term products and solutions — in the bathroom and somewhere else — that can assist persons greater link.

“We are definitely intrigued by anything that can assistance folks, aid couples get closer, have far more present discussions or just strengthen interactions,” Skaloud mentioned.

In a testimonial video clip on the Kickstarter page, just one girl states the encounter of making use of Tandem Shower with a companion made twin showering “more like what you see in the movies and not the actuality that we all know” of a person person getting left shivering.

The device can unquestionably be utilised by one man or woman, as the two co-founders spoke to the de-stressing mother nature of getting surrounded by hot drinking water whilst showering by itself. Whilst a Tandem Shower for two may use significantly less h2o than two individual showers, a Tandem Shower for just one would not be so economical.

A foundation presenting of the products on Kickstarter, offered in a few diverse hues, is promoting for $249 and features the Tandem Shower as well as an more showerhead. It can be put in in “just 10 minutes.” But shipping won’t take place right until early 2023.

The success of the campaign, with 24 times of crowdfunding nonetheless to go, has caught Feiereisen and Skaloud by shock. A TikTok movie that randomly mentions the product as a component of a “genius companies” collection has 6 million views. Feiereisen and Skaloud admitted it’s a little bit “overwhelming and stressful” as they reply to hundreds of concerns from would-be potential buyers and ponder how to keep the momentum going.

And which is a diverse experience from what they professional at Amazon, even though functioning on tasks that were fundamentally startups inside of the tech huge.

‘It’s absolutely interesting to go from very innovative electromechanical gadgets, reducing edge perform that took lots of, a lot of, numerous several years and countless numbers of people today and billions of bucks … to this.’

Feiereisen was at Amazon for 4 several years as an engineering supervisor who managed components enhancement for one element of Go stores. He was at Microsoft for a few a long time before that. Skaloud spent 7 years at Amazon doing work as a components style and design engineer on Go and as a mechanical engineer on Scout, the company’s supply robot.

“Being in a position to have the inventive flexibility and generate the product or service is really refreshing,” Skaloud stated. But having “infinite money” at Amazon manufactured matters a bit easier, and there was excellent appeal to operating on higher-tech principles.

“It’s surely fascinating to go from really refined electromechanical products, reducing edge function that took a lot of, quite a few, numerous years and thousands of individuals and billions of pounds … to this,” Feiereisen reported.

But portion of the journey has been mastering that not everything is as basic as it seems. The two men have experienced to find out a great deal about advertising and marketing, promotion, product layout, how to communicate with customers, and how to get the job done with administrators and actors to make a movie.

“If nearly anything, it is taught us so significantly empathy on commencing a organization,” Feiereisen mentioned. “If very little will come of it, other than just a enormous amount of empathy, and a excellent practical experience, we’d be pretty stoked. But so much, the signals appear to issue toward there may well be a authentic business below.”



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