New Packaging! Feedback Requested :)

[harjms]

@Chris - Got it. I was thinking you were indicating an Inovelli product only hub.

[Eric_Inovelli]

@harjms

You’re going to need to hire more @EricM_Inovelli if you want to create a hub…

There’s no one like the GOAT lol!

@DataMeister

With everything in that previous post it kinda sounds like you are wanting to imitate Fibaro’s design and marketing style, while still being unique.

I do like them for sure – I think if I had to choose another brand that does it well, it’s Aeotec. For some reason I find their products aesthetically appealing and I like their style.

@Chris

So let’s play that game. Everyone knows what a smart switch is and what its feature set is (remote on/off, timers, voice assistant control).
So maybe put on the box ‘Smarter Switch’? Or ‘Smartest Switch’? Immediately implies that this does more than a normal smart switch. And maybe if you have a Micro Center with a shelf full of ‘smart switches’, having one called ‘smarter switch’ will inspire a curiosity like ‘why is that one smarter than the others?’. Hopefully enough to make the shopper pick up the box and read about the features.
‘Smarter Switch’ might be trademarkable too.

Yeah totally – this is what we were going after with the hype video you referenced – “Next Generation of Smart Switches”, which hopefully implied that there are normal switches and there are the next generation of smart switches. Love the idea of smarter though!

@Chris

I think you should go for ‘evolution’ as your theme. I think the first 10 seconds of your Next Generation video illustrates this PERFECTLY- generations of light switches, each a bit better than what came before.

LOL – if you watch the MacBook Pro video from above, you’ll notice we took some inspiration here

@Chris

Yes exactly, that’s why you should keep the flap (especially at only 20c/box). Outer box captures customer attention. Inner flap closes the sale with ‘here’s why this switch is the next evolution of switches, here’s what it will do to improve your life’. Examples like ‘is the garage door open? LED bar is red!’. It’s the value prop pitch to the consumer, what this switch can do for you to make your life better. And it’s (secondarily, through wording choice) a lifestyle pitch, about how with this switch you won’t have to worry about things like whether garage door is closed or alarm is on or whatever you choose.

Fantastic, I agree! Why would you choose a status-quo switch, when you can have one that is a lifestyle switch which makes things easier for you?

@Chris

I also think you should mention that the config button can do scene control here. Have arrows pointing to the parts of the switch- paddle up is kitchen light on, paddle down is kitchen light off, config button is under cabinet light on/off (requires hub compatibility and additional LED strip module sold separately). Or paddle up is kitchen light on, double tap paddle up is all 1st floor lights on, triple tap paddle up is all house lights on, config button is movie mode (light dim, TV on, fan off, etc). The config button is one hardware feature that sets you apart from all others. Use it.

I remember when we were in NYC with the agency that worked on designing our site and overall branding and one of the things that stuck with me as we were out enjoying way too many Old Fashions, was that one of the guys said, “you need something that distinguishes you from the rest” – think of Apple, you know when you see an Apple product, it’s an Apple product. Same with cars – you can generally tell the style of car manufacturers.

Once you have that, “distinctive asset” (Kellogg words… sorry for going corporate), market it hard so when people see it, they know it’s you. This is where the inspiration of the LED bar and config button came from. I think @OverneathCreative nailed this in the Fan/Light video’s intro where it teases these LED bars and shows how awesome they look.

@Chris

For Inovelli- I suggest versions should ONLY apply to the branding name (red series dimmer), NEVER the model number. So right now you have Red Series Dimmer (v2), model LZW31-SN. If/as/when there’s a V3 with 700 series chipset and even more features, it should be branded ‘Red Series Dimmer (v3)’ model LZW41-SN (or whatever).

Interesting take – I see your point. I think we looked at it more as what cars do in that the models are always the same, except it’s a 2019 or 2020, etc, Gen 5. I know we changed the model # for the Gen 1 vs Gen 2, but that was because we change manufacturers and the, “N” stood for our old manufacturer’s name whereas the, “L” stands for the new manufacturer’s name.

@Chris

Packaging wise- this is the thing that should go on the sticker near the barcode. IE, ‘Red Series Dimmer V2, Model LZW31-SN, Firmware 1.47’. Front of the box can just say Red Series Dimmer or Red Series Smarter Switch, keep that clean.

Agree.

@Chris

I agree. Red series has a strong consumer value prop. If you can make that work for a consumer that only has a Google Home or Amazon Echo, you will sell a ton of them. IMHO, right now one of your biggest barriers to mainstream success is that the value / ease of use / overall user experience of your product depends significantly on the capability of the hub the consumer uses. Make it work as well with Google/Alexa as it does with HomeSeer or SmartThings, and you have something huge.

Nailed it. This is our biggest struggle and opportunity. It’s been a challenge for 4+ years to pack all this technology into a product and then bundle it up into a marketing campaign that explains what we do to the novice user. I think we’re finally getting there, but another challenge is the hubs haven’t been able to keep up and most of them you need to piece together code to really unlock the features and this is something the average person does not want to do – just ask this guy who was a treat to talk to on Reddit, but he brought to life the problem with products that have a lot to offer, mainstream hubs, and lack of control from our end to control the environment.

That’s where a license agreement with someone who’s open to us tweaking their firmware and UI to make our products work out of the box will hopefully come in handy.

@Chris

I’d love to see it if you can share.

Happy to share – I’ll PM you. Anyone else who is interested, I’m happy to share as well.

@Chris

I’d caution you about only putting an aesthetic spin though- you don’t want to dilute your brand. Inovelli to me represents functionality and capability far above the average. One thing you guys do that (to me at least) hurts the brand a little is the RGBW bulb firmware- no ramp rate control (and a very slow factory ramp rate). Compare RGBW’s parameter list with Red series and it’s night and day. Red series = ‘this is a Swiss Army Knife product that will do almost anything I can think of’, RGBW = ‘this is a barebones product that works well but doesn’t do some things that I’d like it to’.

Yeah, this is such a good point and it’s one that has haunted us – this and the 4-1 Sensor. We were at a point where B2B companies showed interest in these and the manufacturer was wanting us to sell them. Add that to the fact that we didn’t have the extra money to innovate and pay for our new ideas yet and we went with a white-label. Big mistake and very off brand. In order to add firmware tweaks to these products, they would have to be re-certified and that costs a decent chunk of change, so we just went with the stock firmware.

Major lesson learned there for sure and my gut told me not to do it initially as what’s made us successful is the innovative firmware and more recently innovated hardware (Gen 2 switches). Lesson is… trust your gut. We could’ve waited out a few more months and had the Fan/Light and another innovative item (Project BFF or Windy City).

@Chris

For me, flexibility is what I love. If I put Red dimmers everywhere, they will (due to your great firmware) do any use case I need. I have a Red dimmer on an outdoor floodlight, 700ms delay off, ramp time 0, basically working as a Black on/off switch, but it matches the other switches and it means I don’t have to future-plan what I want to do later while installing it now.

Awesome, this is great to hear – one of the things we were shooting for was to capture as much of the market as we could with the Gen 2’s – especially the dimmers. Neutral and Non-Neutral market… Aux switch and dumb switch market. I literally didn’t think it was possible, but the engineers pulled it off (6 months late, but who’s counting?) and we hit a home run with them. They’ve outsold our Gen 1’s 3-1 and our Gen 1’s sold a ton. Combine that with the great community and we have unstoppable firmware that accounts for 99.9% of what people could want.

@Chris

Hubs also have an 80/20 type problem in a few ways. Making a Z-Wave hub that does basic control and scheduling isn’t difficult. Making it flexible/powerful enough to deserve the Inovelli name, while still simple enough that anyone can use it, THAT’S hard and the entire hub industry has struggled with that balance for a long time.

Yes, exactly – this is quite the challenge and quite the vetting process with existing brands.

@Chris

That said, I think an Inovelli hub (or even a basic Inovelli sponsored hub) as an idea has some merit, if only so you can make an ‘installer starter kit’ with a few dimmers and switches and a hub that an installer can buy for $500 or whatever and smart-ify a home. ZigBee will help with this… throw a few switches and an Echo in a box and you have a winner.

I’ll send over that pitch deck… I think we’re on the same page

@DataMeister

While also making it cheap enough. I think hubs from Fibaro and Zipato both come pretty close to achieving simple and flexible/powerful, but then they want $500+ for the hubs.

Yeah exactly – we were talking to a European Hub Company not too long ago that offered a lot of the bells and whistles (no local control… boo) but they were going to sell it for $300. It has an amazing UI and lots of partnerships and a great community, but that’s a tough mountain to climb in the US where you have established brands selling for $75 and other more powerful hubs selling for $130ish. Very difficult to compete there, even if you had the best hub, the DIY market isn’t going to pay a premium if the story isn’t compelling enough and even then, most of what I’d ever need to do can be bought for $75-$125.

@Chris

That could actually be a good branding split- iLumin are white label products, solid and vetted but not ultra feature packed. Inovelli are products developed by Inovelli, complete with 50 parameter options and ultra functionality

Full disclosure, we plan on eliminating the ilumin brand and just sticking with Inovelli. We originally launched it to protect the Inovelli brand in case the bulbs flopped, but luckily they didn’t. Also, the vibrant colors didn’t seem on brand for Inovelli at the time, but I think we can pull it off now

[Chris]

@Eric_Inovelli

LOL – if you watch the MacBook Pro video from above, you’ll notice we took some inspiration here

Haha yes, never saw that one before. However for the evolution shots at the beginning, your video is better IMHO, mainly because of the music… the buildup suggests something big is coming, then the audible ‘let me introduce to you’ with visual ‘the future’. I just don’t like how the music stops at 0:19 and kind of peters out. I think it should stay strong for the whole rest of the ad. I hope someday you guys recut that, music stays stronger to the end, and focus on what the switch can do for the customer rather than what the switch can do. IE instead of ‘make life more colorful’ (which sounds aesthetic), show a couple 0.5-1.5 second examples of it in action. I think that ad is about halfway to being a true masterpiece…

@Eric_Inovelli

I think @OverneathCreative nailed this in the Fan/Light video’s intro where it teases these LED bars and shows how awesome they look.

Agreed. And the notification examples are great too.

@Eric_Inovelli

I think we looked at it more as what cars do in that the models are always the same, except it’s a 2019 or 2020,

Yes but cars have model numbers too. A 2020 Honda Accord LX has a model number like CV1F1LEW. 2019 Accord Sport is CV1F3KEW. They’d never do CV1F3KEW v2.
I think like cars, there end up being 3 identifiers:

• The general product name (Inovelli Red Series Dimmer / Honda Accord)
• The specific product name (Inovelli Red Series Dimmer v2 / 2020 Honda Accord LX)
• The model number (LZW31-SN / CV1F1LEW).

Just like the car, most customers won’t care too much about the exact version / model #, other than to know they are getting the latest one. But you should make them intuitive. A minor tweak to product design should have a minor model # change, IE LZW31-SN2 would be if a minor hardware improvement was made. A whole revamp like switching to a 700 chipset should have a new model # IE LZW41-SN.

@Eric_Inovelli

That’s where a license agreement with someone who’s open to us tweaking their firmware and UI to make our products work out of the box will hopefully come in handy.

Agreed. That also IMHO is one of the biggest advantages of making a ZigBee powered Red dimmer- you only have two targets to hit (Google and Amazon), and if you can hit those dead on you have a perfect customer experience for literally millions of potential users.

@Eric_Inovelli

Yeah, this is such a good point and it’s one that has haunted us – this and the 4-1 Sensor
…
we didn’t have the extra money to innovate and pay for our new ideas yet and we went with a white-label. Big mistake and very off brand.
…
my gut told me not to do it initially as what’s made us successful is the innovative firmware and more recently innovated hardware (Gen 2 switches)
…
Full disclosure, we plan on eliminating the ilumin brand and just sticking with Inovelli. We originally launched it to protect the Inovelli brand in case the bulbs flopped, but luckily they didn’t.

I don’t think you should. Something being popular doesn’t mean it’s true to brand. I like the ilumin bulbs and will probably buy one or two more because they are functional and cost effective. But with their current firmware, popular or not, your gut is right- they aren’t up to the Inovelli standard and shouldn’t be brought under the Inovelli brand.
The bulbs make money and you’re going to keep selling them, right? I think you should. That’s where iLumin is perfect. Expand and do other white label products, just make the distinction with the branding. But keep them out of Inovelli. If a customer has to look up which products are ‘true’ inovelli and which ones are white label, that dilutes your brand a lot.
If anything, I think you should expand iLumin. Find other white label products, that you can vet and make sure are good, and sell them under the iLumin name. Thus the main brand is protected, but you can still make some money on volume of white label products without the R&D upfront.
Only reason not to do it (maybe) is areas where it cannibalizes your main product line. For example, I suggest don’t sell an iLumin dimmer switch, even if it is a white label without Inovelli industrial design. OTOH, Steve Jobs once said ‘if we don’t cannibalize our own product line, someone else will do it for us…’

@Eric_Inovelli

We could’ve waited out a few more months and had the Fan/Light and another innovative item (Project BFF or Windy City).

That is one valid reason against the white label- if getting white label / iLumin to market distracts your team or the manufacturer from the core mission of Inovelli products, that’s a Bad Thing. If I could rewrite history and kill the smart bulb but have a Project BFF in hand right now, I’d push that button without a second’s hesitation.

@Eric_Inovelli

Awesome, this is great to hear – one of the things we were shooting for was to capture as much of the market as we could with the Gen 2’s – especially the dimmers.

Actually that gives me another idea- a recipe book. This would be a PDF document of several pages, with family friendly illustrations, that takes a Red dimmer, puts it in several use cases around the home, and shows which options one would configure to do that. I stumbled into this on my own ‘heyyyy… if I just tweak the configs I can put these everywhere with no forethought and they do everything!’ but a recipe book would help push that message. For example: Patio floodlight. Rarely needs dimming, except when we set up the projector and watch movies. Set options: default ramp rate zero, local ramp rate 5 seconds, delay override enable. Result- pushing up or down instantly turns light on/off, but holding dims the bulb. Have a bunch of those with some pretty pictures. On the front page, put something like ‘The Red dimmer is the most flexible light switch on the market today. It can be the right switch for almost any application, removing the need to select different switches or dimmers for each location. Here’s some ways you can use it…’

@Eric_Inovelli

the engineers pulled it off (6 months late, but who’s counting?) and we hit a home run with them.

To quote the great Shigero Miyamoto- “A late game is only late until it ships. A bad game is bad until the end of time.” While that’s not quite true anymore now that software updates are a thing, the principle still holds. A late product is only late until it ships. Once it goes out the door, customers forgive you. A product that goes out the door bad kills the customer’s trust, and that’s hard to recover from even if it’s fixed later.

[kreene1987]

@Eric_Inovelli

President of Snacks

Best. Title. Ever.

[jladmin]

Wow, such great feedback on so many levels - great job everyone.

Inovelli has premium packaging for online sales, solid boxes with easy and complete instructions unlike many competitors who provide a link to a website. I use the different parts of the boxes as drawer dividers. From what I understand premium packaging can increase the price of a product, if removing the switch cover (which I never use because all my switches already have them) and using a nice but colorful box (HomeSeer has a great simple box) reduces the price to make them more attractable to consumers then I am all for it. To me a flashy box says the company cares more about the box than their product which I know if not the case; I am a Inovelli fan all the way and support their efforts.

I have a mix of Inovelli and HomeSeer switches, both great products.

I am mostly excited about the possibility of purchasing these at a retail store like The Home Depot or Lowes - would buy more often until the entire house is done.

Again, great feedback everyone.

• J

[jmason888]

@Eric_Inovelli

The mixture of sales are about 65/35 Red vs Black,

I wonder how that mixture would be different if the Red dimmers hadn’t been out of stock for forever and a day. I bought some Black Series stuff because I needed some Inovelli NOW!!! Otherwise everything would have been Red Series; spending the extra $7 is a no-brainer.

[jmason888]

@Eric_Inovelli

I wonder if the same would apply to the 4pk (ie: can we remove faceplates?)

You could remove the faceplates from the 1packs as far as I am concerned. 95% of the switches in my house are in 2-gang or larger j-boxes… If only I could remember to break off the heat-sync tabs BEFORE turning the power off.

[vreihen]

Ditto on dropping the faceplates to save a few Yuan on each unit’s cost. My DW/WAF has artistic skills, and every switchplate in our house is a one-of-a-kind masterpiece that matches its room’s decor.

On a related note, you have no idea how tempting the plain white paddles on the switches are for someone who only sees them as a blank canvas…

[anon14959390]

That’s cool. I’d love to see some examples!

[mgreenb561]

I definitely got my 10000 steps in at the Walmart looking for an example. This is the best i could find, but any variation will make you stand out.

There was comment about not listing Z wave. From my personal experience, during my (ongoing) learning curve, when I pick up a box in the store, my first mistake in home automation was going the less costly route of wi-fi. So as I’m morphing away from wi-fi, when I’m looking in a store at items, I need to see a clear distinction that it is NOT wi-fi. I can tell you specifically when shopping for a (yes) SMART lock last year, I could have a box in my hand for a few minutes before I could figure whether or not it was wi-fi. Yes, I could be described as anal (I prefer pragmatic) but I think if I pick up a box, it is important to know what it is

[Melerann]

@Eric_Inovelli

The key to the 10pks success is that it eliminates the fancy packaging, eliminates the extra faceplates, and eliminates the extra instructions, which allows us to give a better discount. I wonder if the same would apply to the 4pk (ie: can we remove faceplates?)

Yes, if you sent a 4 pk I would not expect faceplates, jumpwires, connectors or extra instruction manuals.

@Chris

Inovelli has shown no interest in building hubs or apps or clouds, and I think doing so would only be a distraction for them.
ZigBee makes sense becuase it’s like Z-Wave, just with slightly more compatibility issues but a much bigger target market.

Didnt even think of the cloud side, I know some chinese companies who would offer thier apps up, but that defeats the cost saving purposes.

@Eric_Inovelli

Yeah, I think I’m coming back around to the flap idea – especially as we just found out it will only add $0.20 per package, so that’s a win in my book. I thought for sure it would be $0.50+. It will also have a magnetic strip on it to keep it closed.

Juste a nerd moment. You want any cost investment to have at least a 3x ROI. So at $0.20 a pack, it would take 140 sales to equal the cost of 1 black on off switch, So as long as the upgrade would net you one additional sale every 46.6 units (140/3). You would have a 300% ROI. So assuming one customer at Home Depot finds your switch and then buys 3 switches, you would just need 1 extra person to find and be sold by your product per 46.6 customers.

@Eric_Inovelli

Yeah that’s a great call-out – I like putting the community on there as you all are more credible than a marketing video

Its what apple does in its Mac vs PC commercials! Maybe you could do Zwave vs Zigbee? Then if they are really good maybe the Zwave alliance would offer some subsidies? (JK those guys probably wouldnt give anything).

@Eric_Inovelli

@Melerann

Dang… that is an awesome package!

I know right?! One day Inovelli…

@Eric_Inovelli

Hmmm… what about all 7?

Lol dont be greedy.

@Eric_Inovelli

I take a lot of inspiration from Apple and it’s a love/hate relationship I have with them. I absolutely will never buy an iPhone as I love Android, but I have a MacBook and will not go back to Windows.

I suppose all leaders have thier flaws… I guess we can accept your macbook.

@Eric_Inovelli

NET: Our brand should portray passion, innovation and mystique.

I assume you mean in that order?
Passion and Innovation do make sense. Apple goes for Innovation first and Presitge second. But i think if you read “How to Fascinate” by Sally Hogshead You might get some ideas for the marketing side with that one, its one of the best branding books I have read!

@Eric_Inovelli

Yeah, definitely – I think one of the things I took away from my job at Kellogg was that I had two different bosses… one that made me feel like a COG in the machine, and another who allowed me to make a difference and put me in front of the decision makers. My Director was amazing at allowing everyone to chime in before she spoke and the President of Snacks was the same way and that stuck with me.

I know the feeling. My day job was completely just to be the highest paid Cog i could be, but the leaders in my life stick with me.

@Eric_Inovelli

It is unfortunate that the big 3 (Amazon, Google, Philips) do not support Z-Wave, so we do need to start adding a secondary protocol to the mix (to be clear, we are not abandoning Z-Wave as there still is high demand from a B2B and B2C standpoint for Z-Wave due to its security). When we heard of CHIP, we thought, bingo – all the main players are in on this and we can start developing ZigBee as CHIP will use the same chipset as ZigBee and it would only require a firmware change if someone wanted to switch from ZigBee to CHIP and we could do the same once CHIP launches. If it doesn’t ever launch, at least we’d have ZigBee that works with some of the Amazon Echo’s and ties into Philips Hue.

Makes sense. Is companies like Philips or Amazon willing to have cross-compatibility out of the box? So you could share thier hubs/Echos?

@Eric_Inovelli

We want to become the Ring of Lighting. Ring went in and disrupted the security space by allowing people to do it themselves. There are only a few brands that are innovating in the lighting space and we hope (once the right investor comes into play) we can do the same. We have some pretty amazing ideas.

Sounds ambitious, how are you avoiding just making a better mousetrap? It seems your making an awesome Smartswitch, but it still is a smartswitch you have to have some electrical experience to wire in. I know its a limitation of the System itself, but I think thats the biggest hurdle keeping you from the masses.

@Eric_Inovelli

You haven’t seen our pitch deck lol jk – while we’d love to build a hub, we’re finding it would take 1-2 years minimum and while we believe we could build the best on the market, we’re likely going to license someone else’s technology, but put our spin on it from an aesthetics standpoint.

Makes sense, I think hubs are where the big money is, since you get more control of your product and other groups. Everyone sucks up to smartthings after all.

@Chris

So let’s play that game. Everyone knows what a smart switch is and what its feature set is (remote on/off, timers, voice assistant control).
So maybe put on the box ‘Smarter Switch’? Or ‘Smartest Switch’? Immediately implies that this does more than a normal smart switch. And maybe if you have a Micro Center with a shelf full of ‘smart switches’, having one called ‘smarter switch’ will inspire a curiosity like ‘why is that one smarter than the others?’. Hopefully enough to make the shopper pick up the box and read about the features.
‘Smarter Switch’ might be trademarkable too.

The “Smarter Smartest Smart Switch, Smarter”

@Chris

Hubs also have an 80/20 type problem in a few ways. Making a Z-Wave hub that does basic control and scheduling isn’t difficult. Making it flexible/powerful enough to deserve the Inovelli name, while still simple enough that anyone can use it, THAT’S hard and the entire hub industry has struggled with that balance for a long time.
That said, I think an Inovelli hub (or even a basic Inovelli sponsored hub) as an idea has some merit, if only so you can make an ‘installer starter kit’ with a few dimmers and switches and a hub that an installer can buy for $500 or whatever and smart-ify a home. ZigBee will help with this… throw a few switches and an Echo in a box and you have a winner.

I honestly think it might be best to see what kind of hub is missing from the market before trying to add one. You cant go more DIY than Home Assistant, and you cant go more User-Basic than Hue. So something that fits between Smartthings and Hue might be a good start.

@Chris

Agreed. $500 for the hub wouldn’t fly. Should be closer to the $100-$200 area.
Maybe the answer is take a white label hub, and specifically call it the Inovelli Basic Hub- core feature set only, don’t focus on working with everything, mostly white label firmware, but brand it in such a way that’s obvious it’s not a feature packed product. That could work. Or perhaps use the iLumin brand for that.

Except as soon as the Smarthome world knows you have a crappy starter hub, any other hub will probably get rejected. I was just thinking a Hub that does our switches amazingly, and then is open source for other things might work well. So the expectations are set. The real money in Hubs isnt in the hub itself, its in getting to control the market and the consumer to a degree.

@Eric_Inovelli

Yeah totally – this is what we were going after with the hype video you referenced – “Next Generation of Smart Switches”, which hopefully implied that there are normal switches and there are the next generation of smart switches. Love the idea of smarter though!

You could try to coin “Intelligent switches” or if your feeling Ballsy “AI-Powered Switches”

@Eric_Inovelli

Interesting take – I see your point. I think we looked at it more as what cars do in that the models are always the same, except it’s a 2019 or 2020, etc, Gen 5. I know we changed the model # for the Gen 1 vs Gen 2, but that was because we change manufacturers and the, “N” stood for our old manufacturer’s name whereas the, “L” stands for the new manufacturer’s name.

If you want to take a note from apple. Stop with model numbers. Apple won the race in part by calling its computer the “Apple II” instead of VAX-11/780, TRS-80 Model 1, or any other complicated name. Amazon follows this by simply calling its products “Amazon Echo Plus” or “Amazon Echo Dot”.

@Eric_Inovelli

@Chris

That said, I think an Inovelli hub (or even a basic Inovelli sponsored hub) as an idea has some merit, if only so you can make an ‘installer starter kit’ with a few dimmers and switches and a hub that an installer can buy for $500 or whatever and smart-ify a home. ZigBee will help with this… throw a few switches and an Echo in a box and you have a winner.

I’ll send over that pitch deck… I think we’re on the same page

One thing I would add would be super-simple DIY instructions. Like IKEA ones with words too.

@Eric_Inovelli

Full disclosure, we plan on eliminating the ilumin brand and just sticking with Inovelli. We originally launched it to protect the Inovelli brand in case the bulbs flopped, but luckily they didn’t. Also, the vibrant colors didn’t seem on brand for Inovelli at the time, but I think we can pull it off now

Let us know before you kill them!

Thats all for now

[mgreenb561]

Well, DUH, on my kitchen counter…,…

[Thtry]

I know it was requested in the roadmap thread, but do you have any updates on products? I’m specifically looking for the Zigbee switch and other Zigbee products. Do you have any dates?

[Melerann]

Welcome @Thtry!
View the Roadmap as a 2002 Garmin GPS Roadmap. So the dates are more targets than concrete days. I know its coming soon though! @anon14959390

[anon14959390]

Ha ha. This actually made me lol. @Eric_Inovelli can verify.

We will keep the new products coming @Thtry!

[Stephen]

Here’s a few thoughts that I have:

• In regard to flap vs no flap - I think a flap showing the product has the potential to make the sale. There are a lot of crappy looking bulbs and switches that look ok in rendering, but in person look ugly. I won’t name names, but there’s one switch that I bought from another brand that I knew would look different than a standard paddle, but in the photo looked like it would be “ok”. Immediately upon opening I saw that it was more curved of a paddle, rather than how it appeared to me in the photo. Having a flap to see the product might help people realize how good these look compared to a regular paddle switch – that’s a huge reason for me I’ve continued to buy them, and one day will likely replace the aforementioned other-brand with Inovelli’s.

• In my opinion, wifi stuff is picking up fast. Whilst I personally don’t like it, and continue to build my zigbee/z-wave network, I’ve had a few conversations with people who started smart-home projects and were unfamiliar with the concept of the hub. I think that the z-wave plus logo on the front would be a good indication that it is not wi-fi, with perhaps small text that says “Compatible hub required.” This might prevent frustrations with people who buy the product expecting it to be wifi if that’s all they know of.

• I agree with the comment that “powered by inovelli” is confusing. No offense intended but in my mind, my switch is created by Inovelli, but is powered by Hubitat. Powered by being in my mind used as a term for the backbone.

• I find that Red vs Black online chart to be invaluable when forgetting the differences between the two (especially when I’m recommending inovelli switches to someone else). I think it’d be very handy to have somewhere on the packaging.

• This may sound silly, but when I first saw the signatures inside the box, I immediately thought it was cool. It helped me show how tight of a company it was, and it helped me realize who I was supporting by purchasing inovelli - it wasn’t a big faceless company – it was individuals. Of course, if you’re going retail, I’m not sure if that’s what you want, but I’m not a marketing expert, so I have no idea – but I thought I’d still mention that It was just a “neat” moment for me seeing it inside. However, the project name did throw me off at first.

• Finally, I voted for blue. The reason for the blue was simple, I think that the red looks off in color, and makes the bulb look cheap because the color doesn’t seem vibrant. It gives me doubts about the ability to produce accurate colors. I’d like to see the blue more vibrant, but to me it looks more like a color someone would select, versus that red which feels more like a color someone would settle for when trying to achieve a red. For what it’s worth, I love the color red, and gravitate to it in a lot of situations (maybe that’s why I’ve only bought “Red Series”? hahaha).

[DataMeister]

@Stephen

I agree with the comment that “powered by inovelli” is confusing. No offense intended but in my mind, my switch is created by Inovelli, but is powered by Hubitat. Powered by being in my mind used as a term for the backbone.

Another analogy might be does it make sense for Dell to sell computers that are powered by Dell? Not really, but it does make sense if they are powered by Windows or powered by Intel processors. I think of “powered by” as an indication of a smaller chunk of technology inside the larger whole. The smaller chunk can’t be named the same as the larger whole.

[harjms]

@Stephen

powered by Hubitat

Powered by electricity. Features implemented with a hub.

[vreihen]

Powered by 100% recycled electrons…

[Melerann]

@vreihen

Powered by 100% recycled electrons

Powered by electromagnetic force used in a way that may not have been originally intended.