Nebia by Moen
A San Francisco-based startup is trying to help save the world, one shower at a time.
All kidding aside, Nebia is no joke. The 5-year-old San Francisco-based startup touts Tim Cook as its first private investor, developed a following in the tiny home community and is hailed by reviewers on YouTube. Their rise to shower fixture fame has been covered extensively by the journalistic elite, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Architectural Digest and Time.
In 2015, the company’s first Kickstarter, for Nebia 1.0, raised a whopping $3,126,114 from 8,559 backers. Last year, its second campaign, for 2.0, garnered more than $1.9 million from 4,640 backers. By comparison, the average successful campaign on the creative invention fundraising site secures about $23,000 from roughly 100 backers.
Today, Nebia’s founders launched their third Kickstarter to fund their newest project, a showerhead co-designed by Moen priced at $160. Nebia 2.0, their luxury model, is still available on their website, though it’s currently on backorder.
They’re on a mission to reduce the amount of water used and wasted by showerheads, without sacrificing the comforts of powerful water pressure. The average 10-minute shower uses about 20 gallons of water, but Nebia reduces it to seven by requiring just .75 gallons of water per minute. The company pledged to save 1 billion gallons of water globally by the end of 2021.
Nebia by Moen
It all started in 2012 when Carlos Gomez Andonaegui (now a Nebia co-founder) wanted to reduce water consumption in his chain of high-end Mexico City health clubs, where 25,000 patrons were washing off from their workouts each day. Andonaegui consulted his 84-year-old father, a retired engineer, who found atomizing water nozzles used in industrial applications, like rocket engines, through a search in Google.
Andonaegui then paired up with Philip Winter, an American doing nonprofit work in Mexico City, who was formerly employed by a company that made water-free composting toilets for flood-prone areas in developing countries. They ordered the parts for the atomizing nozzles from various international vendors online and put their creation together in Andonaegui’s father’s garage. The result was a micro-droplet shower head, similar to a steamer, that created 10 times more surface area of spray while using 70% of the water of an average household shower.
It was around this time that Andonaegui and Winter envisioned a brand they wanted to become the Tesla of household products. In 2014, the pair relocated to San Francisco, where they met Gabriel Parisi-Amon, a mechanical engineer with a specialization in thermo-fluids who was working in iPhone development at Apple. Winter invited Parisi-Amon over to his place to take a shower (how else are business relationships forged?) and he was soon a third co-founder.
“When I moved to San Francisco to launch a shower startup, most people looked at me kinda funny,” Winter said. “But every once in awhile someone would see it and say, ‘Wow, this is brilliant.’”
The trio’s creation was accepted into Y Combinator, the prestigious seed accelerator known for launching the likes of Airbnb, DoorDash and Dropbox, in 2015, and shortly after, through a chance encounter, they received private investment from Apple’s legendary leader Cook.
Meanwhile, the 60-year-old Cleveland-based faucets and fixtures manufacturer Moen was another early backer, and in 2018, its parent company Fortune Brands’ CEO Nicholas Fink flew out to San Francisco to meet the Nebia team - and take a shower in their office.
"It blew me away,” Fink said of the shower. “They had re-imagined the showering experience and made it even more immersive, modern and better for the planet. I knew that we had to do something together.”
Nebia by Moen is now available for pre-order on Kickstarter and promises to provide twice the spray coverage while saving 45% of water compared to a standard nozzle. And while $160 may still be a far cry from “affordable” for many (some models sell for $10 at Home Depot), Winter and his co-founders say they did not forget their original intention - to make sustainable plumbing fixtures accessible to the masses.
Plus, the calculator on the Nebia website shows that the average family of four in New York City, for example, taking 9-minute showers each day will save $338 per year using a Nebia fixture, so the price is recuperated quickly, Winter pointed out.
“We want to be known as the company that brings attention to innovation and sustainability when it comes to water,” he said. While there’s no shortage of genius taking on energy, from the likes of Tesla, Solar City and Nest, “when it comes to water there isn’t any single company that carries the flag.”
