If your best ideas come to you in the shower, you might need a new way to brainstorm, given how record droughts are driving up water bills. Or, like Carlos Gomez Andonaegui, you could view the climate crisis as a market opportunity.
Back in 2010, he was CEO of a chain of high-end gyms in Mexico City. With 25,000 customers showering each day, Gomez Andonaegui found the company’s profits evaporating as a result of costly water bills. The low-flow showerheads he tried produced a less-than-premium experience. So he asked his father, a former engineer, to build a showerhead that would use less water without sacrificing temperature and pressure.
The 84-year-old Emilio scaled down a fluid compression nozzle used in rocket engines to do just that. To improve on his father’s creation and bring the product to a larger market, Gomez Andonaegui joined up with co-founders Philip Winter and Gabriel Parisi-Amon.
Their first investor, Tim Cook, funded two years of R&D ahead of the Kickstarter launch of Nebia in 2015, which immediately resonated with customers, raising $3.1 million. Today, Nebia’s production and marketing partnership with Moen has put its low-flow showerheads in about 100,000 homes, which the company says has saved its customers nearly half a billion gallons of water. As for Nebia’s next planet-saving mission? Bidets.
From the October 2022 issue of Inc. Magazine
