Dear friends of Nebia,

We wanted to let you know about our recent progress and the final price for the Nebia Shower System. When we launched our Kickstarter campaign 19 months ago, we were a small team with an ambitious dream: re-invent the shower experience to make it better for you and better for the planet. We knew our H2Micro technology could do just that. We were inspired when so many of you believed in our dream and pledged to help us achieve it. It’s been a long road since; of continued research, product design refinements, and building partnerships with vendors. We only have one shot if we want to change what society expects out of a shower — and we don’t expect changing a deeply rooted habit will come without some resistance.

If you closed your eyes while taking a typical shower, you wouldn’t be able to distinguish who built it. For the past 100 years, the plumbing industry’s extent of innovation has been to introduce new finishes. Polished nickel for the new year? Groundbreaking. We turned the experience of water on its head. But we didn’t stop there, we also re-imagined the overall design and mechanisms of a shower from scratch. Some of our greatest innovations were envisioned before our Kickstarter campaign: the 25” sliding arm that doesn’t require knobs or buttons, the Wand, and an iconic design. More great ideas came after our campaign: the Magnetic Dock, the improved 10 minute self-installation mechanism, the first of its kind sustainable PVC-Free hose, the pressure regulator, the cleaning caps (all of these ideas came while taking a Nebia, of course!). Some other companies may have saved these enhancements for the second version of the product. In the spirit of exceeding your expectations, we incorporated them to the first version of the Nebia Shower System.

When you are building a product and a company, you quickly realize how many decisions have to be taken every day. What materials do you use for over 150 parts and the packaging? Where do you source them? How many cycles and how much stress do you put on them during reliability testing to make sure they perform to your standards for years to come? How do you make sure that your team is excited for the challenges of the day? And how do you set out the building blocks for your business to have the longevity for which you strive? Many decisions have to be made every day and the values by which we abide have been our compass:

Excellence: Build a product that exceeds expectations in every way. For Nebia to have a meaningful impact on the world, we have to create products that are simply great and stand the test of time. We are motivated to do the impossible (or what was thought impossible) by our dedication to quality. Excellence is the product of perseverance. We do not take shortcuts, we do not overlook any detail, and we do not compromise at any point.

Responsibility: We are conscious that building a product inherently creates an environmental footprint. With every decision we make, we try to minimize that footprint. Sustainability is at the heart of everything we do at Nebia and will be for years to come.

These values are present through every facet of our operations. We have spent months selecting talented and thoughtful U.S. partners for the sourcing of our materials and manufacturing of our product. When possible, we have carefully chosen recyclable materials for the Nebia Shower System and its packaging. For instance, Nebia is also the first shower product in the world to use a sustainable polyvinyl chloride (PVC)-free hose. Even now, we are dissatisfied with how much material is used in our packaging, and we are actively working to reduce it further.

When we were preparing to launch our Kickstarter campaign, we knew the Nebia Shower System would be expensive to build correctly and we estimated the initial MSRP at $399. Since then we have made numerous decisions to enhance the product and deliver an even better overall experience.

We believe sustainability also means financial sustainability. We are grateful to the incredible group of investors who share our vision and values, they have been paramount to our initial success. But going forward we won’t rely only on them for our growth. Companies must build products that their customers love. This is what provides long-term viability. This is what makes innovation thrive. This is what fuels us. We will continue to invest in meaningful innovations to deliver you more exceptional products.

To date, we have pre-sold over 15,000 Nebia Shower Systems to our existing community and we will continue ramping up production to fulfill these backorders over the next 4–5 months. During this time we will gradually increase our pre-order price to reach a final price of $699 by the time that we are shipping on-demand this summer. For those of you who have already pre-ordered a Nebia, don’t worry your price will not change. And for those of you considering purchasing a Nebia, the current price of $399 will remain available for another week until Tuesday April 4th.

The true value of the Nebia Shower System

When looking at the cost of a new shower it’s important to note that Nebia is a shower system and not a shower head. Shower heads are static and provide just one point of spray. Whereas, shower systems come with an overhead spray, a hand held spray, and a sliding rail — and typically cost between $300 and $1,500. Shower systems offer a more enveloping and luxurious experience, but they require drilling into the wall and breaking tile, which means hundreds of dollars for plumbing and contractor work, not to mention the headache of all that work. With Nebia, you will be surprised at how easy it is to install by yourself, it takes on average 10 minutes. You can easily take it with you if you move to a new home and it doesn’t require any drilling into the wall. Finally, significant water and energy savings mean that the Nebia Shower System starts paying for itself with every shower you take. Below we have outlined the cost of ownership of a typical shower system versus Nebia during the first year.

Want to estimate the savings in your home? Check out our calculator (nebia.com/calculator)

The decorative plumbing industry is fraught with price distortions and multiple middlemen that devalue both the product and the consumer. We want to change this, and believe we can provide the best value at a fair price by creating a direct relationship with our customers. The typical shower system is produced by a major brand in a factory in Asia, who then sells it to a national wholesaler, who sells it to a regional distributor, who sells it to a showroom, who sells it to you through a contractor or designer. This means that the price you pay as a consumer has been marked up as much as 6–8x the cost of production. By cutting out all of these intermediary steps and selling directly to our customers we are able to provide a vastly improved product at a fair price.

How Nebia will reach every corner of the world

My co-founder Carlos and I met through a non-profit in Mexico called Endeavor, and naturally our first instinct for developing Nebia was to focus on parts of the world where water scarcity and sanitation are life threatening issues, in parts of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. We planned to develop a solution that would be extremely affordable and could be distributed to the hundreds of millions of people living in poverty. I had previously worked on a composting toilet system that did just that. However, the more research we did the more we realized that we had to start at the other end of the market if we were going to create a movement with truly global scale. Much the way that Tesla has ushered in an era of electric vehicles by starting with a small group of early adopters before moving into more mainstream segments, we plan to push the entire industry towards a sustainable standard. The technology behind atomization is expensive, so we decided to start by creating a premium product that made every aspect of the shower better. As we scale our technology over time, we plan to create new products and new solutions that can reach the entire world.

The planet is going to swell from seven and a half billion to ten billion people over the next 30 years. It’s absolutely paramount that as a society we find innovative ways to use water more efficiently. At Nebia, we plan on pioneering this new wave of innovation.

Let us be clear, the Nebia Shower System is the first of its kind, and we believe we’ve built the best product possible. There will be more. Over time and with scale, we will continue to make this technology more affordable.

If you decide to be a part of this movement, know that someone on our team has thought deeply about every single touch point you will have with the Nebia Shower System, designing your experience to be anything but ordinary from start to finish. Our early customers have equated Nebia to being the closest thing to having a spa within the comfort of their home.

Thank you as always for your continued support in our movement!

Philip Winter, Co-Founder & CEO — Nebia