Founded in 2003, Tokyo-based BALMUDA refers to itself as a creativity and technology company that creates home appliances and other products designed to deliver " thrilling and wonderful experiences ." Last year they entered the US market with products such as The Kettle and The Toaster. A toaster is perhaps one of those things that isn't usually described as being thrilling. But BALMUDA The Toaster is one beautiful toaster, and according to Monocle Magazine it has become a sleeper hit around the world. (The company went public last December in Tokyo and its share price is up nearly 80% at the time of writing this.) It has a special steaming technology that keeps bread moist on the inside and crispy on the outside. What you do is add 5 cc of water to the toaster before heating it up and that produces a thin layer of steam within the appliance. I never knew that my bread needed this, but clearly it does. Watching the latest movie from The Minimalists has taught me nothing. I hope these guys start shipping to Canada very soon.
One of the big questions for this year is about whether or not work from home (WFH) and work from anywhere (WFA) policies are going to stick following this pandemic. It's something that I mentioned in my 2021 predictions at the beginning of this year because it is something that would obviously have a massive ripple effect. So today I thought that it would be interesting to look back on data and articles that were published prior to 2020, before everyone really started prognosticating about the rise of fully distributed workforces.
What is clear, at least from census data, is that working from home was on the rise before COVID-19, but that it still only represented a relatively small percentage of the overall workforce. The numbers are significantly higher if you consider people who maybe occasionally worked from home, but for those who were 100% remote, it was estimated to be only about 5.2% of the US workforce in 2017 (~8 million people), about 5% in 2016, and about 3.3% in 2000. But the question still remains: Now that many/most people have had a taste of the increased flexibility, to what extent will it stick?
There's a ton of research out there about the impacts of working remotely -- covering everything from productivity to morale. But one takeaway that makes intuitive sense to me is that WFH/WFA flexibility is perhaps best when two things are present: 1) the employees already know how to do their job really well and 2) the work that these employees are doing is fairly independent.
The corollary to this is that remote work is probably not the best environment for newer and younger employees who would benefit from being around other more experienced people, and for situations where collaboration among coworkers and outside humans is essential for the job. When I think of the job of a real estate developer, I would place it high on the collaboration scale. Building a building involves a full orchestra of people that all need to be playing in sync. Personally, I find that easier to do when you're sitting across a table.
My belief continues to be that we are are greatly exaggerating the extent to which work is going to disperse in the short-term. I recognize the trend line that existed prior to this pandemic and I recognize that some jobs are perhaps well suited to decentralization. But I think we will continue to see real limits on how much of this sticks as we move past this moment in time and into 2022.
Toto announced a new product this month at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) called the Wellness Toilet. It won't be available to consumers for at least several years, but the plan is for it to do two key things to improve overall health and wellness. It will scan your body when you sit on it and it will analyze your poop. (Not urine?) It will then make recommendations via your smartphone about how you might start to make better life decisions. Presumably this will include being more active and eating better. This, to me, feels like an obvious way to innovate around the toilet. If it were available today and it actually worked, I would likely be an early adopter. Either way, I look forward to hopefully including this in future development projects.
The WELLNESS TOILET uses multiple cutting-edge sensing technologies to support consumers' wellness by tracking and analyzing their mental and physical status. Each time the individual sits on the WELLNESS TOILET, it scans their body and its key outputs, then provides recommendations to improve their wellness. There is no additional action needed, so people can easily check their wellness throughout their daily routine, every time they take a bathroom break. They will see their current wellness status and receive wellness-improvement recommendations on a dashboard in an app on their smartphones.
The residential bathroom is the perfect place to support people's wellness for a variety of reasons. First, although there are a number of other products that track individuals' wellness (e.g., wearable devices), it is more convenient to monitor and analyze the body as a part of the everyday routine act of using the WELLNESS TOILET, to which individuals are accustomed. Second, toilets and people have two unique touchpoints that cannot be found elsewhere – the skin and human waste. The WELLNESS TOILET is in direct contact with individuals' skin when they are sitting on it, and it analyzes the waste they deposit -- a wealth of wellness data can be collected from fecal matter.
Image: Toto
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Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly.
