Moen's CMO and Head of Innovation Interview

There's a lot to be excited about. In the last few years we've won three innovation awards at CES, which for a company that's a legacy company 80 years old and in our industry it's not really all that usual to happen, so we feel very good about that. But this year is really the best ever because it's the first time we've ever been able to create a water network that can control, conserve, and personalize water throughout the entire home. It's never been able to be done before. It really comes back to the acquisition now of Flow, fully nested within the Moen team, and the ability to take that brain that the Flow product enables us to have the smart shutoff connected with a smart faucet to do things that have never been able to be done before. So really our product this year is the smart water network, not any of our individual products, which are also great, but it's really how they all work together and talk to each other to create experiences that have never been provided before by anybody.

Water is a network, you just don't think about it in the same way. Pipes are running all throughout your home, and there are really great things that come from that, like easy access to water anywhere you want it, and there can be really bad things that come from that, like leaks and floods that are really terrible for your life. We felt like the big opportunity for Moen was, as the leader in our space, to figure out how to actually treat water as a network, where every water experience is brought together so we can control, conserve, and personalize water in every way possible, even to the outdoors of the house where you might find irrigation is being used. So we want to know every single use of water there is and we want to improve that experience for the home.

At CES several years ago, we actually met Gabe and his father Henry, and they had the startup Flow company. It was a perfect knitting together of where we wanted to go strategically and what they were developing technologically. So we did an initial partnership, and now it's a full acquisition just recently completed, so they are now fully a part of our company. Gabe could not be here today for health reasons, he's fine, but it's great to have Gabe and others from the Flow company now in our company helping us really raise the game on taking what was a single product and turning it into something to help us build out the smart water network in the home.

Absolutely. Smart water shutoff uses algorithms to read water signatures and looks for anomalies that are then read as events that need to be prevented from happening. Flow by Moen allows you to not only read those anomalies but also to understand where water is being used across your home. It'll tell you a faucet is using this much water, the shower is using this much water, giving you information and enabling you to control your water experiences much more intelligently, conserve water where you don't realize how much you're actually using, and get more smart about it. It also allows you to connect all the other smart products across the home, so the smart shutoff will talk to the smart faucet, and that creates benefits that have never been able to be done before. Let me give you one example. A lot of people are afraid of frozen pipes in their home. What they don't know is it's a real thing. It's hard to say because I'm from Los Angeles, I've never experienced that, but I know what happened. Last year at this time Texas was going through a freeze, and you don't think of pipes freezing in Texas either, but they do. Water expands in pipes, which is why the pipes burst. If there's too much water remaining in the pipes and the pressure drops, then it freezes, the pipe's going to burst when it unfreezes, and water is going to be everywhere. The smart shutoff talking to the smart faucet, for the first time ever as of like this week, they are speaking to each other.

Everything. Flow is connected to the smart water network, and the smart faucet is connected to the smart water network. Flow reads an event — there's a freeze, it's freezing, there's a certain temperature it can sense, and it's also reading pressure in the pipes. If it senses that, it will automatically open up the faucets so the water will pour out and purge from the pipe, so the water does not remain in the pipes and have a risk of freezing, expanding, and bursting. Those two products talking to each other enables that benefit and that security for the homeowner, which has never been able to be done before. So it's a unique time in our industry and frankly in smart homes, because water is such a big part of the home experience. We're very proud of what the teams developed.

This is the Moen smart faucet with motion control, a next iteration of our smart faucets. It's so smart that you can literally manipulate anything you want with the water just by using your hands. You swipe left to make it hot, swipe right to make it cold, swipe up to make it warm, and press to shut it off. You don't touch it ever; it's literally reading your hand motions and controlling temperature and on and off with your movements.

You know, water metaphors — we do a lot of those and they're really painful sometimes. It certainly got kicked into gear with COVID when we realized how touchless was really catching hold during the pandemic.

All of these products come together in the Moen smart water network app. Of course at CES you have to have an app, but the app is really critically important because it's the place where you control all these water experiences and customize them, pre-programming things like wanting my kitchen faucet to give me this degree of water and this amount for my recipe, for my plants, for my whiskey, whatever I want my water to do. When you put it all together in this app, it allows benefits like burst protector which keeps your pipes from bursting, winterizing your pipes if you're going away from home, automatic prevention you can set and forget. Health protect, if you're walking away from your home for several months and want to make sure the water is not sitting still in your pipes causing bacterial issues, will purge the pipes ahead of time so the water is fresh and moving through your pipes, getting rid of any of that gunk. Here on the app we have two devices: our Moen smart faucet and Moen smart water shutoff. I'd like to demonstrate real quickly how they work together to create benefits never seen before. On the app we have a mode called winterize, and it will talk through the Moen smart water network to purge the line through your smart faucet and prevent water from bursting in your home.

Absolutely, always. There are automatic notifications if you have freeze events, pressure issues that you can monitor from anywhere. Let's say you wanted to turn something off — where would that be? Every one of these things is individually enabled and also collectively enabled, that's why it's the network itself. If I wanted to do something with the faucet, this is giving you information on what's going on with your kitchen: what kind of use is going on, day, week, month, year, your presets. So if I know exactly the temperature of the baby bottle I want, the amount, if I have a cooking recipe for exactly how I make my favorite dish with the right amount of water and temperature, it's all pre-programmed here, controllable through your voice or simply through the app.

It's a good use occasion of how the technology brings people into a better experience.

Thank you.