Quirky and GE cook up a smarter, prettier air conditioner
Quirky is more than just bendy power strips these days — recently, it's been pushing its vision of the connected home thanks to a multi-million dollar partnership with GE. So far their deal has yielded stuff like intelligent egg trays …
Context & Ripple Effects
Quirky's move from bendy power strips into a GE-branded air conditioner is the first visible product of the multi-million-dollar partnership the two companies struck, which had until now produced small-ticket novelties like intelligent egg trays. The 'prettier' half of the pitch tracks a deliberate shift inside the company: since bringing on former Frog Design executive Doreen Lorenzo as its President in October 2013, Quirky has been leaning harder on professional design judgment layered over its community-submitted ideas.
First-order effects
- GE gains a fast, community-sourced design pipeline for its appliance lineup, with the air conditioner moving the partnership out of gimmick accessories and into core home-climate hardware.
- Quirky gets its first test of whether crowdsourced product development survives the cost, safety, and service demands of a big-ticket appliance rather than a sub-$100 gadget.
Second-order effects
- The story's unusually broad same-day pickup — Wall Street Journal, Quartz, TechCrunch, CNET, Gizmodo, The Verge, AppleInsider, and Co.Design all carried it — signals that the connected home has crossed from gadget blogs into mainstream business and design coverage.
- Other major appliance makers are handed a template to react to: pair with an external design community rather than staff up internal connected-product teams, or risk looking slow next to GE's cadence.
Third-order effects
- If the GE-Quirky structure holds, incumbent manufacturers increasingly treat crowdsourced design firms as outsourced front-end R&D — the manufacturer keeps factories and distribution while the partner owns idea flow and industrial design.
- Each such pairing also deepens the smart-home fragmentation problem, as every manufacturer-community alliance ships its own app and connectivity approach before any cross-brand standard settles.
The trend: Legacy appliance manufacturers are borrowing external crowdsourced-design platforms to build connected products, rather than developing them through in-house R&D alone.