Yoke Har Lee: Showerdome Invention going full steam ahead

Chief Executive Officer of Showerdome, Maurice O'Reilly, pictured with an early prototype of the showerdome. Photo / Alan Gibson

A boiling kettle was the inspiration behind Showerdome, a product that promises to reduce the problem of bathroom condensation.

In 2004 Ken Evans was waiting for a glass kettle to boil, when he noticed that while steam was coming out of the nozzle, there was no steam above the waterline inside the kettle. It occurred to him that steam was created only when moist hot air collided with the cooler air outside the kettle.

Inspired by his observation, he designed a plastic dome to deal with moisture in his shower.

Evans' friend Maurice O'Reilly was at dinner when he saw the dome's potential. O'Reilly recalls: "I could see the instant commercial application Ken's invention would have. Worldwide, people are always dealing with issues of mould and mildew in showers."

O'Reilly rallied financial support and found an angel investor, and after a year of research and development the Showerdome was ready for the market.

"We made prototypes and fitted them over showers. We tried many materials and ended up with a high-quality acrylic. We needed a material that was UV-stable [because many showers had skylights]."

The material needed to to be moisture-resistant and strong enough to span the shower. The system also had to be flexible to fit varying shapes and sizes of showers

Evans, who is 69 and retired, is still busy inventing in his shed, and says he still can't understand why showers are built with a big hole at the top, allowing condensation to form.

"When I go to home shows, it is nice to hear customers say, 'This is the best thing we ever bought'. My wife epitomises this as well, she says to me when we go travelling, 'Can we take the Showerdome with us?"'

In its early days, Showerdome Ltd could not get the trade interested, O'Reilly says: "That was our greatest challenge. It was a new and unique product that no one knew anything about. People were used to the idea of fitting an extractor fan in their showers.

"When we approached bathroom suppliers, they didn't want to talk to us. So we started taking our product to home shows, and sold directly to home owners. Word of mouth spread quickly. The sales gave us enough capital to start advertisements. In the fourth year, we started advertising on television. We invested time in educating consumers," O'Reilly says.

It was only recently that the company managed to place its product in Mitre 10 and Plumbing World stores.

Instead of trying to cast a wide net to begin with, Showerdome kept its focus on the Tauranga area. "This was to allow us to go into the area to solve any problems we might face. We then moved on to the wider Bay of Plenty area. When we were fully confident we had the product fully performing, we moved our focus to Auckland."

O'Reilly, who has spent years in marketing and management roles, is familiar with the pitfalls that prevent many inventions from ever seeing the light of day.

"Many inventions have potential. But inventors usually end up with a small share of the business success because they don't want to show their inventions."

Pat Costigan, chairman of the Inventors Trust and an entrepreneur with a dozen patents, reckons only about 5 per cent of inventions that are known to the trust make it through to the commercial stage.

Many are not well thought out, and inventors often lack the skills needed to marry their creative ideas with the reality of getting financing to build a full-fledged business, Costigan says.

The Showerdome went to Australia over two years ago, but didn't initially achieve the impact hoped for. A new master distributorship deal is in the process of being sealed with one of Australia's biggest home improvement companies, which O'Reilly hopes will help propel sales.

Showerdome has also travelled as far as Ireland, after the company was approached by a Kiwi living in that country, looking to sell the product there.

There have also been inquiries from South Africa and North America, which O'Reilly hopes will mean further inroads into other export markets.

There are already about seven million showers in New Zealand, and O'Reilly says statistics from the shower manufacturing industry show that about 120,000 new showers are installed every year. "There is a lot of potential for us."

To prevent the Showerdome from being replicated, the company has invested money in gaining copyrights and trademarks for the product.

As a growing company, Showerdome faces the constraints of financial resources, O'Reilly says.

"One of the major challenges smaller companies face is being undercapitalised. There never is enough money left until many years down the track."

The company, he says, is lucky it has managed to run on shareholders' resources.

Showerdome still has its share of doubting Thomases, but also ardent converts. "Ninety-nine per cent of those who have had a Showerdome installed will never live without one again," O'Reilly says.