NVA Startup SmartStall, Inc. Completes the Touchless Restroom Experience
The wave of a hand locks and unlocks individual stalls for a safe, private and sanitary experience that helps drive upkeep efficiencies and boosts customer satisfaction
The COVID-19 pandemic forced hundreds of millions of people to change the way we look at the world when it comes to the cleanliness of public facilities as well as our own personal sanitary practices.
Social distancing and fist-bumps replaced what had previously been a close contact world – virtually overnight. Work from home directives, masking requirements and vaccine mandates generated a crisis the likes of which we hadn’t seen for decades.
But with every crisis comes opportunity, or so the ancient Chinese proverb goes.
The story of SmartStall, a fast-growing Auburn New Venture Accelerator company founded by Samuel Ginn College of Engineering graduate Wynn Gamble, is a perfect example of how turning crisis into opportunity can be a promising foundation for new business success.
The NVA sat down with Gamble to catch up on how he got here, the incredible progress he and his team have been making so far, and to get a glimpse into what’s next for this emerging leader in safe, sanitary and cost-effective public restroom design, construction and operation.
Locked Down, Locked Out
NVA: Before we get into what you do and how you do it, can you tell us how a mechanical engineering student at Auburn finishing up his degree online as COVID-19 raged on came to invent SmartStall.
Gamble: Like millions of students across the country, we got kicked off our beloved Auburn campus and sent home, in my case, to finish up my senior year online. So, there I am, back home in Birmingham at my parents’ house, finishing up while studying for the GRE, with more time on my hands than I knew what to do with.
One day I was reading about how Shakespeare wrote King Lear and Macbeth during the quarantine period of the plague and how Uber was founded during the ‘08 Financial crisis. I was encouraged to spend my time with purpose and make good out of a bad situation. I started off looking into touchless payments – I even came up with some diagrams for initial products – but soon found out that there already were a lot of players in the touchless payment space, and a lot of innovation.
That was true in a number of other markets as well, where touchless technology was well-covered with impressive applications by multiple, well-financed competitors.
But there was one market that struck me as not only large, but also one that had already incorporated touchless technology across many aspects of the design, development, production and maintenance supply chain:
Touchless technology for public restrooms.
NVA: I don’t think I would have ever guessed that public restrooms would be at the forefront of touchless technology innovation.
Gamble: And yet, it is – and has been for 20 years.
Think about it, the toilets and urinals flush automatically, the sinks dispense soap and water with the wave of a hand, as do the towel dispensers and hand dryers. The only roadblock to a completely touchless, sanitary, hands-free restroom experience remains the stall itself.
And so I thought to myself, “Why is that? It must be a hard problem to solve.” The combination of power issues, sanitation issues and functionality issues struck me as exactly the kind of engineering challenge I like to take on given my mechanical engineering roots.
What I soon discovered was that the United States lags far behind Europe, Australia and Asia in terms of how they perceive what the restroom “experience” should be. Europeans, for example, come here and think our bathrooms are disgusting.
What’s more, I found that many in the American restroom facilities marketplace really just copy what the designers in international markets do
NVA: Let’s get into your solution – what it is, how it works and what the reception to your first prototypes has been.
Gamble: Our initial product line – the Hytm Lock system – is a hands-free smart lock for any restroom cubicle. With just a wave of your hand, the door locks, providing secure personal hygiene and physical security protection. Wave again to unlock, and the door swings open with ease, allowing for a no-touch exit.
Take a look at the video here: https://www.smartstallus.com/. Scroll down to see “How it Works” as someone walks into the open stall, bumps it closed with her hip or elbow, for example, and the door closes shut. All she had to do then was to wave her hand across the device on the inside of the stall door and it locks in place
When she’s ready to leave the stall, she simply waves her hand over the lock and the door opens automatically based on a gravity-based design that requires no motors or other complex mechanisms that can fail. Nobody wants to be trapped in a stall.
There’s nothing like it out there at our product’s level of technical sophistication that leverages the exact “touch points” required to ensure a hands-free – and, hence – safe and sanitary – restroom environment. There are other, much more complicated and ultimately cost-prohibitive “solutions” pegged at meeting this final component of complete restroom sanitation and safety. We believe in the simplicity and elegance of our solution powered by the technology we’ve developed.
NVA: But that’s just the start, right? While customer hygiene and satisfaction are important foundational benefits, there are a whole host of other reasons why washroom companies are interested in your solution and approach. Can you talk a bit about those?
Gamble: One reason bigger customers are so interested in our system is that the lock can wirelessly connect to the central facilities management system to collect and send usage and safety data on a stall-by-stall basis – how many times each stall has been used, how long someone has been in a stall, etc., in case there is a medical emergency.
With our fully connected system, you can notice that “hey, this stall has been locked for 30 minutes. Something’s wrong.” Whether it’s either at a school and someone’s having a bad day or someone’s had a heart attack. The live status option is critical.
With SmartStall, you can now tell how many people are using restroom stalls and at what times. How much traffic do we have? When is it a good time to clean and when is it not? How much toilet paper has been used?
And then there’s data that the plumbing companies can use to schedule critical system maintenance. They need to know how many times that toilet’s been flushed so they go in and make sure the seals are tight and all that – on an individual stall-by-stall basis.
This optional feature also comes into play in high traffic locations like airports where the availability of stalls can be displayed outside the restroom signaling stall wait times during time-critical experiences.
NVA: Where are you in terms of getting your initial product in the hands of customers? Can you give us a sense of who those early adopters are and how that critical process is going?
Gamble: Ultimately, our goal is to serve the washroom industry. Thus, we are working directly with washroom cubicle and equipment manufacturers and distributors. We’re currently partnering with firms on three continents and have more across Europe, Asia, Australia and the U.S. who are putting the Hy Lock through its respective evaluation and testing processes. It is important to note, though, that the entry point – the purchase decision point – is different in different markets.
In some markets – Australia, for example – the specs everything involved in stall design, production and installation. In other markets, like the U.S., these various responsibilities are handled by different vendors.
The locks are easily retrofitted to almost any stall design, allowing us to serve users in restrooms throughout Atlanta for over a year now. Yet our primary goal is working with our industry partners to primarily target new buildings and full restroom renovations.
NVA: How big can this market get for you?
Gamble: That depends on the geography, as I mentioned.
But our research indicates that Georgia Pacific, one of the leading providers of paper towels, soap dispensers and air hand dryers, has alone sold over a million dispensers over the past ten years, almost exclusively in the U.S. According to research, builders make way for about one dispenser per sink. For every sink, there are about 1.5 stalls. The same facilities that want all touchless dispensers are the same ones that want fully hands-free restrooms.
For every $1.00 spent on workplace-based disease prevention medical costs drop by $3.27 & absentee costs fall by $2.73. – Harvard School of Public Health
So, some rudimentary math, going forward we can see a total available market here in the U.S. of approximately one to two million SmartStall units over the next 10 years.
A Compelling Business Model
Gamble also pointed to Bradley Corporation, one of the world’s largest commercial washroom technology and products companies and their annual survey of public restroom handwashing behavior. The detailed data these surveys provide are guiding SmartStall’s projections and development plans.
70% of Americans are more likely to return to a business with touchless restroom fixtures.
– Bradley Corporation
“One of the most interesting facets of the research Bradley does is what they’ve learned about how touchless fixtures and clean restrooms drive business,” says Gamble. “That makes sense, because as we all know, if we walked into a restroom at a restaurant and it was less than sparkling clean, we wouldn’t want to eat the food, right? We might never come back.”
“And the data shows that with an exceptional restroom experience comes higher tenant satisfaction scores, which helps drive higher rents for office buildings,” continues Gamble. “The top three requests from customers year in and year out, in varying order of priority are cleanliness, well-stocked materials and ‘make everything touchless.”
“The SmartStall HyTM Lock system directly addresses all three,” notes Gamble.
The Bradley survey also consistently reveals that 70% of Americans are more likely to return to a business with touchless restroom fixtures, and 60% of Americans use paper towels or clothing as a shield with doors and faucets that are not touchless.
“Then there are other markets where it’s essentially a health-focused decision, such as in an oncology unit or anywhere else, really, in a hospital. It’s very clear why you want hands-free.”
“You go into the Emory Winship Cancer Center, you wave the main restroom door open. You walk in, and every single fixture is touchless except the restroom stall. When the best of the best struggle to complete the touchless technology loop without your solution, you know there’s a pressing need.”
To find out more about Wynn and how SmartStall is changing the touchless restroom experience through innovative, Auburn University, New Venture Accelerator-grown technology, visit SmartStall or contact Wynn at wynn.gamble@smartstallus.com.
To learn more about the New Venture Accelerator visit click HERE and/or contact Lou Bifano, Director, at loubifano@auburn.edu