Cleaner Air for All – Smart IoT enabled air purifiers

Clair redesigned its air purifier service using SAP’s Human-Centered Approach to Innovation. Clair is leveraging SAP Internet of Things and SAP Cloud Platform to launch a new data-driven service that customers love.

Air pollution is a growing problem in 80% of the world’s mega cities according to the World Health Organization.  Polluted outdoor air seeping in to the home also compounds the problem of air pollution generated from indoor cooking, resulting in poor household air quality that affects the health of its inhabitants.

Clair is a fast-growing startup based in South Korea that manufactures and sells air purifiers.  The company is globally recognized for its filter patents that produce higher filtration efficiency than other existing filters.

The air purifier market in Korea is highly competitive with low-priced producers at one end and big brand conglomerates at the other. To innovate on their existing service, Clair partnered with SAP AppHaus to redesign their business model through a customer-centric approach.

The project began by focusing on the customers. Designers from SAP AppHaus, industry experts from SAP Korea, and members from Clair gathered at the AppHaus to define their target customers. By empathizing with the end-users, SAP designers helped Clair define four personas: early/late adopters aged between 20 and 30 without kids and early/late adopters aged between 30 and 40 with kids. The participants identified what a regular day in the consumer’s household looks like, their lifestyle and their tech-savviness etc and then quickly came up with initial ideas for new services.

Are we solving the right problem? To answer the question, Clair needed to hear first-hand from their customers.

Clair and the SAP designers visited seven households to interview and observe the users in their homes. By deeply understanding them, Clair found out how customers actually used their air purifiers, their pain points and needs related to the product. From the field research, the team brought back over 500 pictures that delivered key insights.

The next step in the “Discover” phase, SAP designers and Clair gathered at the AppHaus to interpret and analyze the field data and translate them into insights.  They then created user journey maps describing the needs, pain points, emotions regarding the use of air purifiers. Incorporating intelligent technologies, Clair rapidly iterated on ideas and redesigned their business models that better fits their customer needs. During the workshop, two prototypes were developed and visualized into detailed service scenarios and service blueprints.

The final result of the co-creation journey was an IoT enabled air purifier and a customized filter subscription service that runs on SAP Internet of Things.

Using Clair’s smart air purifier, customers can easily check the indoor and outdoor air quality real-time and see when the next filter replacement is due. Customers will receive alerts and can order new filters with a one-click-deliver scenario.

Moreover, with the customer data collected, Clair will be able to offer predictive maintenance for their devices by reading and analyzing the data transmitted from the sensors.  Furthermore, Clair may improve user experience through feedback from customers by leveraging SAP Qualtrics.

After the successful co-innovation journey with SAP, Clair is one step closer to achieving its vision ‘Clean Air for All’. Clair is excited to be the first to market with predictive filter subscription service in Korea and expand to other subscription sales opportunities in the near future.