It’s a chilly Sunday morning. You pour yourself a cup of tea, curl up in a cozy blanket, grab a book, read a few pages, and take a sip only to find that it’s gone cold. This letdown is precisely why Ember–an L.A.-based startup that makes temperature-controlled products–designed its latest offering: the Ember Ceramic mug.
The smart mug, which was designed by Ammunition, connects to your phone through Bluetooth and allows you to set an ideal temperature for whatever you’re drinking (up to 145 degrees Fahrenheit). Once the beverage reaches that temperature, the mug will maintain it. (After two hours of sitting idle, the cup automatically goes into sleep mode as a safety measure, but if you keep moving it, it’ll keep the drink warm.) On the outside it looks just like a regular cup, but beneath its unbreakable double-walled stainless steel and ceramic exterior, there’s complex tech making this seemingly simple feature work. Four sensors embedded inside relay temperature info to a microprocessor in the cup’s base, which tells the heating element to crank it up or dial it back. To recharge the cup–which is hand-wash only, obviously–simply rest it atop the included conductive coaster.
“It’s the Tesla business model,” Clay Alexander, CEO of Ember, says. “We launched with a premium product. [The travel mug] had a digital screen and phase-change cooling–it’s space technology in your hand. At $150 it had amazing sales, but it hit a ceiling.”
In the future, Alexander wants to make temperature-controlled plates, glassware marketed to mixologists and cocktail drinkers, and serving ware. He and Ammunition are currently developing a baby bottle, which they expect to be the next product Ember brings to market. The key to making this successful is to augment existing product archetypes and add technology to them without letting that technology take anything away from the original experience.
For example, Ammunition and Ember went to great lengths to make sure the edge of the cup felt exactly the same as a regular ceramic mug. The size had to be the same, as did the weight–even the sound the mug makes when you set it on a table. The cup’s base is actually plastic–to let the Bluetooth signal reach your phone–and has the same texture as the rest of the cup. When industrial designer Martin Gschwandtl received the first prototypes he noticed that it sounded like a plastic sippy cup hitting a table. To “correct” the sound, he added a rubber ring at the base, which also prevents the cup from scratching tables and offers a recess for the metal conductors on the cup’s bottom.
One morning, I poured my coffee into a regular cup at my apartment and started catching up on emails. After I got through that day’s inbox, I took a sip and discovered that my coffee had gone cold. What surprised me most about Ember’s ceramic mug was that I missed it when I didn’t have it. I wanted my dumb old mug to be smart–and I don’t consider myself a gadget person.
“We see many many companies trying to introduce technology into everyday products to be disruptive,” Matt Rolandson, a partner at Ammunition, says. “For our part, we have a rule that we’re stubborn about. When it comes to adding tech to everyday life, we don’t want to do stuff that will make things difficult or more frustrating. If it doesn’t amplify–and maybe augment–what you already expect in that moment, it’s probably a bad idea.”