OSOTEK HotWave Mop Vacuum

Kickstarter:

Introducing OSOTEK HotWave: a remarkable mop vacuum cleaner with a multifunctional charging station, which provides hot water mopping, dual self-cleaning, and hot air-drying solutions to help you realize a hassle-free cleaning experience.

We have ourselves here a campaign that is a little confused about who they are. The Kickstarter campaign’s location is in Irvine, CA, but the creator’s location is in Singapore. A quick check on the OSOTEK trademark reveals the owner as Beijing Shunzao Technology Co., Ltd.

Kudos to the team for disclosing that the company is called Shunzao Technology, albeit dropping the Beijing prefix.

Founded in 2019, our company is named Shunzao Technology. For years we’ve been manufacturing and developing high-quality cleaning devices, and therefore accumulated a lot of patents and expertise in production. Our team has gathered a group of talented individuals in the software and hardware fields, all of whom have worked for well-known companies, such as Xiaomi, LG, Huawei and NEC, etc.
Last year we decided to establish a new brand, OSOTEK, to especially develop high-grade household cleaning products for global customers. The vision of the OSOTEK is to make people’s lives more convenient, improve their quality of life, and bring the most industry-leading technology and innovations to every family in the world.

In case if you’re wondering whether they needed to fund their product on Kickstarter, check out the funding they have received so far:

Recently, Shunzao Technology gets the completion of a Series B financing round of US$50 million. This round of investment was led by Baobi Industrial Chain Fund, followed by Blue Lake Capital, Shunwei Capital, and Xiaomi Group.

So they don’t really need funding and this campaign seems more like a pre-order rather than one to bring a dream to live. The good news is, they are unlikely to be a scam campaign given the capital backing they have raised so far.

You would expect a company of this size to put in more effort on their branding, but it is still very neutral and generic even after they decided to rename the brand as OSOTEK from Shunzao.

What are the alternatives?

There are many wet dry vacuums in the market ranging from $100 to $400 on Amazon. So you might want to check them out before spending $499 on the OSOTEK. You pay extra for the OSOTEK because of the self-cleaning station. Do you need it though?

The OSOTEK HotWave Mop Vacuum will retail at $899 after the Kickstarter. That is quite a big jump in pricing, and also a $400 margin at least? And that is if they are selling it at cost for the campaign. We all know how much ad spending you need to do well on Kickstarter. For the uninitiated, the industry average is between 20% to 25% of the funds raised goes to ads.

Video

I like their campaign video. Shot in Shenzhen, it tries to avoid the typical ecommerce product video approach. The poor voice over let it down though.