Wallflower Labs
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
A wearable AI voice assistant for enterprise workers
Wallflower Labs developed a wearable voice assistant and software platform intended to improve productivity, quality, and safety for enterprise employees.
02 / Wallflower Labs FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
Wallflower Labs was a small hardware company fighting on several fronts at once: the COVID pandemic, the microchip shortage that made it impossible to manufacture more inventory, and a brutal macroeconomic environment. As a startup that could not support the costs of its cloud platform and mobile apps, it ran out of ways to survive - and in 2022 the company announced it would deactivate the stove monitoring cloud service and shut down, telling customers to unplug their devices.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Founded
Wallflower Labs is founded in Charleston, Massachusetts by the former founder of speech-recognition startup Yap, to build an internet-connected smart plug for electric stoves.
- Funding
Wallflower raises $1.5 million in new funding for its connected cooking solutions, bringing total funding to over $2.5 million.
- Product launch
Wallflower launches its Smart Stove Monitor, a Wi-Fi smart plug that alerts homeowners when the stove is left on, aiming to reduce cooking-related residential fires.
- Shutdown
Wallflower announces it will no longer produce the Stove Monitor and will deactivate its cloud service and mobile apps on August 1, 2022, citing COVID, the chip shortage and the macroeconomic environment.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
Wallflower informed customers that it no longer produces the Stove Monitor device.
- 02
On August 1, 2022, the company deactivated its stove monitoring cloud service and mobile applications, making the devices non-functional.
- 03
Customers were asked to unplug their stove monitors and delete the Wallflower app; the company apologized for the inconvenience.