Photo-Illustration: Pablo Rochat; Retailer ; Vector Tradition/Shutterstock At the end of January, I found myself living through an acute bout of a very modern panic: fear of the air around me. Both my girlfriend and my dad, with whom we were living, had just tested positive for COVID. He felt okay, for now, but she was miserable. Somehow, I had tested negative twice. We were living in a two-bedroom apartment in Kansas City, and the patients quarantined themselves into bedrooms at opposite ends.
It was unclear how exactly the model we bought could “kill COVID” — it was a literal black box — but, like everyone else, we had been looking for reassurance wherever we could find it.
HEPA filters are mats of fibers, several inches thick, with billions of tiny gaps of varying microscopic diameters between them. They function less like a colander and more like a three-dimensional maze. Large particles, such as dust and pollen, crash like mosquitoes flying into a screen door. Smaller particles — a virus carried by an airborne droplet, say — may sneak around one fiber only to hit the next.
The biggest thing about COVID is the fear of the unknown,” Jaya Rao, the CEO of Molekule, told me in the middle of my own personal air panic. She was on Zoom, joined in two other boxes by a pair of PR representatives; I was now two days into quarantining in a hotel room a block away from my girlfriend and my father, who encouraged me to leave so I wouldn’t get sick. I was happy not to stress about every breath, but I was suddenly worried all the precautions had been for naught.
But, in 2002, Consumer Reports published testing that found the Breeze “ineffective,” claiming it produced “almost no measurable reduction in airborne particles.” The industry had developed a standard measurement known as the “clean-air delivery rate,” or CADR, which tests how well a purifier can clear pollen, dust, and smoke out of a 10.5-by-12-foot room. The higher the CADR, the better — and the Breeze’s was shockingly low.
But it was hard to raise start-up capital in Florida, and in 2015, Dilip and Jaya moved Transformair to the Bay Area. Silicon Valley was in the middle of a tech-enabled-hardware bubble: Nest was disrupting home thermostats, while Jawbone, a speaker and wearables company, had a $3 billion valuation — two years before liquidating all its assets.
The Goswamis wanted Transformair to look different. “We wanted to signal that it’s a product you should be proud of,” Jaya told me. The company’s first hire in San Francisco was Peter Riering-Czekalla, a German designer who had previously worked at IDEO; he was tasked with fitting the Transformair into an attractive package.
Air purifier sales were booming even before the pandemic, riding the wave of airborne misfortune spread by climate change and California’s wildfires. But the pandemic sent the business into hyperdrive
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