Source: indiegogo.com
Published: April 9, 2013
Niko Järvinen
1 Campaign |
Jyväskylä, Finland
Grow your own food and make your indoor air cleaner with FreshWall – vertically, year round with near zero maintenance. And it looks awesome!
See FreshWall video at https://youtu.be/b18k8dLhr1w
Or this video in Spanish: https://youtu.be/ZfXxMMZGSGk
FreshWall is a vertical garden that redefines indoor agriculture while maximizing the air purification ability of plants. The innovative green wall combines high-end technology with Scandinavian design aesthetics to encourage a green and healthy lifestyle. Currently the product is mainly for business use, but the team just launched an Indiegogo campaign with the goal of making it available to everyone.
The campaign is now over! If you’re interested check this page and leave us your email and you’ll be the first to know when FreshWall is available!
FreshWall in the news:
Inhabitat: http://inhabitat.com/freshwall-indoor-vertical-garden-purifies-the-air-while-growing-fresh-veggies/
TrendHunter: http://www.trendhunter.com/trends/freshwall
HomeChunk: http://www.homechunk.com/9646/2013/03/18/freshwall-redefines-the-concept-of-growing-plants-indoors/
Tekniikka&Talous (in Finnish) http://www.tekniikkatalous.fi/innovaatiot/article887167.ece
FreshWall – bring the nature indoors
Grow your own green food and make your indoor air cleaner with FreshWall – vertically, year round with near zero maintenance and no green thumb required!
We have been making automated air purifying green walls for two years and received many requests for a product which you can use to grow edible plants and fits to homes. We decided it’s time to make it happen and we can do that with FreshWall: affordable, automated green wall for people with green heart.
You can be the first one to have beautiful, automated and active FreshWall in your own home or office! Would you like it to be in the kitchen or in your living room?
Check out our FRESH competition from below!
PLEASE NOTE! After the campaign the recommended retail price for FreshWall is 999€ so be sure you order yours before the campaign ends!
Redefining the indoor plant-growing
Have you ever wanted to grow your own salads, herbs, chillies and other veggies and plants?
Do you find it’s too messy, taking a lot of floor space and you simply don’t remember to water those greens? And then there are vacations when you need to arrange someone to take care of your plants…all kinds of difficulties that life brings!
With FreshWall you can forget all those problems. We bring easy vertical gardening available to everyone! FreshWall is plug and enjoy; all you need to do is put the plants into our specially made pot, plug it to your FreshWall and add water to the reservoir. Plug the cord and you are ready to go.
Grow, eat, re-grow, eat, re-grow, eat. You got the point? Eat your wall!
But there is more than meets the eye.
FreshWall is also about making your own indoor air more breathable. Each plant in FreshWall purifies air as well as 100 normal plants! Plastics and other synthetic materials people use release harmful chemicals into air. FreshWall will cut them down. Not to mention traffic and other pollution. Plants can use the fumes, not you, you know! We’d like to offer the possibility of having pure, natural indoor air available to everyone just like clean water and food.
FreshWall is also economical and environmentally beneficial, because you can regrow the plants and do it at home, you know how you’ve fed them and they’re not transported thousands of miles to get onto your plate. Organic, self-made.
Ahh, so fresh!
When nature met technology
Geek alert! FreshWall combines several new inventions to make the whole process easy and fun! First of all FreshWall combines hydroponics and aeroponics – two of the best ways to grow plants used all over the world by professional growers. However, we take away the tedious work of pH and conductivity monitoring associated with hydroponics and lower the energy requirements compared to aeroponics!
Turboponics. You just grow and enjoy.
Just add some water a few times a month
Our patent pending system enables you to grow almost any plants in the same wall even if they need different kind of growth conditions. The watering system takes care of delivering the right amount of water and nutrients to all the plants.
Because FreshWall circulates air through the plants root systems plants stay much healthier and grow faster! As air is circulated through the root systems all the bad chemicals are captured and destroyed by microbes and afterwards plants can use those as fertilizer – true organic growing!
No soil means no worries about allergens
There’s no need to use soil with FreshWall so working with plants is much cleaner compared to traditional methods which use soil. Our custom developed growth medium takes care of the right pH and other factors important for good plant growth. Now there’s no need to manually work with pH and other factors like you have to with traditional hydroponic systems. Avoiding traditional soil also has advantages as up to 70% of all allergens released by indoor plants come from the soil. So by avoiding the soil we can also avoid allergens and you don’t have to worry if your friends have allergies or not.
Air Purification System makes your indoor air a lot healthier
The very cool thing behind FreshWall is the technique it’s based on: dirty air is pulled through plant roots and growth medium that is invented only for the purpose of the wall. In the root zone there are millions of good microbes similar to the ones inside your stomach, which clean the air from the harmful chemical compounds. Microbes remove the chemicals by breaking them down for good and plants then use these chemicals as nutrients. NASA research reveals that in fact plants are capable of removing up to 90 % of harmful chemicals! As an added bonus FreshWall can humidify air extremely well in the winter when it can be very dry in these colder latitudes!
How did we end up here? (hint: we stole some studies from Nasa, no biggie!)
We are a startup from Finland, the land of clean nature, Nokia cell phones and Angry Birds. Our team’s first green wall was created back in 2010. The pilot unit was just a basic green wall – nice looking but without any fancy functions. We wanted to build a better one since already the basic wall had clear benefits: it was like a refreshing greenhouse or small jungle inside the room!
In 2011 we bumped into NASA study (http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nas…) stating that plants really purify the air and plants do affect one’s health. This is where the story really starts. We created our first innovation: the indoor air cleaning green wall prototype, for a local elementary school. The results were promising. The teacher’s symptoms caused by toxic indoor air disappeared almost eminently and she was able to return to teaching kids. Ever since we have been able to do this over and over again: decrease or remove peoples negative symptoms caused by unhealthy indoor air. We have been concentrating on purifying the air in offices and public buildings, because of the high manufacturing costs of our first generation green walls.
Manufacturing of the old model costs thousands of euros, because it is mainly hand made and it takes a lot of work. With the new manufacturing technique, the costs of the FreshWall will be dramatically lower. Only problem is that changing to this new production technology has high starting costs because we need to produce tooling for the FreshWall. This is where the Indiegogo project jumps in. And yes, you and your friends.
We – who we?
Our team combines the excellence and enthusiasm from several fields that all together pursue to produce FreshWalls for you. Our educational backgrounds vary from environmental sciences to creative business knowledge mixed all together with also health studies and landscaping. Despite the professionalism we believe that the magic is in the fun we have together that enhances creativity and pushes us towards new innovations.
What are we going to do after the campaign?
Traditional green walls have been work of art, which is great, but they require a lot of work and that makes them expensive. We have come up with different methods and combined NASA research with Finnish environmental sciences and Scandinavian design. Our technology has been tested in the tailor-made first generation products for two years now.
So it was about time to bring FreshWall and all of its benefits into public!
All of the pre-buy money we get from here will go towards making the FreshWall easy, affordable and, well – possible for everyone to have. We’ll also be creating new tool-less ways to attach pots to the wall and easy way to plant all the plants to the wall. The tooling design and manufacturing is approximately 40k€. Indiegogo and credit card fees will be around 10k€ and the rest will go to fulfilling the perks.
Currently the new model is 99% designed and tested. All that’s to do now is to do the final design phase with manufacturer and start creating the required tooling to produce FreshWalls.
Our new models will be even better looking yet even more ecological. The new FreshWall is made mostly out of PE plastic, which is more environment friendly than previous materials and it’s also recyclable. Cooperation with you guys means that the production of the new FreshWall can start in Fall 2013.
FreshWall Specs
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Size: |
Approx 6,4 feet (195cm) high |
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Slots for plants |
Approximately 50 slots |
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Body Colors |
White, dark grey and one bonus color you get to vote on. (Front panel & pots are always black) |
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Electricity |
WWW – Works World Wide |
Stretch goals
Help us and we’ll help you a lot more! When we reach our stretch goal of 250 000€ we’ll be able to employ this fellow Esa as a member of FreshWall production. His role would be to develop easy growing techniques and test all different plants in the green wall so you can just focus on the growing part!
Our second stretch goal is 400 000€ and if we achieve that we’ll be able to start production of the FreshWalls in second geographical location, such as North America or Asia! That means MUCH smaller shipping costs for all of the non-European people! So remember to tell all your friends and neighbours and we can make this happen together!
FAQ
What is UCS?
UCS is our User Coaching Seminar, which will be held in Jyväskylä, Finland in December 2013. In this seminar we coach you to use FreshWalls the most efficient way and show you tricks and tools to get you to pro level. We also want you to tell everyone how you have succeeded with your FreshWall. Everyone who has took part of this campaign is warmly welcomed! The will also be available as a webinar via our website.
Show me the awesome T-shirt!?
Will do!
What is REMO?
We developed REmote MOnitoring system just for active green walls because it makes taking care of them much easier especially in cases where the FreshWall is 500km away like some of our walls are. It connects FreshWall to internet and has small AI to keep the conditions of FreshWall at optimum levels for plant growth. This is only available to the perks which buy the complete wall with plants!
How do we get FreshWalls to you?
We’ll send out some pigeons to deliver FreshWalls via envelopes. Not.
FreshWalls are big items so the transportation can be very expensive and the price varies wildly. To keep the price reasonable we don’t want to include huge safety buffer because the shipping price will obviously be very different from country to country and month to month. The price also strongly depends on how many others from your country/state want to get FreshWalls because at that time we can combine shipments. Also if we meet our stretch goals we’ll be able to start manufacturing in US & Asia too so shipping costs will be dramatically lower!
After the campaign has finished we’ll start working with shipping companies to find the absolutely best prices and ways to ship green walls straight to your door step. We’ll provide you two choices, fast and expensive and cheaper and slower to you and you will be able to decide which one you want. If for some reason you will not be able to pay the shipping price just then, we’ll keep the money as a store credit and you’ll be able to order FreshWall later from our webshop for this same price.
At the moment we can only give rough estimations that EU shipping is around 50-200€, US and Asia shipping 200-600€. These can however change – and only to a better direction!
What is REMO?
We developed REmote MOnitoring system just for active green walls because it makes taking care of them much easier especially in cases where the FreshWall is 500km away like some of our walls are. It connects FreshWall to internet and has small AI to keep the conditions of FreshWall at optimum levels for plant growth. This is only available to the perks which buy the complete wall with plants!
How do we get FreshWalls to you?
We’ll send out some pigeons to deliver FreshWalls via envelopes. Not.
FreshWalls are big items so the transportation can be very expensive and the price varies wildly. To keep the price reasonable we don’t want to include huge safety buffer because the shipping price will obviously be very different from country to country and month to month. The price also strongly depends on how many others from your country/state want to get FreshWalls because at that time we can combine shipments. Also if we meet our stretch goals we’ll be able to start manufacturing in US & Asia too so shipping costs will be dramatically lower!
After the campaign has finished we’ll start working with shipping companies to find the absolutely best prices and ways to ship green walls straight to your door step. We’ll provide you two choices, fast and expensive and cheaper and slower to you and you will be able to decide which one you want. If for some reason you will not be able to pay the shipping price just then, we’ll keep the money as a store credit and you’ll be able to order FreshWall later from our webshop for this same price.
At the moment we can only give rough estimations that EU shipping is around 50-200€, US and Asia shipping 200-600€. These can however change – and only to a better direction!
Why would I want to add a plant lamp to my FreshWall?
If you don’t have enough natural light in your home/office you should add 151€ to the perk and get this specially made green wall plant lamp to enhance the growth and wellbeing of your green buddies. Below is a photo of the lamp and it’s attached to our current green walls. Yep, it’s small but it’s still powerful and boasts 39W of full spectrum natural light! The lamp contains one T5 High Output 39W tube.
What is rootcup?
Rootcup is an amazing, patent pending, design by good3studio that helps to propagate plant cuttings. This makes it easier to grow your own plants for FreshWall. good3studio offered rootcup as a reward to support FreshWall campaign. More about rootcup here: www.rootcup.com
Choose from grey or green:
Information to all participants
To every perk we give a ticket to UCS. This is due to Finnish legistlation. We can not receive only donations because it is against the law to do it without having a special licence. So in essence every contribution you make always gets you ticket to UCS. Said in other words: the ability to provide funds without compensation isn’t possible so each contributer gets always the ticket!
Challenges & Risks
As with creation of any new product there are always some risks. However we’ve tried to identify and minimize them as much as possible.
- We’ve tested the technology for about two years now so we have quite good understanding on how it works.
- We’ve chosen only trustworthy companies with great track record who we buy stuff from. They pay special attention to training their employees so we can be sure of quality.
- Over 90% of the FreshWall will be produced in Finland so there won’t be any language or cultural barriers.
- We will be very strict about quality so if we need to do more iterations than we’ve planned the production will be delayed slightly.
FRESHWALL COMPETITION – Let’s do this together!
You guys are experts with networks, we are sure about that! That’s why we want to make the most of it and kick the starting push for our campaign and make FreshWall a phenomenon it deserves to be!
You know every person in the world is linked to everyone via just six persons.
COMPETITION RULES: The rules are very simple and anyone worldwide can participate. We can track all referrals we get from each person’s links and the person whose link boosts up the campaign the most with total contributions made gets a FRESHWALL FOR FREE shipped to your front door. The four next best runner-ups get the FreshWall t-shirt. Of course this is the case when the campaign gets fully funded.
You can find the personal link below the campaign video as you have signed in to http://www.indiegogo.com/freshwall/
HOW TO DO IT THEN?
- Share the personal link you get through signing up to all of your friends via Facebook, Twitter, email etc.
- Present FreshWall in a gardening, tech or environmental blog
- Present FreshWall to news agencies or publications like Yahoo News, NBC, BBC, WSJ, New York Times, Huffington Post, Science Daily, PopSci, IEEE, Wired, BuzzFeed etc.
- Up to you – how do you get as many contributions through your link as possible?
We’ll keep you updated and announce the coming Top5 on 20th day of the campaign and finally announce the winners on the last day. Note that you can share the link as a private person or through your company.
Thank you everyone for your participation! This is your chance to win some AWESOME rewards and help us reach our dream! We’ve tried to make the rules as simple as possible so that everyone can participate.
It’s the same with FreshWall, we want to make the eating, breathing and enjoying the nature available for everyone!
Thanks again everyone! Good luck for the competition! http://www.indiegogo.com/freshwall/
Contact us
Urgent media contacts:
- Email: niko@freshwall.com
- Phone: +35840 533 9758
- Skype: jarvinen.niko
Want to speak to the rest of the team?
- annika@freshwall.com
- aki@freshwall.com
- mika@freshwall.com