Update – unfortunately (I’m beginning to hate this word) the tariff guy did not pull through and offered a solution that wasn’t feasible for us to work with (the two options were: ship over multiple shipments, but keep the value under $800 OR drop-ship customer orders directly from China).
So, we decided internally to not move forward with the LED bar option at this time. Our thought process is the following (for those curious):
- We’d have to sell the LED aux switch for at least $28.50 to hit the bare minimum margins (and these are the minimum Inovelli margins, not the margins investors want us to hit) – whereas we could sell the non-LED aux switch for $17.50 and make acceptable margins).
- The switch still has to have some, “smarts” in it to communicate with the smart switch (to emulate the LED bar status level and also notifications) so there is room for failure here as it would require a hub that speaks ZigBee/Matter to work properly with our Z-Wave switches and we’re unsure of how good TouchLink works with ZigBee and how complicated it would make things in large houses
- We’re still unclear as to whether or not the LED bar would work (along with the secondary ZigBee chip) in a non-neutral setting
- Since this is targeted to mass market, their level of experience with technology is likely less than our current customer and we’ve found that our products can sometimes be too complicated for our current customers which are already tech savvy. Therefore coming out with an aux switch that has all these, “conditions” (ie: you have to buy a bypass in non-neutral, you have to bind it to the main switch via Touchlink, you have to setup an automation if you’re using our Z-Wave switches, etc) just doesn’t make sense and would likely lead to a bad initial experience with the brand.
- If you really want two matching switches, we would encourage you to purchase multiple smart switches as they will be able to detect another smart switch and would only be an extra $7 (I know it adds up, but in the grand scheme of things, it sounds like most people wouldn’t mind it).
I’m not writing off this project yet as I do believe there is a market for a unique aux switch – but it will have to wait.
I’ll be creating a poll shortly regarding the design for the new aux switch. and closing this thread to create a new one around the new design.