Revolutionizing the peeing industry: meet Trone

Meet Trone: the startup that makes you feel like a Queen/King while doing the most natural thing of all.

Trone (part of the HEC program at STATION F) has one mission: reinventing our toilet experience, both the object and the space. As Hugo, the co-founder puts it: “I want to make the toilet bowl desirable again”. In (very) polite French, we call the bathroom “lieu d’aisance” (the place to be at ease): it should mean something, and Hugo and his team are trying to do so.

Hugo Volpei, 27 years old, started working on Trone a year and a half ago, with two architects, Romain Freychet — one of Hugo’s childhood friends — and Antoine Prax. Soon joined by Camille Mourgues, their CTO, they started working on their concept for toilets.

But why reinvent toilets, you ask? Well, as Hugo was exploring new ideas for a restaurant project, he was visiting Sketch, in London. Sketch is the kind of place where you go and just let yourself be amazed by everything: the dining area, designed by India Mahdavi, is the most instagrammable in the world, and the bathroom is unlike anything you’ve seen before. Instant crush: the concept resonated with Hugo’s will to change an object that’s been the same for centuries.

What’s wrong with the way we pee?

But first things first: if the bathroom hasn’t been changed for so long, is there really a problem? According to Hugo, there are four kinds of problems:

• Our position: according to scientists, we don’t sit right to evacuate properly. In short, we should be sitting with our thighs close to our chests, not like on a chair. Is it serious? Well, it can have serious health consequences for our digestion, create hemorrhoids, and so on. Some products are starting to arrive on the market, like the Squatty Potty, following the warnings of our bad toilet-sitting habits, notably highlighted in best-seller book “Gut, the inside story of our body’s most underrated organ”.
• Cleanliness: this is where innovation in materials can play an important role, preventing scale deposits for instance, using a smart design and the best possible ceramics.
• Smell: we’ve all been there, pinching our nose. To go beyond the spray bottle, Trone is working on a diffuser integrated to the flush button, or directly into the bowl.
• Noise: this is a challenging one. How to avoid the discomfort of having a bathroom next to the bedroom or living room? Trone is currently doing a lot of R&D in this area. Stay tuned!

In addition, Trone is also working on improving water consumption (when you sit on a Trone, you can see how much water is used in a single flush) and make the production line smarter and of higher quality: all Trones are 100% Made in France, by top-notch artisans!

Question… number 2. What’s the toilets market like?

No surprise here, the toilets market remains in the hands of a few, very old actors. In France, about 8 or 9 companies account for 98% of the market. All of those companies are at least 100 years old (knowing that the modern toilets have been around for about 300 years).

Tough for a startup to enter such an oligopoly! To this day, some actors have tried different formats (round, square…) or tackled some of the issues like position or smell, but none have managed to get a grasp on the whole toilets experience. Enters: Trone!

Facing industrial actors with hundreds of years of logistical experience and network, Trone is differentiating itself with a strong sales-friendly approach, and a strong brand focused on desire.

It’s an opportunity not to miss: just in Europe, the toilet market represents €3 billion, €500 million just in France. And a stable one with that: there’s a great chance that toilets will still be around in hundreds of year. But it’s a challenge too, since the market and user needs are very different depending on the location: we don’t pee the same way in France, Germany or Japan!

In terms of pricing, Trone positions itself in the lower-luxury sector. One piece will cost you €1900, up to €2400 for an original design. On average, entry-level toilets cost €100 and designers’ models, around €2000. For toilet nerds who want cool features, prices can go up to €8k and more.

Disrupting an unsexy industry: the sexiest business opportunity

“What? Unsexy? I don’t think of toilets as an unsexy industry” says Hugo (very objectively speaking).

For Hugo, his toilets are pretty objects, designed by killer architects. And no, he doesn’t think of what people do using Trone when he is working. In addition, working for toilets is something anyone can relate to, on the contrary to many online software that only concern a certain type of population.

Furthermore, the market is wide open for newcomers since not a lot of people are attracted to markets that are 300 or 400 years old: Hugo is!

“I admire entrepreneurs who build chatbots, artificial intelligences… Me: I like good ol’ industries! Like what Big Mamma does with restaurants: changing something that hadn’t been changed for a while. It has a lot of room for improvement” says Hugo.

When your first client is the biggest restaurant in Europe

Speaking of Big Mamma: do you know where to find the first ever Trone bathroom? At La Felicità, STATION F’s Food Market!

Now that is a crazy story. Hugo tells us that when he moved into STATION F, right when we opened back in July 2017, he had a bunch of 3D renderings of a first prototype for Trone. He heard about the restaurant’s construction and reached out to Big Mamma’s CEO, owner of what would become la Felicità.

In September, based on a PowerPoint presentation with the craziest bathroom designs you can imagine (and surely, a strong salesman ability), Big Mamma’s founders agreed to give the key of their restaurant’s bathroom to Trone.

“At the time, I had nothing. Not a single industrial partner. No engineer in the team. No prototype. I had four months to install all of la Felicità bathrooms.” says Hugo. With a smile on his face. Zen.

In February, they had a first prototype (and the construction was thankfully delayed). In April, Hugo sat down on his first Trone. A month later, la Felicità opened. “Needless to say, me and my co-founders were on constant call for any issues, fixing the toilets all the time, implementing constant improvements.” recalls Hugo.

Today, you can go pee in a disco, a Swiss chalet, a fully-mirrored space or… the interior of a vagina. Sitting on the best ash tree toilet seat, on the best ceramics made in France. The result: thousands and thousands of selfies in the bathroom. And many many new clients!

Good luck to the Trone team in making the toilet experience always better! Ps: they are hiring a mechanical engineer and business developer: https://jobs.stationf.co/