The Premiumization Playbook For Reinventing A Dull Product Category

In an example of premiumization at its finest, the Bartesian cocktail maker delivers a professional mixologist to your kitchen countertop.

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While Silicon Valley chased the “smart home” valuation bubble, a quieter but more profitable revolution has been unfolding in the unsexy corners of the kitchen. A new guard of founders realized the path to premiumization in stagnant markets isn’t adding connectivity for its own sake, but re-engineering the underlying physics and business models in our mundane daily lives.

They looked at machines we touch without thinking, saw dormant opportunities for high‑margin reinvention, and asked, “What is broken about how this category works, and can we rebuild the underlying system so performance sells itself?”

CEOs at Revolution Cooking, GE Appliances’ FirstBuild, Rorra, and Bartesian deployed a systems‑level critique of categories that hadn’t meaningfully changed in decades, then executed four clear strategies: 1) fix the physics; 2) re‑stage the experience; 3) rewire the company; and 4) redesign the P&L.​

Here’s their playbook.

Premiumization Through Engineering: Killing The Nichrome Wire

“I noticed that the same heating element that was in a $20 toaster was in a $6,000 oven,” Tom Klaff, founder of Revolution Cooking, told me over Zoom, as did everyone in this article. “This was technology invented in 1890. It’s still state-of-the-art, and the problem with it is that it takes an awful lot of energy to create heat.”

Klaff explained that, because you “can’t heat up the iron fast enough, or the nickel, in this case, nichrome wire,” toasted bread wasn’t quite living up to its potential. “Toast takes a long time to toast, and ovens take 20 minutes to preheat.”

Klaff hired scientists and thermal engineers to invent a new heating system. The outcome was InstaGLO, a proprietary alloy and control stack using algorithms to modulate heat in real time. It doesn’t just get hotter; it changes what heat can do.​

This is the physics lever: attack the constraint incumbents have mistaken for a law of nature. Klaff’s team realized slow cooking and long preheat times can be fixed, but only if you abandon the commodity supply chain every other OEM relies on. That decision allowed Revolution Cooking to price its toaster far beyond the category average and still pass the value test with consumers because the price gap is justified at every breakfast.

The same InstaGLO platform now sits at the core of a forthcoming oven combining microwave energy, high‑speed air, and infrared, eliminating the need to preheat and compressing what used to be a three‑step dance between microwave, oven, and broiler into one cycle. The consumer sees only a single button.

“The consumer needs to be liberated from the status quo,” Klaff championed. “Right now, especially in kitchen appliances, there is no innovation.”

Premiumization of Countertop Real Estate: When Drinking Water Becomes An Experience

“We wanted to look like a $100 million brand from day one,” said Brian Keller, co‑founder of Rorra, the countertop water filter system. “We really wanted to build something from the ground up that didn’t look like anything else that was out there. Better filtration technology, easier and simple to use, used the highest quality materials, and fit really nicely into the kitchen.”

If the toaster’s flaw was physics, the water filter’s flaw was in the experience. Keller’s answer was a gravity‑fed countertop system built from medical‑grade stainless steel and engineered to remove PFAS, lead, microplastics, chlorine and dozens of other contaminants faster than the usual suspects. But the physical interaction mattered as much as the filtration itself.

“What does everybody have a good experience using? Like a tap handle, right?” Keller said. “It’s got a good weight to it. It was like, can we build that into this product as something that’s unique? It’ll make it easy for kids to use. It’ll make it easier if people have low dexterity in their hands.”

When it came to launch time, Keller skipped the standard marketing playbook entirely and instead spent a month and a half educating the market before Rorra went live. Working with the Environmental Working Group, he built a dashboard allowing people to search their zip code and see exactly what contaminants were in their local tap water and what health effects those chemicals could have. By launch day, Rorra had 25,000 to 30,000 email subscribers.

“We wanted to build something that people weren’t going to just put away, or underneath something, because there’s a lot more organic value to something that’s beautiful, and that can sit out on the countertop. As it becomes a statement piece, it also becomes a conversation in the kitchen when you have people over.”

The product didn’t need to convince people they had a problem. It just had to offer the best solution within an aesthetically pleasing design that made drinking water an act of self-care.

“Does it elevate your space?” Keller and his team considered. “Does it elevate your life, and does it deserve to exist in the space you’re building for yourself?”

Premiumization of Failure: When 85% Rejection Becomes The Goal

“We’re built from the ground up like a machine for big things,” explained Andre Zdanow, president of FirstBuild, a division of GE Appliances. “Inherently, you just smash small ones.”

When GE Appliances brought him in to restart their small appliance business in 2017, the company hadn’t operated in that category directly since 1984. His first act was to short-circuit a century of institutional muscle memory. Whereas major appliances such as refrigerators and wall ovens demand long development cycles, massive capital investment, and replacement-driven purchase behavior, small appliances live in an entirely different universe. Fueled by impulse buys, upgrade cycles, and social media launches, countertop appliances can reinvent categories overnight.

Zdanow knew retrofitting GE’s existing infrastructure wouldn’t work, so he chose instead to quarantine innovation entirely into a new division: FirstBuild, a wholly owned subsidiary with none of the corporate scaffolding. The model borrows from the early-stage start-up strategy of throwing ideas against the wall, hoping consumers will quickly say no to the loser ideas, and graduating winners to the main business.

“Eighty-five percent of what we work on doesn’t make it to market,” Zdanow said. “We’re really trying to figure out what a product is, and if anyone wants it before we really invest. At every step, we’re asking people to tell us no.”

Where traditional R&D might spend months and significant budget running structured focus groups, FirstBuild posts prototypes on Instagram and TikTok.

“Literally ten minutes and an iPhone could have answered that question for you,” Zdanow said on determining if a product is a market fit. “We’re not afraid of someone copying our idea. The worst thing is that they’re going to think we’re crazy anyway. Once we’re successful, they’ll all copy us in a year. But until we launch it, no one’s stealing our ideas.”

He continued, “That’s the basis of why I even have a small appliance business.” It’s also why GE Appliances president and CEO Kevin Nolan recruited Zdanow.

A former chief technology officer who’d spent years watching the best ideas die in business case purgatory, Nolan knew the company needed someone who wasn’t afraid to move fast and break things. “He knew it would take having a concept of doing it a different way,” Zdanow said. “I think he had a pretty good understanding that I don’t take no for an answer well.”

This zero-distance ethos produced an indoor mushroom grower during COVID, co-created with influencers who sold grow kits on social media. It also launched the first countertop icemaker.

“Innovation, the way we do it, is a full contact tech sport,” Zdanow said. “We’re not out doing closed focus groups. Everyone can see our good and bad ideas.”

Premiumization Through Partnership: When Comcast Becomes Your Fractional CMO

“These Googles and Metas will keep taking your money all day long,” lamented Ryan Close, founder and CEO of Bartesian. “It’s just a never-ending gas tank with holes in it.”

When Bartesian launched its countertop cocktail maker six years ago, the company faced the classic consumer product paradox: customers who tried it loved it, but not enough people knew it existed. Digital ads on Meta and Google worked, but the customer acquisition costs was unsustainable. TV advertising offered scale but required capital Bartesian didn’t have. Traditional broadcast buys ran hundreds of thousands of dollars with murky attribution.

So Close did what entrepreneurs do when cash runs out: he got creative with the cap table. Instead of raising equity to buy media, he gave equity to get media. Close negotiated deals with Comcast, UK’s Channel 4, and iHeartMedia where the companies provided advertising inventory in exchange for ownership stakes tied to measurable customer acquisition.

“We forged these arrangements and ended up spending millions of dollars to drive more brand awareness to get us to the stage we’re at now, where we’re doing $100 million a year.”

Close never stopped testing what worked organically. Before Bartesian had influencer budgets, customers posted videos hitting 50 million views.

“They weren’t affiliated with us, we weren’t paying them. They were organic TikTok and Instagram videos from customers who bought the Bartesian, and loved it.” PR wins followed with Good Housekeeping and Oprah’s Favorite Things in year one. “I never tried. It wasn’t me going out and knocking on Oprah’s door. That was a bit of dumb luck that we actually stumbled into that one.”

Once TV layered onto organic and digital, Meta’s conversion costs dropped significantly. “The high tide rises all boats. It improves significantly, and we’re spending a lot of money on Meta, so that pays for itself.”

Premiumization And The Return to First Principles

What binds Klaff, Keller, Zdanow, and Close is a shared refusal to mistake veneer for value. Each rebuilt an infrastructure first, then let consumers’ natural pursuit of luxury follow suit:

• In fixing the physics, they rewrote underlying technology to create products their chosen category wasn’t doing before.
• Restaging the experience meant showing consumers what was once believed as the only way was simply a level of mediocrity bore from never asking for more.
• Rewiring the company meant breaking the mold of how things were always done to discover how things could be done better.
• And redesigning the P&L meant being willing to risk it all on a vision only the founder could see before consumers began wondering how they ever lived without such innovation.

While the tech world screams for attention with features we don’t need, these brands are quietly winning by solving the problems we forgot we had. The lesson for founders eyeing their own “boring” categories is to stop asking how to make the product smarter and start asking what made it dumb in the first place. The next billion-dollar brand prime for premiumization isn’t hiding in an emerging technology vertical. It’s sitting on your countertop, doing exactly what it did in 1950, waiting for someone to notice.