Rather than imposing its technology in the room, the Bloom air purifier, from the Montreal company Dupray, comes in the innocent and discreet form of an elegant planter. It can also be transformed into a side table with storage. It won a Red Dot Design award in 2023. A breath of fresh air in a hotly contested market.
Dupray traces its origins to 2008, when two young entrepreneurs, Sébastien Dupéré and Brent Gray, decided to tackle graffiti, chewing gum and dirt in public spaces with industrial steam cleaners. Soon, with an Italian partner, they developed a steam cleaner that perfectly met their needs, the first device marketed under the Dupray brand.
In 2019, Dupéré and Gray launched the Voilà garment steamer for domestic use, the design of which was created by the Montreal firm Enta Design.
They once again called on Enta Design when they had the idea of an air purifier that wouldn’t clash with the decor.
“Today, we are the best-selling brand of steam cleaners in North America. We develop all our products in Montreal, and manufacture them in Italy, Spain, Romania and China,” says Sébastien Dupéré, president and co-founder of Dupray.
Bloom is a sleek purifier: a white cylinder whose gently tapered lower half is covered in a colorful textile sheath.
This is where it hides its filtration and ventilation system, which intercepts 99.7% of polluting particles and odors, the company argues.
Equipped with a HEPA-13 filter, it was developed by “a team of engineers from a former German household appliance factory, in collaboration with the fluid mechanics department of the University of the Basque Country (UPV /EHU) for optimizing air flow,” explains Sébastien Dupéré.
The upper part of the device constitutes a kind of pot cover where the planter itself is slipped.
Its top can be closed with a walnut or oak disc, which transforms the object into a side table, in the hollow of which books, magazines or other small objects can be stored.
The Enta Design studio was founded in 1979 by industrial designer Michel Morand, still as passionate as ever after 44 years in the profession.
“There were a lot of difficult elements,” he says.
“The first is you have to take the air at ground level, where the dust is, and you technically have to send it back up so you’re not recirculating your clean air through the filter. »
Their first prototypes had the disturbing result of shaking the leaves of plants in perpetual movement.
In the final version, the air is sucked in at the base of the device, filtered, then projected by a turbine through a ring of slots, halfway up the object, at an upward angle.
Second difficulty, “a plant pot waters itself”, underlines Michel Morand, which entails a risk of splashing and overflowing.
“We didn’t want water to penetrate and reach the blades and the motor,” adds fellow designer Guillaume Cavalié. It required a lot of work on the inside, on a lot of things that we can’t see. »
The lower technical section is covered with an antibacterial filter membrane, removable for washing and available in 12 shades.
Here, the challenge was to establish the right balance between filtering capacity, air permeability and sufficient opacity to hide the air intake and expulsion slots. “It still took quite a long time to find,” comments Michel Morand.
“Another important element was how we change the filter,” emphasizes Michel Morand. We looked at several solutions, and the one that was most obvious was from below. »
You must turn the device upside down – after removing the planter, of course –, remove the textile sheath, then remove the circular plate which closes the bottom of the device. We then access the filter stretched over a removable plastic ring.
“Normally, in other air purifiers, we throw all this away, which means a lot of plastic wasted,” comments Guillaume Cavalié. We worked so that only the filter part was removed. »
The air purifier is controlled by a single, discreet capacitive touch button – which responds to a simple touch.
In a sequence of touches, it starts the device in automatic mode or at three ventilation speeds. In its center, an annular indicator light indicates whether the air quality is good, average or poor. It is measured by an infrared sensor, which automatically turns the device on if necessary.
Launched in May 2023, the Bloom air purifier is made in Spain. Dupray currently plans annual production of around 100,000 units.
The company is initially targeting the North American and European continents, but sees “a lot of potential for other markets such as Japan, South Korea and China,” indicates its president.
Bloom is available on the company’s website and on several online marketplaces such as Amazon, Home Depot and Walmart. Canadian Tire will be the first Canadian retailer to offer the device on its shelves in spring 2024, underlines Sébastien Dupéré, who wants to attract the attention of other major American retailers.
With around forty employees, the company is “in heavy hiring to prepare for upcoming launches” – new “very original” products which are the result of several years of R and D,” he specifies.
