The Long Road to Robot Butt Washers

Or, my intersection with the story of the smart toilet category

I just installed my first smart toilet – 20 years after writing about the entrepreneur who helped bring those things to the U.S. market.

Two decades ago, smart toilets were a bizarre idea to Americans – another weird thing that the Japanese came up with, like chopstick fans. (You know, a tiny fan that attaches to your chopsticks to cool down your noodles as you eat them. You don’t have one?)

Today, smart toilets are a mainstream luxury item. You don’t need one…but I know you want one. Or if you’ve used one at a nice hotel or a friend’s house or the Korean Air Lines lounge in Seoul, you’ve probably ever since been daydreaming about one.

If you know anything about smart toilets, you probably know the brand Toto. Through a category design lens, Toto is both the creator of the smart toilet category and the winner of its dominant design. Toto was founded in Japan in 1917, at first under the name TOYO TOKI CO, Ltd. In the 1960s, it started working on a combination bidet and toilet seat for the hospital market, for patients whose limited mobility made it hard for them to clean themselves.

The company tried to sell it to consumers, but consumers didn’t like it, mostly because the water was always cold and the spray went, like, all over the place.

Then came the 1970s, an age of Japanese inventions such as the VHS machine, the Walkman and karaoke. (Yes, karaoke is a product of the seventies.) This is the era when Toto’s engineers got the idea of marrying electronics to their bidet toilet seat.

In Toto’s telling of the story, this may be my favorite part:

TOTO engineers worked tirelessly to find the ideal angle at which water should spray from the wand. Although this data was vital to the new bidet seat’s development, testing directly on an individual’s rear end was met with significant employee resistance. It was challenging to get staff members to cooperate, especially women.

I picture one of the more bizarre product testing labs ever. And, by the way, the ideal angle the Toto engineers came up with was 43 degrees.

Anyway, in 1980, Toto launched its first Washlet electronic bidet toilet seat in the Japanese market. It wasn’t great. Toto says a lot of consumers didn’t like it. But those Toto engineers and rear-end testers pressed on, and by the 1990s the company had a version of the smart toilets you see today. They caught on in Japan, and Toto started selling them in the U.S.

Still, Americans didn’t get it. Sales were slow.

Toto established a new category of smart toilet – yet for at least a decade, Toto was the only company in the category in the West, which was problematic. When a market category has just one player, the public often ignores the category. People don’t get why they need this new thing, and no other company is coming in and validating that this category might be worth competing for. As happens in most new categories, Toto was going to need competitors to give it legitimacy.

At a tech conference in 2005, James Hong told me about a smart toilet he just bought. If that seems out of bounds for a conversation at a tech conference, keep in mind that at the time James was best known for starting the controversial website Hot or Not, which rated people’s looks. (Some argue that it was a precursor to Instagram, Twitter and other social sites.)

James’ smart toilet was not from Toto. It was from Brondell, and James knew the guy who started it, Dave Samuel. So he introduced us.

Prior to this, I was completely unaware of smart toilets. But as a tech columnist, I couldn’t resist. I called Dave Samuel, and he told me one of the best “founder insight” stories ever. Here’s how I wrote about it in 2005:

“In 1990, after Dave Samuel graduated from high school, his father took him along on a business trip to Tokyo. One night, the two went to a business dinner at a restaurant. Samuel excused himself to go to the bathroom and found himself staring at a toilet seat studded with buttons and electronic controls.

“‘I’d never seen this,’ Samuel recalls. ‘It had Japanese characters, so I couldn’t read what the buttons meant, But, of course, I had to press the buttons to see what they’d do.’

“He pressed one that extended a wand inside the bowl. The wand then sprayed warm water upward to wash whatever areas a seated person might need to have washed.

“Except Samuel wasn’t seated. He was still standing, fully dressed, facing the toilet and gawking. The spray soaked the front of his pants. He launched into a frenzy of trying to dry himself before rejoining his father and a bunch of Japanese businessmen, ultimately slinking back to the table and throwing a napkin over his lap.”

Samuel never forgot the strange toilet. Nine years later, he sold a startup to AOL, and he thought it “was time to introduce this to America,” as he told me. After a few years of development, the company Samuel founded – Brondell, named after J.F. Brondel, who invented the flush toilet in 1738 – started selling its $500 Swash 600.

To tell Americans about the concept, Samuel made an infomercial starring his grandparents, who were soap opera stars from Days of Our Lives. Within a month after my column appeared, Mark Cuban pumped $1.3 million into Brondell. The category picked up a little momentum, but remained small in the U.S. even while catching fire in Asia.

Over the next decade, other companies entered the category – Kohler, Moen, a few Chinese companies. That helped American consumers feel like smart toilets were more than just a curiosity.

Then, in 2020, Covid came along, and if you remember, toilet paper disappeared from shelves.

Suddenly, having a toilet that ends the need for toilet paper seemed like a really good idea. That, combined with gathering category momentum, helped smart toilet sales surge. The global market was about $3 billion in 2020, almost all not in the U.S. In three years, it tripled, much of it driven by the U.S. Some reports say it will grow another 50% by 2029.

Most thriving categories require what economist Paul Geroski, who studied market categories, called a dominant design. Mainstream buyers don’t want to have to choose between a bunch of products that work in wildly different ways. We like a standard.

It’s interesting to look back and realize that Toto first established the dominant design for smart toilets, and won it over time. All smart toilets work pretty much like Toto’s.

And that’s a powerful position. The company that establishes the dominant design usually controls the biggest market share – and Toto has the category’s biggest share, at about 30%. The dominant design winner also usually gets pricing power. A high-end Toto toilet can cost two or three times more than a similar model from Brondell or most other makers.

We bought a mid-priced Moen. These days the category is mature enough that there are many good choices. Toto has evolved into a global high-end bathroom company – toilets, fancy bathtubs, faucets. Brondell similarly expanded its product line into things like water filters and shower fixtures. Dave Samuel is now general partner at venture capital firm Freestyle. James Hong now describes himself as a family man and investor.

Lots of change in 20 years.

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This is my column as it appeared in USA Today on November 23, 2005. I accessed it through Newspapers.com. It’s not otherwise available online.