Page 24 - HW March 2022

security, doors & windows
How Mitre 10 is looking to make more of smart home
The lead on Mitre 10 NZ’s smart home category or group of categories since 2019, Anya Dyson is the co-op’s Category Manager for Lighting, Heating, Cooling & Smart Home.
Smart home runs across several distinct categories and other Category Managers still look after the components within smart home.
But it’s Anya’s task to manage smart home as a concept, to own the strategy relating to smart home, what that looks like in-store and to make sure that it has a cohesive look & feel.
One of the first examples of this is the so-called Smarthome Hub that’s been trialled at Mitre 10 MEGA Albany for some months now.
The photos on this page explain better than words can, but in summary the Hub was designed to bring together usually separately merchandised categories – security and automation, in the form of principally security cameras, digital entrance locks, smart doorbell- cameras, smart light bulbs, automated garden irrigation and lighting and even connected smoke detectors.
As a grouping of separate but related products across a range of brands, the Smarthome Hub reflects a change in thinking around smart home for Mitre 10.
Anya Dyson explains:“I think for a long time we had been looking for the one perfect smart home system, the one perfect smart home product or product range that was going to ‘solve’ smart home.
“But as products have evolved, it’s really been about recognising that smart home is not one system. It’s not one brand. What it is, is a group of products that you can personalise to help solve whatever problems that our customers have.”
Easily understood, everyday solutions like checking who is at the front door, ensuring a child’s light or electric blanket is turned off at a given time, like getting a text message when the kids get home from school or when granny’s smoke alarm goes off.
“When you focus on what [smart home] can do for you and how
it can solve problems, it’s very easy for people to understand the benefits that it can bring every day, whether it’s through automation, security, safety or just health and happiness,” says Anya Dyson.
Smart home may start for some with an Amazon or a Google smart speaker, for others with a smart doorbell or light bulbs but
Mitre 10 believes building a smart home is a piecemeal process, a bit at a time and, with pretty much all of the Mitre 10 Smarthome Hub products being plug & play, quite DIY-able.
If you can operate a smartphone, you can almost certainly install and operate smart products goes the thinking.
Anya Dyson points towards the most popular smart home products being at lower (if not low) price points as an indicator of their growing popularity, adding that these days, smart home is actually “quite mainstream,” she says.
How is the smart home program working so far? Anya says it has “significantly outperformed” the forecasts set in 2019, and that growth is “tracking faster than anticipated.”
And the Smarthome Hub?
Tracked against a cohort store, smart home at Mitre 10 MEGA Albany is tracking “significantly higher” following the implementation of the Hub.“We’re really pleased with how that rollout has gone,” says Anya Dyson.
Look out for a broader rollout of the Hub concept, including in- bay and end cap or aisle-end solutions, both of which are currently being finalised.
www.mitre10.co.nz
22 NZHJ | MARCH 2022 MORE AT www.hardwarejournal.co.nz