He Scaled a $500M Product. His Advice for Water Tech? Slow Down

Ravi Kurani

What if the biggest lesson for water tech founders came from an engineer who built a $500 million fitness mirror? Ravi Kurani sits down with Brad Augustine, VP of Hardware Engineering at Inspiren and former VP of Hardware at Lululemon, to trace his journey from designing LED task lights and ergonomic furniture at Humanscale to scaling the Mirror connected fitness device — the smart mirror Lululemon acquired for $500 million and ultimately killed. Brad shares how he cut 40% of Mirror's production costs right before the pandemic supply chain crisis, why a working prototype is the most dangerous moment in product development, and the engineering trade-offs that separate products that ship from products that die. They explore why water industry engineers need to stop building before they know their customer — are you solving PFAS at the wastewater facility or the drinking water plant? Two very different products. Brad also breaks down how AI could finally help engineers navigate the tangled web of water regulations and SCADA constraints, and why the "hardware is hard" mantra has it wrong, hardware is fun.

Key Takeaways

• "Hardware Is Hard" Is Actually "Hardware Is Fun": Brad reframes the popular mantra, arguing that the constraints, trade-offs, and regulatory puzzles of hardware product development aren't obstacles, they're the creative challenge that makes engineering rewarding. The real danger isn't that hardware is hard; it's that people think a working prototype means you're done.
• From Humanscale to Mirror to Lululemon's $500M Acquisition: Brad cut his teeth building LED lighting, height-adjustable tables, and healthcare equipment at Humanscale, learning the full product development cycle from concept through mass production. He then joined Mirror pre-acquisition as the first real engineering hire, scaling the connected fitness startup through multiple investment rounds and a $500 million acquisition by Lululemon in 2020.
• The 40% Cost Reduction That Saved Mirror: Brad led a value engineering process that slashed Mirror's bill of materials cost by 30–40%. When the pandemic shattered supply chains and component costs surged, that margin cushion was the difference between survival and collapse, proving that rigorous engineering diligence pays off when the unexpected hits.
• Your Working Prototype Means Nothing: One of Brad's sharpest warnings, executives see a functional prototype and want it on shelves tomorrow. But the real work of NPI (New Product Introduction) hasn't begun: regulatory compliance, reliability testing, supplier selection, tooling, and the brutal math of BOM cost vs. margin. The gap between "looks like, works like" and "mass production ready" is where most hardware products die.
• Engineers: Don't Just Say No, Present Options: As engineers grow more senior, the skill isn't identifying what can't be done, it's presenting trade-off options to product management and executives. "You can have this and this, or this and this, or do this now and reduce cost later." The engineer who frames decisions instead of blocking them becomes indispensable.
• Why "Me-Too" Products Fail in Hardware: Unlike software, you can't pivot hardware overnight. A plastic injection mold takes months to build. Brad argues that engineers should push back on copy-the-competitor impulses from product management and instead analyze how competitors are solving problems, then find better solutions using emerging tech like AI and robotics.
• AI as a Regulatory Navigation Tool: Brad sees AI's biggest near-term value for engineers in compiling and cross-referencing complex regulatory standards - UL, IEC, FCC, and regional requirements that no single person can hold in their head. For regulated industries like water, where SCADA systems and drinking water compliance add layers of complexity, AI-assisted compliance could be transformative.
• What's Next, AI Inside the Box: Brad's perspective as a mechanical engineer is refreshingly grounded: AI is just the control system changing. The box is still a box. The real opportunity is adapting AI into physical products that solve problems in our communities, from AR beauty tech (his current Primer project) to AI-powered senior care devices at Inspiren.

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Meet Brad Augustine

Brad Augustine is the VP of Hardware Engineering at Inspiren, an AI-powered senior living care platform that combines proprietary hardware with intelligent software to improve resident safety, care planning, and staff efficiency across more than 150 senior living communities.

Before Inspiren, Brad spent five years as VP of Hardware at Lululemon, where he led engineering for Mirror, the connected fitness smart mirror that Lululemon acquired for $500 million in 2020. He joined Mirror pre-acquisition as the company's first dedicated engineering leader, building the hardware team, driving regulatory compliance, upgrading contract manufacturing, and leading a value engineering process that cut product costs by 40%. He also oversaw the development of Mirror's second-generation device and a line of connected dumbbells and ankle weights before Lululemon discontinued the product line in 2023.

Brad began his hardware career at Humanscale, the office product company, where he spent four years as Design Engineering Manager, engineering products from concept through mass production including the M2 Monitor Arm, Element LED task light series, and the ZON Air Purifier. He has also consulted on product development for over two decades and recently worked with Primer, an augmented reality beauty tech startup developing a smart mirror for makeup tutorials.

Brad holds a bachelor's and master's degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Minnesota, with a focus on control systems and fluid dynamics.

The Book, Movie, or Show

Learning Piano / Music Theory
Brad Augustine's pick isn't a movie or a book, it's learning to play the piano. A self-taught musician since childhood (guitar, piano, accordion), Brad says what inspires him most right now is digging beneath the surface of music into the layers of theory underneath. Why does this chord progression sound good? What's happening when you play an accidental? He draws a direct parallel to engineering: you can engage with an object and enjoy it, but there are always deeper layers to explore. Just as a mathematician sees beauty in the structure behind a composition, Brad sees hardware product development the same way, there's always something beyond what you're doing, and the drive to parse it, pull it apart, and understand why it works is what keeps him exploring.

Transcript

[Brad Augustine] Hi, my name is Brad Augustine — former Lululemon and Humanscale. Today we're going to talk about why hardware is not just hard, but it's also fun and challenging. Doing good.

[Ravi Kurani] Doing really, really good. Summer's coming to an end. We were chatting earlier about your whole summer camp world that you went through. It's a world I don't know of.

[Brad Augustine] Yeah, it's a world unto itself. Once you have kids, it's all about figuring out structuring their summer and everything around what they're going to do. But I love that you mentioned water and summer — as those ended, it was pool, pool, pool, pool. It's a good connection.

[Ravi Kurani] We were chatting earlier about solving big problems that are consequential. Let's jump into that. I think that's going to be the theme of what we talk about today. We'll explore a little bit about your background, which I think is extremely impressive. And for all the engineers and product managers and product folks listening out there — Brad is your guy. So definitely tune into this episode and I think you'll enjoy this conversation. Brad, let's jump into that. What did you mean when you say solve big problems that are consequential?

[Brad Augustine] Having been in product development for 20 years and worked with a variety of companies, I'm at a place where I've worked on solving interesting problems in office spaces, connected furniture with Mirror, and taking fitness into the home. I'm at a point where I can say, what do I want to do? Where do I want to bring my skill? And it doesn't need to be commercial products — it can be bigger.

As an engineer, we have a problem-solving mindset. That's why I became an engineer in the first place. Engineering education gave you that problem-solving mindset. All the control systems and fluid dynamics — everything you learn is just to solve problems. That mindset can be applied not just to a very specific focus, but you can take a look at how are you living in the world? How are you living in your city? What are the problems?

I have busy streets here in my neighborhood in New York City. My brain has lately been revolving around how can technology slow down my streets so I can have my kid walk across the street? I think those are big problems. Sometimes those happen because you start at the big place — how can I make my street safer? And then it eventually distills down into something with a crosswalk, something with a street light. It's a fun place to start. What are the big problems that affect your life? And as an engineer, it's great to realize that we have the capacity to solve those with specific instances.

[Ravi Kurani] I want to touch on two things that are going to be building blocks for this episode. The first is this adage about "hardware is hard." I think it's important for the audience to understand your background because you brought a very compelling product to market. Let's explore the world of Brad as you were bringing that product to life.

[Brad Augustine] I'll start back a little bit. I did my bachelor's and master's in mechanical engineering — control systems, fluid dynamics. I was deep in the hardest part of computational work and it wasn't fun. When I discovered new product development, I was like, this is creativity, this is problem solving, this is what I want to do.

I kind of cut my teeth at Humanscale. It had a very strong sales arm, a very strong identity of what it wanted to be. But it wanted to expand into lighting, LED lighting, height-adjustable tables, docking stations, and healthcare equipment. I got to engineer a lot of those products, but also build the teams that were able to take products from concept all the way through to mass production.

It was a medium-sized company. I really learned the whole product development process. Private, heavily held company, working directly with the CEO to define the opportunities. Working with industrial design, then doing the engineering design, the regulatory, the reliability — defining these tests. These tests weren't defined. These regulatory requirements weren't set. So it was a lot of figuring out what made sense, where could we find anything defining something similar, and then setting it all up.

They also had the luxury of taking it all the way to mass production. All the NPI — choosing a supplier, working with that supplier, whether it was an ODM, OEM, or joint development agreement, reviewing off-tool samples. I got the breadth of product development and that's what I really loved.

I realized that's my expertise — knowing that you've got all these different constraints that you have to navigate. The fun part — and maybe this gets into "hardware is hard" — the hard part to me was the fun part. Figuring out all these different constraints that are all hitting. The product manager always wants it all — fast, best, cheap, everything. And as an engineer, you're the one to realize that these two now ram up against each other.

I think the "hardware is hard" mantra came from people who are kind of new to that, or realizing that you can't have it all. Because prototyping got easier and easier. It was easier to make that first initial design concept that looks like it works. But you haven't done all of that engineering work of having all these constraints hit.

The more senior you become as an engineer, the more you realize that it's about being able to not just say "you can't have it," but being able to identify the constraints, present the options. You can do this and this, you can do this and this, or maybe you can do this now and then later reduce costing.

[Ravi Kurani] Just re-summarizing — 3D printing and some of the technologies out there have been able to bring prototyping to where you can actually see a physical object. You can make a one of one. You can make 10 of these a day. But when you want to make tens of thousands of these and put them on Walmart shelves or sell them through Amazon, that's where NPI — New Product Introduction — comes to play. For the audience that may not understand the product development process, can you explain what has changed? Prototyping is easier, but at that intersection point when you turn from a one of one to thousands on shelves — what is that process?

[Brad Augustine] With prototyping you can make tens, you can make hundreds. But why do people go to more traditional manufacturing? It's cost. It's different materials and different functionality.

Looking at rapid prototyping versus traditional injection molding — these are two viable manufacturing processes with pros and cons. Rapid prototyping is very quick with not a lot of upfront investment. Injection molding takes longer to create your tools but gives you different possibilities for materials, and there's a lower cost. It's trade-offs.

As an engineer, the product manager ideally gives you the product requirements — here's what it needs to do from a customer perspective. They've got the voice of the customer. But they also say, here's what our BOM cost has to be. As an engineer, you can make a cheap fork and you can make a fork that's $20 — same functionality in different ways. That BOM cost really defines how you're going to do it.

[Ravi Kurani] BOM, by the way, is bill of materials for the folks listening out there.

[Brad Augustine] All your components costing. So as an engineer — all right, I know what you're going to sell it for. I know what the company needs to make for it to be commercially successful. Calculate that down. Then we start unpacking: high ticket items are going to be this part, this part, this part. For each part, the possibilities are rapid prototyping, injection molding, soft tooling. You do that for everything.

There are lots of different possibilities to go from that prototype to being able to say, for every single component, how do we make all these components in a physical product and how do they fit together so we can meet all of our product requirements?

This is the hard part because it's work. The "looks like, works like" prototypes with rapid prototyping look great. And there's a super danger in that because executive management sees a working prototype and they're like, fantastic, let's get it on the shelves tomorrow.

[Ravi Kurani] Yeah, ready to go to market.

[Brad Augustine] And you're like, I haven't done the work yet. The work hasn't been done. That's the hard part — you realize as you unpack more and more, there are other possibilities that optimize different aspects.

[Ravi Kurani] Let's carry over your Humanscale experience to Lululemon. What did that look like? What did you do at Lululemon? What was your story with Mirror?

[Brad Augustine] I had experience with exposure to the startup world. My wife was working at Kickstarter at the time, so I had a lot of exposure to people making prototypes. I realized that the knowledge I had of the full product development cycle — they didn't have awareness of it. It was get a prototype, put it on Kickstarter, and sometimes there was difficulty because they hadn't done the commercial viability, figured out the finances, understood the regulatory, or secured a supplier.

So I got hooked up with Mirror. Prior to being acquired by Lululemon, Mirror existed as a startup launched fall of 2018. Brynn Putnam, fantastic innovator, had a great idea for this product — giving people access to fitness in a home environment. It really resonated with me.

[Ravi Kurani] Can you explain what exactly Mirror is?

[Brad Augustine] It was in the connected fitness world. Peloton kind of defined that at-home connected fitness category. Mirror was a smart mirror in your home — when off, it was a very well-functioning mirror. When you accessed it from your phone to start fitness content, there's a screen behind the mirror shown through. It's really just a high-powered LCD blasting through. You get the aspect of focusing on the trainer while also seeing your reflection. The production studios had all-black backgrounds, filmed so the trainer existed in the middle and you got a lot of your reflection.

I came in there and was the first real engineering-focused person. They had typical startup backgrounds — manufacturing operations, quality, finance. I came in familiar with the product development process and put together all of the engineering due diligence. We hadn't been acquired by Lululemon yet. So it was get the documentation in order, do the regulatory that was outstanding, figure out what reliability testing hadn't been done that would be asked for by the next round of investors. Then upgrade the contract manufacturer from a smaller facility to a larger one with multiple facilities and greater capacity.

We had a few more rounds of investment. I was part of those conversations to say this is why the product is stable, this is why we feel confident the product is out there in the market. Then we did a huge value engineering process where we took about 30 to 40% of the costing out of the product, which was great because we hit that number. Then the pandemic — all the supply chain issues hit and costs went back up again. But we were in a much better place than if we hadn't done that.

Lululemon acquired us in summer of 2020 and let us run as a wholly owned subsidiary for a few years until they decided to focus on apparel.

[Ravi Kurani] One of the lessons I hope to pull for the audience, especially around the world of water, is going back to the beginning of this episode — solving big problems that are consequential, then tracing through your story of product development at Humanscale and then building Mirror and Lululemon.

The folks that listen to this podcast are either thinking about working in the world of water or are in the world of water through technology, building products for the world of water. There's an interesting thread here — understand who your customer is. A lot of folks in water just kind of build. They see that PFAS is a problem. But have you studied how PFAS is mitigated? Is that at the wastewater facility? Is that at the drinking water facility? Two very different customers, two very different intents.

Many times as engineers, we'll just get down to solving the problem. But pull your head up, run this thing from a product development process, figure out who your customer is, and then solve the problem end to end.

With that framing — what advice do you have for product folks and engineers out there?

[Brad Augustine] Definitely be part of the conversation. As an engineer, it is really important to get in there early and ask why. There is absolutely nothing engineers hate more than making a product, spending years on it, and then it's a total commercial failure. That's your baby. You've worked on it. So why didn't it succeed?

That has forced my mindset more and more into — why are we doing this? Is there commercial viability? Engineers are going to look at competitive products and see how they're solving problems differently than someone with a straight business background coming at product management.

Being able to bring that in — understand how the competition works, pull it all apart. Where is the technology interesting? Is it proprietary? Where are they putting their money? As engineering, we can bring that into the early stage.

If you can be part of the conversation early with product management to understand the problem and make sure product is not just running to a solution — because sometimes there's such pressure to generate sales that product management runs into, well, let's make our version of the competitor's product.

As engineers, we can say hold on — there might be a better way to do this. How are they solving it? Looking at all the constraints with money, with technologies, how things are changing — we might be able to solve it better.

It's a huge opportunity right now with AI advancing and robotics advancing. We can bring new solutions to problems. But AI is super shiny right now — it's going to cost you this much more for this chip and you're going to be out of it. We're the ones to analyze the possible solutions. You can't do this all with a humanoid robot. But you can do it with just an arm. The newest AI is going to require this much processing power, but you can solve it with this other approach. Engineering knows how to break it down into what do you really need to solve the problem, and then figure out how to optimize to that.

[Ravi Kurani] You said two things — make sure we're solving the problem right, don't build a solution for the sake of building a solution. And second, product managers from the non-engineering side will sometimes drive engineers to just build the "me too." Our competitors are doing this — just go ahead and pivot. But that circles back to "hardware is hard" — you can't pivot that quickly. Once you've made a mold in the injection molding facility, that thing took four months. You're not me-tooing another thing and changing the mold as quickly as software.

That segues to something you started to touch on — AI. It's very shiny. We have edge-based processing where you can run ChatGPT on a remote hub. You don't need cloud connectivity. Water has historically been very, very regulated because it is critical infrastructure. Especially drinking water or potentially bioterrorism. You don't want to immediately connect up your municipal water system to the cloud and end up with a CrowdStrike issue, the blue screen of death, and you can't serve water to hundreds of thousands of people. That's why there's these local SCADA systems.

When you're looking at technologies coming out now — use half a humanoid robot. You don't need an entire Tesla Optimus. Maybe just get an arm. If you're looking at AI, do you need cloud-based connectivity? What are the interesting things you're seeing from a product and engineering perspective that are new tools in the toolkit?

[Brad Augustine] There's a lot of people trying to develop software that figures out how to define constraints and solutions — whether from a regulatory perspective or tolerance perspective. Regulatory is always interesting, especially going global. You've got UL requirements here, IEC requirements there, China and Japan being different. There's always this sense of how do I design one product that can meet them all, and adding wireless and global radio requirements.

Something like water is the same — you've got different sets of requirements. One of the interesting things I've seen is the beginnings of how to avoid that process of buying this 30-page standard, buying this 100-page one, and trying to figure out how to navigate it all. As an engineer, it's impossible. I remember as an early engineer thinking, who is here to tell me how these all overlap? You learn very quickly there is no one and there's no process.

But AI is starting to come out to be able to say, all right, these are the requirements I have. And it's great at identifying those sources and compiling them — everything related to this aspect, the different varying requirements from this standard, that standard, this government standard. That is a great tool for engineering. You still have constraints and trade-offs, but you have something that's very good at taking a lot of information and sorting it. It's super useful for engineers.

[Ravi Kurani] Especially in water — there are so many regulations. If there was a tool, maybe not a generalist tool, but an AI water regulator sort of thing, or manufacturing — does this meet FCC or another particular regulation? Really interesting.

Last question before we wrap up. You've done Humanscale, you've done Lululemon and Mirror. What's next in the world of Brad? What large problem are you solving?

[Brad Augustine] My brain has been going to my environment, my community. How can my products affect my world, my family? Over the last year I've been working with an augmented reality beauty tech startup, which has been fascinating — digging into AR, optomechanical, 3D displays, taking my background from Mirror and pulling that smart mirror aspect into this other space. Learning a new technology.

My advice — get off email, call up the engineering applications people and start asking them questions. Usually they will sit there and talk with you until the next meeting.

I'm still involved in that project, but really taking a look at how I can use my background in new product development to create physical products that harness new technology. AI is fantastic. Right now everybody's talking about the control system. To me as a mechanical engineer, it's just the control system changing. The box is getting a little bit sturdier, but it's still a box to me. How can that now adapt into physical products that address problems in our world? I think the adaptation of AI into the next round of physical products — more than just a phone or a device — is really interesting. Whether it's robotics or other types of products.

[Ravi Kurani] Final question — I ask this to everybody. Do you have a book, a movie, or a TV show that has had a profound impact on the way that you see the world?

[Brad Augustine] I'm going to answer that a weird way. I've been a musician since I was a kid — self-taught guitar, piano, accordion. What is inspiring me right now is learning to play the piano. There's an aspect of understanding the theory — there's a difference between playing by what sounds good and digging into layers of theory underneath it. Why does this sound good? Parsing it, pulling it apart. Every mathematician who's into composition says, that's why I love it.

There's an object you can engage with and it's great, but there are so many layers behind it. Why do these chord progressions sound good? How can I play accidentals — why does this sound interesting? There's that aspect of realizing there's always something beyond what you're doing. It's not a movie, but it's something that gets me doing and exploring. Hopefully that's the heart of your question.

[Ravi Kurani] I love that. Awesome. Brad, thank you so much for joining us today. This was an extremely insightful conversation. Thanks a ton.

[Brad Augustine] Great. Thank you very much for the time. It was great.