Bluesmart

» see bluesmart.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Bluesmart sold the idea that a suitcase should have an account. The Bluesmart One was a carry-on with a lithium-ion cell built into the shell, a location radio, a scale in the handle and a lock that opened from a phone. It went up on Indiegogo in October 2014 and met its funding goal in two hours. By the time the campaign ended it had taken more than $2.2 million from backers in 114 countries against roughly ten thousand units, which was the largest sum a travel product had ever raised that way. Diego Saez-Gil and Tomi Pierucci started it in New York back in 2013, with Alejo Verlini.

The battery was the whole product. Everything Bluesmart promised ran off a cell glued into the body of the bag, because a removable one would have meant a hatch, a seam and a worse suitcase. That was a defensible engineering call in 2014 and it stayed defensible until January 2018.

I have never owned a suitcase with firmware. The Bluesmart One listed at around four hundred and fifty dollars, which buys a great deal of ordinary luggage in Turkey, and the pitch behind it assumed somebody who boards a plane often enough to want to know where their bag is at every moment of the day. That was not my 2018 and it is not my now. I recognize the engineering decision behind the bag and almost nothing else about it.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the ban ~

American Airlines announced on 1 December 2017 that from 15 January 2018 it would not accept smart bags whose batteries could not be taken out. Alaska and Delta published the same rule within days, and the reasoning everywhere was identical: a lithium-ion cell in a cargo hold is a fire nobody can reach. Bags with removable batteries were fine. You pulled the cell, put it in your pocket and checked the bag.

That carve-out is what makes the Bluesmart story specific rather than general. Raden, the other smart luggage brand of that moment, built removable batteries and still closed, so the rule was not a clean execution on its own. For Bluesmart the rule was closer to a product recall announced by somebody else. There was no firmware update, no accessory, no revision of the One that could comply, because compliance meant a different suitcase.

~ what travelpro bought ~

On 1 May 2018 the company posted that the airline restrictions had put it in a financial and business situation it could not reverse, and that Travelpro had bought the majority of its intangible assets, its technology and its brand among them. Travelpro was started by a Northwest Airlines pilot who had invented the wheeled carry-on in 1987, which is a tidy destination for a brand that airlines had just killed. A separate limited company was set up to handle refunds and to move the intellectual property across. Sales stopped, warranty support stopped, and the apps and servers were to run on for a few more months.

~ the bags still out there ~

Reporting at the time put roughly 65,000 Bluesmart cases in active use. Not one of them was bricked by the shutdown, which was never the mechanism here. The bag still rolled and still weighed itself, and it still could not be checked onto an American flight. People who had paid a premium for the connected half of a connected suitcase were left holding the suitcase half, with an app pointed at servers on a countdown.

Hardware crowdfunding failures usually run on the same engine, a team that cannot manufacture what it demonstrated. Bluesmart shipped. Ten thousand units went out, the thing worked, the reviews were real, and then an industry it did not sell to and could not lobby changed one line of policy. The company had built its entire product on a permission it never actually held.

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