EverSoft, the apartment friendly, shower water softener.
Year 1 (2025-26)
by Garrett Phelps
EverSoft offers an innovative soft water experience that allows renters to shower in safe, clean, water with a retrofitted system that is noninvasive and apartment friendly.
About This Idea
Our goal is to provide peace of mind for renters by creating clean safe water for people to wash themselves with.
Hard water can cause:
Hair Loss
Dry Skin
Dandruff
Oily Hair
Itchy Scalp
Most people turn to a filtered shower head as the answer to hard water. These products are sold under the guise that they treat the problem. News flash, THEY DON’T!
The only effective products for treating hard water are water softeners. Sadly, the only retrofittable options on the market are bulky and hard to use. A full charging cycle for one of these takes 12 hours! Ain 't Nobody Got Time For That!
The only other options are whole-home softeners. While these work very well, they are not an option for renters. These systems need to be remodeled into current spaces, and renters need an apartment-friendly option if they want their security deposit back.
With EverSoft we have designed an intuitive point-of-use water softener for the apartment dweller.
Our patent-pending system indicates when it needs to be recharged, taking the guesswork out of the equation. The user simply swaps out cartridges like they would a drill battery from the charging station. With a charged cartridge installed, they can say hello to fresh, clean, silky smooth, soft water.
Where Did This Idea Spark at WMU?
The idea for EverSoft came about after my wife’s hair started falling out. We moved into Kalamazoo, a month later her hair started falling out in clumps. Thinking it would solve the issue, I bought a shower head filter. It stopped the rust, but her hair didn’t get any better. She eventually stopped showering at home and was commuting 40 minutes to shower.
I showered another 4 months, until my hair started falling out! Now we were both commuting to shower with soft water.
Feeling like our water wasn’t even safe to wash with made our living situation horrible.
I had to find a solution. Eventually, I found an inline water softener that connected to a shower. $300 later we had a solution; we could safely shower in our apartment.
It cleans the water effectively, but it takes 12 hours to charge the system! It's bulky, there’s no easy way to tell when to recharge, and the whole system needs to be disconnected for a charging cycle.
This had me thinking, there’s got to be a better way!
Impact in Kalamazoo
If we win, over half of Kalamazoo wins.
56% of Kalamazoo rents. That’s 40,000 people living with hard water.
Ask anyone walking down the street in Kalamazoo if they trust their water.
You’ll hear responses like:
“I’ve never seen water this brown.”
“I don’t drink the water, I don’t even make ice with it.”
and my personal favorite,
“It’s so hard you have to chew it.”
This water quality affects all of Kalamazoo. Unless you have access to a softener, you too, are dealing with hard water. Our goal is to offer safe, clean, soft water to folks who don’t have the luxury of a whole-home softener.
How Investment Helps
Our first milestone will be a local Kalamazoo alpha test. This research will be used to gather user feedback to drive any design tweaks as we move into regional beta testing.
What I'll Do With the Money
Phase 1:
$20,000 will be dedicated to research testing. This includes user testing, regulatory testing, and safety compliance.
Phase 2:
$50,000 will be used to run a pilot program in Southwest Michigan. With Kalamazoo acting as the dirty water hub, we will give our systems to beta testers to find real-world bugs and build early user buy-in. This phase will also include the implementation of turbidity and TDS sensors in every device for the collection of macro water usage and quality data. We aim to offer this data to local municipalities, public utility companies, and governmental agencies for the improvement of current water quality.
About the Founder
I’m Garrett Phelps, a Southwest Michigan native studying product design at WMU. My goal in life is to create products that enhance the health and well-being of users all over the world. However, nothing world-scale happens overnight; it happens step by step. Step one for me is building up the people of Kalamazoo. I know their pain; I see it every day. I know that when these folks thrive, the growth will spread like wildfire.