Electrical manufacturers submit several hundred new product press releases each year to Electrical Wholesaling’s editors. We see everything from a full-on public relations assault from companies with uber-sophisticated product launch campaigns to products submitted by electrical contractors and other entrepreneurs who invent a product and promote them with little more than a few bulleted points in a Word document and a photo or two they took from their smart phones.
However a company launches a product, the really interesting ones usually stick out. Some of them hit you with a “Why didn’t I think of that?” revelation, while other new products occasionally offer little more than a different coat of paint on last year’s model. Many of the products that caught our interest over the past year followed some similar key trends in electrical product development:
- They are designed to help electrical contractors do their jobs better, safer or faster.
- The “LED-inization” of the lighting world as this now ubiquitous technology has revolutionized this business product application by product application.
- App-based control of lighting systems that puts some of the design of what were once customized lighting control systems into the hands of the customer so they can select colors, dimming schemes and other system controls.
- Smartphone apps that help electrical contractors make electrical calculations on the fly.
- Application of IoT (Internet of Things)-enabled sensors into all sorts of residential applications.
With the advent of the COVID-19 coronavirus, new forms of germicidal lighting. EW’s editors sifted through the press releases on everything from pink locknuts and garage workbench inventions from serial inventors, to products carefully launched after hours of job-site test marketing to highlight to find the products that followed these trends. We also included products that generated tons of traffic in popular monthly Top 10 product picks on www.ewweb.com, and some of those that stood out in the 2020 EC&M Product of the Year competition that’s been held annually for the past 20 years by Electrical Construction & Maintenance magazine, Electrical Wholesaling’s sister publication.
