David Malcolm on The Trevor Carey Show: High Sierra Showerheads

Transcript

Trevor Carey: We have a guy I’m inviting in right now. Time to wash all this filthy news off of us, and I do it every night at 6:30. My statement right now is, I can’t right now, I’ve got to wash the day off.

Trevor Carey: I’m gonna talk to the inventor and designer of one of the coolest things in California. Literally, it’s on the list of one of the 16 coolest things in California. What am I talking about? Well, that’s my tease. We’ll talk to the inventor and designer next.

Announcer: This is The Trevor Carey Show on the Valley’s Power Talk.

Trevor Carey: I’m gonna say, in almost the eight years I’ve been here — Squires, you’ve been here, what, four or five? Four? — wouldn’t you say maybe two or three times sales has come and said, “Hey, we’d really like for you to push something”? I think it’s very rare, is what I’m saying. I’ve said no at times.

Trevor Carey: They didn’t come to me with this. I’m coming to you out of my pure enjoyment that I want to share with a — he’s a sponsor of the show — David Malcolm, sir, High Sierra Showerheads. David, welcome in, man.

David Malcolm: Hi, Trevor. Glad to be here.

Trevor Carey: It’s something that I do every day now, sometimes twice on the weekends. Now I’ve been known to do it three times.

Trevor Carey: You commented about low flow. You texted me the other night when we had a misunderstanding. You thought something was wrong with it. I was going, “No, I’m staying — the reason I’m staying in there so long, it feels so good.”

Trevor Carey: And you said, “With conventional low flow, you’ve got to stay in the shower longer just to rinse off. With High Sierra, you stay in longer because it feels good.”

David Malcolm: That’s right.

Trevor Carey: It does. Now, it’s kind of hard describing it to others. You’re the inventor. Describe what that means. It almost looks like a coloring book with the raindrops that come down. That’s the best way I can kind of do it. What about you?

David Malcolm: It’s kind of hard to visualize, but it’s really not hard water. What we’re doing is colliding two streams of water together inside of a nozzle. That collision is creating this perfectly cone-shaped spray of heavy droplets. They’re most like rain, except they’re focused into this cone.

David Malcolm: It comes out with a lot of energy, and it needs a lot of energy to be able to rinse the shampoo out of your hair. And we’re able to do it with very low flow.

Trevor Carey: Now, you were on the 16 coolest inventions in California, and you thought you would’ve won if you had a new addition on here. And listen, guys, I don’t know how to describe it. I said hard, but you said heavy. That’s really what it is.

Trevor Carey: It’s like heavy water, because there are so many splitter-splatter showers. If you travel to a motel, sometimes you’ll get a decent one, but all of them have that, at the end of the spray, that splattery feeling. As you move your hands closer to where it’s coming out, it might be more forceful.

Trevor Carey: Yours, how you do it, is you can almost hold your hand up to the showerheads — because I have two, we’ll explain that later — hold it up, and it’s almost like a workout a little bit. That’s the best way I can describe it, pushing back against that flow.

David Malcolm: Yeah. Well, it’s a full-cone spray of heavy droplets with a lot of energy, and it’s really, in our opinion, the best way to create a low-flow showerhead.

David Malcolm: All the other showerheads that are out there are really just modified versions of high-flow showerheads that we used to enjoy many years ago. They just make the nozzle smaller, maybe there’s fewer streams of water, and it just makes it more difficult to enjoy a good shower when it’s hitting you and stinging you.

Trevor Carey: If there’s any state that needs a good shower. Isn’t it horrible? You know, I’ve lived back east in the Buffalo area. It’s like a water hose from a fire department, and then you come out to California and it’s like a little summer spring-rain sprinkle that they allow to come out.

Trevor Carey: So with everything that you’re going through in your life, this actually is something else. It truly is.

Trevor Carey: And you’re probably, outside of the guys at work — that’s a restroom — you’re probably the only guy I’ve been alone with in a bathroom.

[David Malcolm laughs.]

Trevor Carey: David came over and installed it in my bathroom at home and explained the double-shower thing, because normally I’ve had the Amazon ones, right, where you hook it up, but only the shower would work or only the handheld would work. You couldn’t have them both on at the same time, but this, you can.

Trevor Carey: What I do is, with my hands, I go down and feel, okay, where’s the shower flow from the main shower? Then I direct the nozzle up to where it’s barely touching that flow, and that gives a massive shower flow.

Trevor Carey: Am I describing that right?

David Malcolm: You are.

Trevor Carey: Did anybody picture that?

David Malcolm: I hope you could.

David Malcolm: We have two different combination kits. One is a three-way, which is the one that you can only run one at a time. The other one is a four-way. That’s the one I installed in your bathroom, and you can run both. You can run one or the other or both at the same time and get full flow.

Trevor Carey: And it does. When you hit pause on one, the other one doesn’t increase. It stays consistent, and then the other one will stay consistent. You can choose either/or.

Trevor Carey: And if you have — I’m gonna say right now, I would never do this because I don’t have animals, and if I did I’d wash them outside in a tub — but there are people that will wash them in their bathtub. And if you do, with that nozzle, boy, I could come down and just wash any animal in there.

David Malcolm: Yeah, yeah. And because it’s a comfortable spray, it’s not going to scare them. If it was a very coarse, harsh spray, it’s going to scare an animal or a child. But our sprays are not soft, but they’re not hard. It’s like the Goldilocks of showerheads.

Trevor Carey: Yeah, it is. And that handheld thing — you told me that you had a gun designer — and I understand why now that handheld shower thing is not cheap, plasticky whatsoever.

David Malcolm: Right. The only non-metal part in the handheld showerhead is our rubber grip, and we source that locally from a company called Easer Products. One of the products that they make are these grips for pistols, and we use that on our showerheads. It’s tough. It’s not going to slip off.

David Malcolm: So many people are hesitant to add the rubber grip to our handhelds. They can order it from our website like that. You can build your own showerhead on our website and add the rubber grip.

David Malcolm: People are hesitant to add the rubber grip because of bad experiences that they’ve had with rubber grips made by other companies. They’re easily soft and spongy and fall apart after a short period of time, whereas these ones that we have sourced locally are not going to slip off and they’re not going to deteriorate over time.

Trevor Carey: You go to HighSierraShowerheads.com and it looks like you’re a national organization that David runs as maybe a franchise out of here or something, because you sell all over. You’re doing well.

David Malcolm: Oh, we do, yeah. We sell on Amazon in addition to our website. We’ve also been experimenting with retail in Oakhurst, and the owner of True Ace Hardware in Oakhurst has been very kind to us and allowed us to set up a display of our showerheads in his store. We’re giving that a try to see how that works for us.

Trevor Carey: I think Mark Cuban is asking how much it costs you to make. That’s what I feel like. Hey, we’re now in Ace Hardware stores. That sounds like a story from Shark Tank, man. It does. David, you’ve built this up well. Were you designing and building things as a kid? Were you one of those guys?

David Malcolm: Not really.

Trevor Carey: When did you decide you were gonna start?

David Malcolm: Well, I followed my dad into the irrigation business. He was a design engineer for Rain Bird, designing sprinklers. In the 1960s, he brought our family up to Fresno. He got a job as a chief engineer at Buckner Sprinklers, and then he later started his own company making sprinklers here in Fresno.

Trevor Carey: So you sat around as a kid at the table and heard how water comes out the end of things, and now you’re in the business of how the water comes out of the end of things, right?

David Malcolm: So, back in those years, there were no child labor laws. Our dad—

Trevor Carey: How many hours were you working?

David Malcolm: Oh, yeah. On weekends we’d work at the plant. I was maybe 11 years old and building sprinklers. So I’ve been around this my whole life.

Trevor Carey: Child labor laws. I think the reason I’m short is my dad. At the age of 10, I’d go in on weekends at the radio stations where he was the general manager, and I would bulk-erase carts — magnetic, these carts radio used, like eight-tracks — and that magnetism, I think, during my growth time, I think it stunted it.

Trevor Carey: So child labor laws, I think we both, we can go back, right? We’ll go back and take them all to court.

Trevor Carey: No, listen, there’s really not a gift outside, I would say, a new car or, I don’t know, a year’s supply of toilet paper, that you would think of the person every day, right? The shower is one of those gifts, I’m gonna say, that people would remember you every day.

Trevor Carey: But here’s the thing: HighSierraShowerheads.com. What’s the price of these? Just give me the range, because people want to know that right out the gate.

David Malcolm: Well, they start at $40, and then up to between $200 and $300, depending on the kit, depending on the finish. We have a lot of options that people can add to these things.

Trevor Carey: And you’ll just send it, you’ll mail it right out to them? It can come through Amazon? Or is it better to go through you? Do you make more? Let me just ask you that.

David Malcolm: Oh, yeah, we do.

Trevor Carey: All right, then we’re gonna say go to HighSierraShowerheads.com, right?

David Malcolm: Right, and we do have discounts because of Thanksgiving and Black Friday and all that. Then we have the Trevor20 discount that will go on beyond Black Friday. We’ll continue on through the end of December.

Trevor Carey: David, we had a conference room meeting of all the radio station people in there, and before it started we were all just talking back and forth. I was talking about the showerhead, and now Trevor20 has been shouted around the station a few times. It really has now. I did the pitch right in there.

Trevor Carey: And that’s why I’m saying, hey, this would be a good gift for anybody, and you can send it to anybody across the country. David, anything you want to say in the end here, man? I appreciate you coming in, because this is a cool thing.

David Malcolm: Well, you mentioned that contest that we were in, and I believe that we would have won if my fog-free mirror—

Trevor Carey: We’re gonna have to stop this. We’re in California. We have an election denier. And you’re saying—

David Malcolm: Yes.

Trevor Carey: You would have won?

David Malcolm: I think we would have won.

Trevor Carey: You would have won? Okay, I’m gonna go ahead and let—

Radio clip: That’s true, because it’s true.

Trevor Carey: Okay, you can say it then. Go ahead.

David Malcolm: So we have this new product that’s coming out, and it’ll be available for Christmas, so in December. It’s a fogless mirror showerhead. Okay, and this is it right here, and I’m showing it to Trevor.

Trevor Carey: That looks like a really big CD. It’s silver, big, metal. What is that?

David Malcolm: It’s an awesome mirror.

Trevor Carey: Let me feel it, because I— oh, that’s what I have, don’t I?

David Malcolm: No, no, you don’t.

Trevor Carey: I don’t have this?

David Malcolm: No. You have the Half Dome.

Trevor Carey: Okay.

David Malcolm: Yeah. So that is a fogless mirror, and with that—

Trevor Carey: So this has to be people that want to see themselves naked, though.

David Malcolm: You can see yourself—

Trevor Carey: I’d rather it fog. I got the fog-over one, do I?

David Malcolm: Well, that doesn’t fog over either, but it’s not going to reflect.

Trevor Carey: Hey, you know what? You can shave.

David Malcolm: That’s what you can do with this.

Trevor Carey: Yes, bingo, right there.

David Malcolm: You can shave in the shower, and this mirror—

Trevor Carey: See if you have nose hair. Eyebrow look. Yeah, I get it.

David Malcolm: It’s made out of aluminum, and the hot water heats it up. The hot water heats up the mirror, and it cannot fog over. So no matter how steamy it is in your bathroom, all the mirrors in your bathroom are going to be fogged over.

Trevor Carey: Did you design that?

David Malcolm: Yes, I did. And this mirror will not be fogged over, and you’ll be able to shave with it and do whatever you want with it, but it will not fog over.

Trevor Carey: Hey, put in Trevor20, get 20% off. Thanks, Dave. Have a happy Thanksgiving, and I want you to give the website in closing here. Go.

David Malcolm: HighSierraShowerheads.com.

Trevor Carey: Thank you.

David Malcolm: Thank you for inviting me.