Airthings
- Web & App Development
- Brand & Growth Strategy
- System Integration & Cloud
- Design System
Selling something nobody can see.
Airthings makes indoor air measurable. Its monitors read radon, particulate matter, CO₂, VOCs, humidity and pressure, and its app turns those readings into something a household can act on — an invisible risk, given a number and a next step. The science behind it runs back nearly two decades; more than 300,000 homes rely on it.
UrbanIQ partnered with Airthings on the direct-to-consumer side: the storefront, the commerce engineering beneath it, and the design system that holds the two together. The difficulty was never the hardware. It was that the product has to teach before it can sell.
Chapter One
Entry · The Brief
Science,
made shoppable.
✦
Airthings sells instruments, not accessories. A buyer arriving on the storefront usually cannot name the thing they are worried about — they have heard that radon matters, or that wildfire smoke reaches indoors, and they are trying to work out which of seven sensors answers that. The catalogue has to close the gap between a worry and a product before it asks anyone to choose.
That pulls three ways at once: copy and structure that explain a scientific problem without lecturing, a commerce layer that handles bundles and currencies across seven markets, and a component system disciplined enough to keep every product page consistent as the range grows. UrbanIQ worked with Airthings across all three, and on keeping them coherent as the catalogue widened.
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01
Node.Challenge Comprehension
A problem you cannot see.
Radon is odourless. PM2.5 is invisible. VOCs mean nothing to most people until someone explains them. A storefront selling against those threats is doing two jobs at once — establishing that a risk exists at all, then establishing which device measures it — and doing the first badly makes the second impossible.
The pages could not simply list sensors. They had to start from the worry, not the specification, and let the hardware answer a question the visitor already had.
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02
Node.Challenge Range
One catalogue, three buyers.
The same storefront serves a homeowner buying one monitor for a basement, a facilities team fitting out an office, and a radon professional who needs calibration and rental. Each arrives with different vocabulary and a different definition of proof, and each can reach the other's pages in two clicks.
Add seven locales with their own currencies, bundles and regulatory language, and the catalogue stops being a list. It becomes a system that has to route people before it sells to them.
Engineering notes
One system, seven markets
Currency, bundle pricing and regional language resolve from the same components rather than forking per market. A locale is configuration, not a second codebase, which is what keeps seven storefronts from drifting apart the moment one of them ships a change.
A design system sized to the catalogue
Tokens, primitives and product-page modules were defined once and consumed everywhere. A new monitor or bundle assembles from parts that already exist, so the range can grow without each addition negotiating its own layout.
Claims that stay defensible
A health product carries a duty the average storefront does not. Sensor capabilities, thresholds and guidance are stated plainly and kept to what the hardware actually measures. Trust in an air quality product is the whole product.
Chapter Two
Entry · Closing Remarks
A storefront,
built to keep up.
✦
The result is a storefront that carries a growing range without re-architecture. A new monitor arrives as a configuration rather than a rebuild, a new market inherits the same components, and a bundle can be introduced in one region without the other six having to agree to it first.
Airthings now sells a scientific instrument the way it should be sold — starting from what the buyer is worried about, and arriving at the device that answers it. The catalogue explains itself, which for a product measuring things nobody can see was the whole point of building it this way.