• by Sarah Mahoney  @mahoney_sarah, April 5, 2016

As connected-home devices continue to gain popularity, start-up Lono has landed on the shelves of the Home Depot, with the promise of making smartphone-driven lawn sprinklers easy to use.

Born three years ago in the incubator at ad agency Rain, Lono’s goal is to lower water consumption and optimize energy usage. “The idea came from my co-founder, who is based in Utah, where he would often notice his neighbor’s sprinklers going off during the rain,” says Doug Crescenzi, Lono’s co-founder and CEO.

Bringing the product to market, he says, has been made much easier by companies like Nest. “It’s been fascinating to see how the market has changed in the last two-and-a-half years. Early on, these connected-home devices were popular mostly with younger early adopters. But between companies like Nest and Lowe’s Iris, we’ve seen a transition to older consumers, as well as women. They’ve become much more mainstream.”

But the main sticking point, he tells Marketing Daily, “continues to be ease of use. People are afraid it’s going to be complicated to set up. That’s why we’ve made sure people can get up and running with Lono in 10 minutes, tops.”

The company, which raised $150,000 on Kickstarter with a campaign that includes video, uses a WiFi-enabled sprinkler controller, a soil moisture sensor and an outdoor smart plug. With WiFi and Bluetooth, Lono connects with its own cloud, which collects, segments and operates based on data collected about lawns, weather, specific geographic areas, even historical evapotranspiration data, which all power sprinkling suggestions.

Crescenzi says the company is in talks to distribute the $250 system through other retailers, including Lowe’s and Best Buy. And recently, it joined Scott’s Miracle-Gro’s "Works with Gro" platform, introduced recently at SXSW.

For now, he says advertising is primarily through Facebook, as well as hyperlocal efforts.