COVER STORY
When Killi’s Met i-mop
One of the standout exhibitors at the Cleaning Show 2015 was T.L Killi’s. Not only did they pick up the Floor Cleaning and Overall Winner at the show’s Innovation Awards, they were constantly bombarded by customers interested in the i-mop. Here, Tibor Killi Junior, Sales Director at T.L Killi’s, tells us the story of the i-mop, and why it’s causing such a fuss.
We first saw the i-mop at the ISSA/ Interclean show in Amsterdam in May last year. It was actually the very professional, eye catching and clean stand that caught our attention, as well as the large crowd of people gathered around a machine. Our first thought was ‘wow, this product must be worth looking at.’ Our first impression of the i-mop was that it was a very compact scrubber dryer which had potential, but only in certain market segments. We thought this machine would be ideal for cleaning small areas.
We Were Wrong! We did not realise the real potential until showing the i-mop to our customers. After demonstrating the i-mop to our dealers and end user customers we very quickly realised that the i-mop was so much more
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than a small scrubber dryer. The i-mop was a revolutionary cleaning system, with a potential bigger than any machine we have ever sold.
Looking back at the design process it shouldn’t have come as that big of surprise to us, but that is with the benefit of hindsight, of course. From what we understood the core concept was created by an engineer from Germany, who faced the same problem everybody did in the industry.
On one hand you have a mop, which was great for small spaces, very nimble and flexible, but low in terms cleaning quality and efficiency. On the other hand are the fleets or scrubber dryers, powerful and fast, but they also had their drawbacks, almost the direct opposite of the mop. The first design looked something like a typical floor machine with a backpack
vacuum hooked up to it in order to recover all the water, but it already showed a lot promise.
One of the things the producer, FCT, did when they became involved was to bring in end users at critical points in the design process, which were almost exclusively women. One of the core design principles was that it needed to be easy to operate by women, because what they found was in most operations, that’s who made up the majority of the cleaning staff.
From its initial concept the machine then saw a functional design phase under FCT, which integrated the vacuum motor and recovery tank into the machine itself and did away with the belt drive in favour of a gear drive. The third and final design phase was mainly focussed on the exterior, such as the controls, removing all of those complicated switches and replacing
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