🌐 Beautiful Heat: Quilt Turns Decarbonization Into Desire

Adoption Archetype: 🎨 Lifestyle Upgrade — make it aspirational.

The upgrade moment.

I bought a used Tesla in 2023, my first foray into the EV lifestyle. The perks were obvious. The cars are insanely fast, incredibly convenient, and far cheaper to maintain than anything powered by gas.

Yet the most miraculous thing about EVs is that, unlike their gas-powered counterparts, they improve the longer you own them.

When I bought my Tesla, it didn’t have a lane-change warning sensor. Two months later, it did.

How? Through over-the-air (OTA) software updates that continuously improve safety, performance, and features.

That’s the electric future—and it’s Supercool.

This past September, the same thing happened for the first time in the history of residential HVAC. An invisible revolution in a category that accounts for over 50% of home energy use.

The company behind it was Quilt. Overnight, homeowners woke to find their heating and cooling systems 20% more powerful than the day before.

Paul Lambert, Quilt’s founder and CEO, saw what everyone else had missed: the heat-pump adoption problem wasn’t technical; it was aspirational.

So he assembled a team from Google, Nest, Tesla, and Lucid to pull heating and cooling into the 21st century—to treat it like a true consumer technology category. To turn need into want. And to accelerate the shift away from fossil fuels.

Quilt is writing a new story for HVAC—through software and design—making sustainable comfort feel like luxury and elevating decarbonization through aesthetics. Since launching two-zone, ductless heat pumps in the market over the past year, Quilt has expanded to more than a dozen states and 1,000 installations.

Paul frames the directive in simple terms:

“Where do consumers still buy fossil fuels? In their car and in their home.”

Hundreds of billions have already been invested in electrifying and scaling the former. So Quilt is transforming the latter.

Design is the Adoption Strategy

Before Quilt built its first prototype, Lambert’s team ran studies to understand why homeowners avoided heat pumps.

“We did a bunch of research early on that showed that the aesthetics were actually one of the big reasons people were not buying,” he said.

For a product that resides in the most personal space we own, the legacy industry has treated design as an afterthought. That insight became the foundation for how Quilt builds.

The company took its name from the feeling it aimed to restore: warmth, comfort, care.

“The home is our most personal space,” Lambert said. “People spend a lot of time and effort shaping it for their families and friends.”

Since its founding in 2022, Quilt has been on a fast track, garnering recognition at the highest levels of design and innovation. This year alone, TIME named Quilt one of the Best Inventions of 2025, and Fast Company included it among the Most Innovative Design Companies.

Still, when Domino Magazine honored Quilt with a Good Design Award, that was the proof the company is reaching into mainstream consumer consciousness—where the future must be won.

Intelligence in the Air

The car got autonomy. The phone got intelligence. The home, Lambert believes, deserves both.

While most of the HVAC industry still operates on a mid-century template—ducts, furnaces, and static thermostats—Quilt systems think in real-time.

Every unit carries up to 1,000x more processing power than a traditional system. The innovation isn’t in the hardware, but in how the entire tech stack is integrated, and how it unlocks intelligence.

Quilt’s software uses AI to learn each room’s thermal fingerprint: how sunlight moves through windows, how insulation holds heat, how people actually occupy the space. Over days and weeks, it builds a predictive model of that room’s behavior—anticipating how it will warm, cool, and retain temperature.

“It’s not just about occupancy,” Lambert said. “It’s about the thermal characteristics of the room itself. Once you learn that, you can make better decisions—and that means more energy efficiency.”

That’s real-time optimization: a self-tuning system balancing comfort, efficiency, and cost every second of the day.

Unlike traditional HVAC systems, which operate on static thermostats and crude cycles, Quilt adjusts continuously. The result feels different. Rooms stop drifting hot or cold. The air feels steadier, quieter—like the environment itself is paying attention.

Culture by Design

Climate work is serious—existentially so—but Paul believes seriousness doesn’t have to become heaviness.

“It can get very serious,” Lambert says, “but it’s also authentic. We have fun at work. There’s no reason you can’t have fun.”

That approach shapes a brand that feels human in a category characterized by detachment.

When the team added a playful feature that let the light on each unit twinkle like a Christmas tree, customers loved it so much that it became a feature. Now there’s a “disco” mode and more on the way.

The point isn’t novelty—it’s character. Climate tech often asks people to care. Quilt gives them a reason to smile.

“We enjoy making the products we make,” Lambert says. “And people can feel that.”

Expanding the Category

Quilt isn’t trying to out-market other heat-pump brands. It’s trying to expand the field.

“If someone only buys Quilt instead of an existing heat pump, we’re not creating any net new fossil-fuel displacement,” Lambert says.

The mission is bigger: to attract people who would never have considered a heat pump before. Make sustainable comfort aspirational.

That strategy is already working. Quilt launched with direct installations in the Bay Area, then partnered with HVAC companies across the country. It’s now available in more than a dozen states and expanding rapidly.

Quilt matches the price of premium Japanese systems yet outperforms them on:

• Efficiency: Highest in class.
  

• Performance: Real-time optimization through data.
  

• Longevity: Software updates extend capability.

“On performance per dollar,” Lambert says, “we pretty much always win.”

Heating and cooling aren’t optional purchases. They’re inevitable. Every 10 to 15 years, systems reach the end of their lifespan and are replaced. Electrification is arriving through that natural cycle—but only if the products people want happen to be electric. 

Quilt’s bet is that they will be.

Supercool Takeaway

Quilt proves that design is the most underutilized accelerator in climate technology, and the future of electrification belongs to products that work beautifully and look even better while doing so.

Operator Takeaways:

• Design converts emotion into adoption. Aesthetic intelligence isn’t garnish—it’s the growth engine.
  

• Integration beats invention. Borrow proven tech from faster industries and reapply it with precision.
  

• Build for want, not should. Electrification wins when products earn their place in people’s lives.

This Week’s Podcast Episode

Trust Scales: Veo Is the Micromobility Partner Cities Love

🎙️ Listen on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and all other platforms.

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Stat of the Week: 3.6 Million

That’s how many heat pumps were sold in the U.S. in 2023, now outpacing new gas furnace sales. The key to electrification is to further accelerate this trend.

Quote of the Week:

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🌐 The Climate Adoption Playbook - Module 3

Dandelion: How to Turn "Too Risky" Into "Sign Me Up"

Geothermal heating and cooling have always had the specs to win: ultra-efficient, near-zero emissions, and low operating costs. But for decades, the market wouldn't budge.

The problem wasn't performance. It was perception.

Homeowners saw drilling rigs in their yards, uncertain timelines, and costs that could balloon without warning. They imagined being the neighborhood test case—the family who gambled on some niche technology while everyone else played it safe with conventional HVAC.

Even people who loved the idea of geothermal couldn't get past the image of their driveway torn up for days, their lawn destroyed, their budget blown.

Dandelion understood: the barrier wasn't technical. It was emotional.

So they rebuilt the entire experience around certainty. They engineered a proprietary drilling rig designed specifically for suburban lots—compact, quiet, fast. What used to take days of disruptive construction now happens in hours, with minimal impact.

They built software that delivers accurate upfront pricing without the usual multi-visit dance. And then they wrapped the whole package in long-term financing, industry-first leasing contracts, equipment warranties, and performance guarantees.

The psychology flipped. Geothermal stopped feeling like an exotic gamble and started feeling like the safe choice—a predictable home upgrade with a guaranteed payback.

The results prove it. Thousands of systems now installed across the Northeast. A national partnership with Lennar, the second-largest U.S. homebuilder, embedding Dandelion into new developments.

What was once a niche technology for early adopters is now infrastructure.

As founder Kathy Hannun explained: "Homeowners don't want to gamble on drilling. They want certainty that it works, looks good, and pays back. That's what we guarantee."

The de-risk lever: Dandelion didn't try to educate the market into courage. They eliminated every reason to hesitate, so the risky choice could become the obvious one.

The takeaway: Markets don't move on better technology. They move when you erase doubt.

From Module 3 of the Climate Adoption Playbook—learn how climate solutions unlock mass adoption by turning customer risk into customer confidence.

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Related

Design-Led Electrification

Design is becoming one of the strongest accelerators of electrification. Like Quilt, other forward-looking companies are leveraging design to provide electric machines that people genuinely want.

Rivian set the tone for electric adventure with the R1T and R1S lines. The upcoming R2 carries that spirit into a more accessible form, an electric mid-sized SUV built for broad adoption. Rivian’s design ethos stays consistent: functional lines, thoughtful details, and an unmistakably electric identity. 

Arc Boats reimagines what life on the water can be. The 23-foot Arc Sport delivers silent acceleration, joystick precision, and customizable wakes for hours of riding. It’s a fully electric boating experience shaped around joy, ease, and control. Arc is now extending its powertrain into commercial vessels, including electric tugboats bound for service in the Port of Los Angeles by 2027, showing that good design can move an entire marine segment forward.

Lightship brings aero-electric design to the American travel trailer with the A.E.1. Its streamlined form, integrated solar array, and high-capacity battery turn it into a self-powered, all-electric RV built for EV towing. It’s a full rethinking of a category that hasn’t changed in decades.

Olto brings that same clarity to two-wheel mobility. The Infinite Machine is a modular electric scooter designed for urban mobility — featuring two-passenger seating, reversible drive, and a footrest that transforms into pedals for bike lane riding. The form is simple, balanced, and instantly legible.

Beta pushes electrification into the air. Its electric aircraft platform focuses on efficiency, manufacturability, and operational simplicity — a winged architecture designed for logistics, defense, and regional mobility. Clean aerodynamics and a streamlined control environment give electric aviation a shape built for actual service, not speculative prototypes.

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