As many people have been asking us why we set out to create the perfect aquarium and what is wrong with existing aquariums that you can buy, we thought we would explain ourselves. Here are our top reasons why we created the Norrom Aquarium.
Whacky, Tacky Plastic
It’s been an entertaining few years of design in the aquarium industry, and we are grateful for that. Most product line-ups have innovated only so far as to change the shape or colour of the tacky plastic frames. Here are some of our favourites below.
At Norrom we believe that design within the home requires a passion for care and detail. Just like any piece of furniture in your home, an aquarium needs to fit the style and colour scheme of your home perfectly, and be built well enough to last. After all, who would buy a coffee table or a chair that looked as tacky as these aquariums?
Attention to Detail
Many of us have been here. You shop around for a cool-looking aquarium that will complement your fantastic new lounge, and you come across an aquarium that looks great on the box. You get it home, set it up, and…it looks like this. The aquarium industry in recent years has been populated with aquariums that contain annoying little design flaws that the manufacturers hoped nobody would notice. These include messy wires hanging freely from the lid, thin bendy plastics in naff colours (often so thin that you can see the light shining through), visible condensation at the top of the aquarium, noisy external parts like the air pump, a constant glare from the light simmering on the water surface. To add insult to injury, many aquariums contain a range of propriety or unique components, especially when it comes to filtration, guaranteeing that the manufacturer can continue to rip you off for many years to come.
Dodgy Manufacturing
Much like many sectors of the consumer products industry, the past few years has seen good quality design and manufacturing give way to a flood of copy-cats and me-toos from the Far East. Some of the most notable ‘British’ branded aquariums manufacture their products in the Far East to make their profit margins as high as possible. This makes us at Norrom think hard about what we value in a product and how much better aquariums could be. Our beautiful high-quality aquariums are, and always will be, manufactured right here at home, supporting British and Scandinavian industry and ensuring only the best quality and care goes in to everything that we give our customers.
Depressing Retail
The aquarium retail industry has not changed much over the past few years. Ever increasing numbers of people are buying record numbers of items online, where there is more information, customer reviews, and no traveling. However, many of the UK’s pet retailers compete with the online world like this (pictured). A typical sight in your local aquatic shop: aquariums uninspiringly lined up next to each other, some on top of their dusty boxes, switched off, unlit, with nothing in them except a few freebies and some faded marketing literature. If you are lucky, they have the one in stock that you want. You pay over the odds, and lug it back to your car. Few brands offer a better alternative to this tired retail experience.