The owners of Hydros Bottle LLC have goals for their business that are hard to find these days—making a difference in addition to making a profit. Aakash Mathur started the path to creating the company with partner Jay Parekh in a class called Societal Wealth Entering at Wharton Business School. Aakash explains, “The idea of the class was to look at how to use companies and enterprises to solve social issues. One thing I looked into was the consumption of bottled water in the United States and the effects of it environmentally and financially. I studied both how to deter people from drinking bottled water, and worldwide water issues.”
At the time, Jay was president of Penn Engineers without Borders, an organization that implements sustainable water projects worldwide, and the two were introduced by another startup that was involved in filtration development. Aakash says, “We realized that 70% of Americans drink bottled water regularly, and the top reasons for doing so are taste, convenience, and water quality concerns. It’s incredible wasteful, sending 60 millions bottles to landfills a year, and it’s ridiculously expensive. People want an alternative.” The two saw the opportunity for a business that could both create an alternative for a wasteful and environmentally harmful problem here in the U.S. and fund solutions for the global water crisis overseas. “We thought we could release a product here and then use proceeds to develop technology to take the product worldwide and fund water projects like Engineers without Borders.”
Aakash and Jay began developing the technology for a water bottle with a built-in filter, and created “Operation Hydros,” the facet of Hydros Bottle LLC that supports overseas water projects. As of now, their main project is in Gundom, Cameroon. “We take a dollar from every bottle we sell and put it into a project, and it translates to about 2000 gallons of clean water. In Gundom, the project we support brings water from a local source and pipes it into villagers’ homes.”
While Aakash and Jay may be excited about the work their proceeds contribute to in developing countries, they also know that they have to thoroughly research which projects to support. “We have criteria for choosing a sustainable project. We allow people to propose projects to us, and we look into them and decide whether or not to provide funding.” There are many projects that look great but two years down the road, the systems are broken and nobody qualified is around to fix them.”
The future of Operation Hydros is what really excites Aakash. “It’s a lot of fun thinking about how this could make a huge difference.” Hydros Bottle’s strategy of social entrepreneurship is a rising trend in an age when people want to know exactly what kind of difference their donation is making. “The old way was just that you donated to a cause and hoped for the best,” says Aakash. “Now people ask what the outcome of their money is—they want to see the results. Everything we donate goes directly into materials cost, so we can actually trace the impact of each dollar—there’s a clear, visible impact.”
Aakash and Jay keep their focus not only on their overseas projects, but also on their growing business here in Philadelphia, and more specifically on their product itself, which Aakash says they designed with convenience in mind. “We’ve created a product that’s very simple and convenient to use. You can take our water bottle to any water fountain, kitchen sink, bathroom tap, any tap water, and filter it on the go. The bottle filters on the way in, just like a traditional kitchen filter, in less than 20 seconds.” The entrepreneurs also stress the importance of creating a product locally. “We manufacture entirely in America. All our manufacturing is done through contract manufacturing in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware.”
As for selling their product, Aakash’s advice is to start at the top. “I think the best thing you can do is aim high. You should ask yourself, ‘What is the best retailer I can get in with?’ And just go there. Target and go after them because in the end everyone is excited about a new product that can make a difference.” The Hydros Bottle went live on retail shelves in July of 2010, and is now in Essene Market, Pumpkin Market, 5 Philadelphia area Whole Foods Markets, 10 DC area Whole Foods Markets, 23 Dick’s Sporting Goods, and a number of independent retailers across the country.
For the future, the biggest challenge faced by Hydros Bottle is getting the word out about its product. “We’ve been online a couple months now and we’ve seen a steady increase in sales, but our big struggle is getting people to know about us. The idea of a filtering water bottle is pretty new so we just need to get people to know about it and see the Hydros Bottle in action and how it works.” And there’s an increasing amount of features to tell people about. “We want to create more customization—different kinds of bottles, some with straws, more colors than the five we now have. We want to give people different options.” Along with improving the variety of their water bottles, Aakash and Jay hope to continue to increase awareness and adopt more sustainable water projects.