Bottled water vs. trusted tap
Happy Sunday {{first_name}},
If you’ve watched The Lorax, then you’ll be familiar with the brilliant satire based on the local tycoon selling bottled air. Perhaps the best line in the film comes from the marketing team: “Our research shows that if you put something in a plastic bottle, people will buy it.”
Watch it with your kids. Heck, watch it as an adult. It’s good.
When Dominique Olivier did some digging into the history of bottled water, it was hard not to think about the bottled air when reading it. There are some of course some regions where bottled water is the only choice, but there are many regions where tap water is arguably the safer outcome.
To learn about bottled water vs. the tap you can trust (along with the genesis of the term “mineral water”), you can read her latest piece here.
Tap coffee isn’t a thing, but Bootlegger’s online store makes it about as convenient as possible to stock up on your beans. As a Ghost Mail Weekender reader, you qualify for a discount. Just use GHOST10 at checkout when you purchase here.
Read on for a tale of the world’s most expensive bag of ice, as well as the Fast Facts themed around a customer for every product.
Enjoy the rest of your Sunday - and go buy some coffee!
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Bottled water, or a tap you can trust?
Bottled water has been sold to us as medicine, status symbol and safety net.
It all goes back to 1789, when a French nobleman visited a small town on the shore of Lake Geneva.
Dominique Olivier brings you a short history of paying for something that falls from the sky.
Would you like some ice with that?
TL;DR: One prince's grand plan to solve a water crisis ended up as the world's most expensive bag of ice.
In 1975, Prince Mohammed al-Faisal of Saudi Arabia had a problem and an idea.
The problem was that he was responsible for keeping a desert kingdom supplied with fresh water.
The idea was Antarctica.
His plan was simple and stupidly expensive: find an iceberg of around 100 million tonnes. Wrap it in sailcloth and plastic. Tow it to the Red Sea. Chip off pieces of it and let them melt - and voila, fresh water. Estimated cost: $100 million. Estimated timeline: three years.
To drum up support, the prince co-funded the First International Conference on Iceberg Utilization, held at Iowa State University in October 1977. Nearly 200 experts attended. And the prince, who had never actually seen an iceberg, felt that an iceberg conference ought to have one.
That’s how a team of divers in Alaska ended up wrapping a two-tonne chunk of glacier ice in netting. A helicopter lifted it to Anchorage, a passenger flight took it to Minneapolis, and a refrigerated truck drove it the rest of the way to Ames. The delegates were delighted. They chipped it up and used it to chill their drinks.
Unfortunately it was all in vain, and no iceberg ever reached Arabia. Instead, the prince built something far less glamorous but infinitely more practical: Saudi Arabia's desalination industry, now the largest in the world.
The idea, however, refused to melt. In 2018, as Cape Town counted down to Day Zero, salvage master Nick Sloane - the man who refloated the capsized Costa Concordia, which Dominique wrote about here - proposed towing a kilometre-long Antarctic iceberg to the Cape. Wrapped in fabric, it could have supplied about a third of the city's water for a year.
The city said it would rather keep an eye on the rainfall. Sorry, Nick.
How Jennifer Aniston’s LolaVie brand grew sales 40% with CTV ads
The DTC beauty category is crowded. To break through, Jennifer Aniston’s brand LolaVie, worked with Roku Ads Manager to easily set up, test, and optimize CTV ad creatives. The campaign helped drive a big lift in sales and customer growth, helping LolaVie break through in the crowded beauty category.
Dominique’s Fast Facts
Inspired by the innovative things we manage to package and sell, this week’s Fast Facts section is titled: "There’s a customer for every product”.
On Black Friday 2014, Cards Against Humanity took its game off sale and offered one product instead: a box labelled "Bullsh*t", containing pasteurised dung from a Texas cattle ranch, for $6. All 30,000 boxes sold out in under two hours, despite repeated warnings that there was nothing inside but dung. The company made 20 cents a box and gave the profit to Heifer International, a livestock charity.
During Beijing's worst smog on record, sales of Chen Guangbiao's canned fresh air suddenly took off. The multimillionaire had been selling the cans for 5 yuan each since 2012, in flavours including "Pristine Tibet" and "Post-industrial Taiwan". He admitted the venture was a tongue-in-cheek attempt to shock people (and officials) into taking pollution seriously. Each can had a cartoon of Chen and the words "Chen Guangbiao is a good man". He claimed to have sold 8 million cans in ten days.
Vitality Air started as a joke. Two Canadians from Edmonton put a ziplock bag of air on eBay, and it sold for 99 cents. The second bag sold for over $150. They began bottling air by hand in Banff and Lake Louise, and when a smog red alert hit Beijing, their first shipment of 500 bottles to China sold out almost immediately (in four days, according to the co-founder). A 7.7-litre can sold for about 100 yuan, roughly 50 times the price of a bottle of mineral water. Perhaps The Lorax isn’t so ridiculous, after all.
In 2013, Wall Street businessman Jamal Qureshi brought part of a melted Arctic iceberg back from Svalbard as a gift for his wife. A few years later, with the Governor of Svalbard's permission, he was chartering an icebreaker twice a year to collect 15 tonnes of floating ice from a fjord about 1,000 km from the North Pole, then melting and bottling it by hand. The brand launched at Harrods and sold online for €69.95 a bottle, with the company describing the water as having a "unique terroir" and being perfect for pairing with fine foods.