Archive for February, 2010
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Of Late
What our competitors do with their money.
Let’s be completely honest – giving large portions of money to charity doesn’t exactly leave much breathing room in the ol’ budget, and it’s easy to see something like WeDrink as coming off as scam-y, or just plain impossible.
Trust us, we understand that. That’s why we’ve spent almost a year now working on the behind-the-scenes structuring of WeDrink to ensure that you get an affordable WeDrink bottle – in fact, almost equal in price to many of our competitors’ bottles – while still managing to give to charity. And not just a dollar here or there – 4 out of 6 of our bottles, as well as our ceramic mugs and koozies, give 50% of the sale price to water-relief charities.
50% of sale price – not of our profits, like, well, just about everyone else.
What about the other two bottles? They’re about half the cost of our other bottles, and let you decide how much you give – our WeDrink Choice line. We take care of the microdonation – you get a legit bottle and the satisfaction of knowing your purchase – your money – your bottle – is working to save lives.
But yeah, how do we manage this insanity? We may as well sell our wallets on fire, right?
Not so much. We accomplish this in a few ways, none of which are particularly nefarious, but today there’s one in particular I want to note: we’re not dumping money into marketing campaigns.
Back when WeDrink first started, we experimented with Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and various other means of paying for traffic. Then we became a sponsor to DailyBurn’s CEO Fitness Challenge, we sponsored the All Good Music Festival in the summer of 2009, and we found ourselves reaching more people than ads or expensive marketing campaigns ever could. Word of mouth is a tremendous force, and we’re thankful for every nudge and “hey, check this out” people send each other.
In light of this, we cut the ads, released the WeDrink Choice bottles, and decided that getting the word out about WeDrink should depend on someone we know we can rely on.
You.
Doing all we can,
Daniel
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Good Faith Business Practices: WeDrink Bottles for America’s Economic Health
by Andrew
In 2005, Americans spent $9.8 billion on bottled water, according to the Beverage Marketing Corporation analysis.
That’s right, I’m gonna go ahead and use the CNN/NBC/FOX tactic to let the weight of big numbers really fall by reiterating that this is 9,800 Million dollars we are wasting on a product that isn’t even any better than tap water.
Yeah I said it, Tap Water! It costs $0.002 per gallon (up to 10,000 times less than bottled water), and has stricter safety and health standards than bottled water!
If there’s anything that’s gonna pull America out of the economic rut we’ve found ourselves in, it’s by thinking of ourselves as one big family unit, with money coming in and out amongst other countries. And the more we can trim from our family budget, the better off we’ll all be.
This is one of the main reasons that Dan and I founded WeDrink. We didn’t want to start a business that would ultimately just move money around between folks, creating little net value.I’ll spare you all the rant full of econ jargon by keeping it short and sweet: We wanted to build a business that would also have an immense positive net impact on the economic health of a great many Americans.
By choosing to boycott the waste of plastic bottled water, and instead drinking tap water and taking it to go in a reusable stainless steel water bottle, you could be saving $1,000 to $2,000 per year on bottled water costs for a family of four.
And that’s just the beginning. We have yet to discuss the environmental impact of choosing stainless steel bottles over plastic (see: The Great Pacific Gyre Garbage Patch), or let alone the immense charitable benefits of WeDrink (the sole characteristic that lets us stand out from all the other stainless steel bottle companies).
But those are all stories for another day. For now, let’s just think about all the money we could be saving.
Best,
-Andrew -
Haiti Relief
Occasionally, something truly shocking occurs in the world, something that surpasses the petty politicking and celebrity feuds over millions of dollars that dominate our evening news.
Unfortunately, these occasional events pale in comparison to the reality of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti.
The International Red Cross estimates that about three million people were affected by this 7.0 earthquake from 25 km outside of Port-au-Prince, the capital and largest city in Haiti. 300,000 were injured, and up to another 3-400,000 didn’t make it through the event. An event of such magnitude hasn’t been seen since the Indonesian tsunami killed over 200,000 people in 2004.
In light of such tragedy, we here at WeDrink are committing all of our charitable contributions, normally given to our water relief charities, to the relief efforts being conducted by the International Red Cross in Haiti.
Giving all we can.
