Eric Barnes of KOR Water Interviewed at Opportunity Green
Eric talked to Oppgreen Insights at the Opportunity Green conference about KOR’s “Better Me, Better World” mission, and KOR’s partnership with RKS.
From the interview:
Eric: Design, from the start, was critical. We sought out the best design firm we could find, RKS. We’re entrepreneurs, we didn’t have much in the way of resources, so we had to counter that with great enthusiasm and a great idea. At the time, the RKS guitar had won a design award from BusinessWeek and they were featured on the cover. We interviewed several design firms, but RKS won the job because they really understood what we were after. So it was very exciting. KOR came to the equation with a lot of deep thinking about where we could innovate—a cap that stays on the bottle so you don’t have to hold it, a threadless spout so you can put your lips on it without it feeling like you’re drinking out of a garden hose, little subtle things like the bevels. It’s sort of an obelisk in shape, in the way it tapers. We knew that we wanted to touch the senses the way a cologne bottle or a nice liquor bottle does, there’s a lot of thinking that goes into bottle design. In the resuable market at the time it was all about utilitarian functionality, and that was good enough. So design can really add that special layer, and I think RKS really succeeded. And we also got connected with Eastman. In 2005, if you did a little bit of research, it was already evident that BPA was a big issue. It wasn’t mainstream, but it was on the top of our list of requirements that the bottle be BPA-free. So poly-carbonate was not an option. We sought out Eastman when they were in the preliminary stages of developing Tritan, and it was a great match. Up until 2008 you had companies like Nalgene that were still holding onto poly-carbonate and defending BPA. It’s still not outlawed.