Entrepreneur

Mistakes
↓ Grayl’s new bottle
and marketing.
You Can’t
Serve
Everyone
By trying to create a luxe water bottle for
the masses, Grayl built a product
no audience wanted. So the brand hit reset.
by CLINT CARTER
R
Travis Merrigan and Nancie Weston had a simple,
elegant idea. They wanted to make a bottle that
cleans water. Fill it from a dubious source—a stagnant
creek or a rusty spigot in a foreign country—
and then use it like a French press, pushing down
on a plunger-like filter to screen out harmful compounds.
In 2013, after two years of development
and a successful $15,000 Indiegogo campaign,
they made it. It was called the Water Filtration Cup, sold
under the brand name Grayl.
Their sales strategy was ambitious; they wanted Grayl to be
useful to everyone. They gave it a sleek, stainless steel design
to broadcast its durability and high-end elegance. Then they
offered three cleaning cartridges, which were called Tap, Trail,
and Travel. Tap made water taste better, and the other two
made it safe. Tap and Trail were filters that removed bacteria
and protozoa, while Travel was a purifier that also cleared out
viruses. The bottle cost $80 and included the Travel filter; the
other two cartridges were sold separately.
Confused? So was, well, everyone.
At trade shows, even Merrigan struggled to describe his
product to buyers. “I’d spend two and a half minutes just
explaining Tap, Trail, Travel,” he says. “Odds
are you still don’t understand, and I haven’t
shown you what sets us apart.” Two years in,
Grayl had managed to land 104 retail partners,
many of them wellness stores and gift
shops. A few outdoor brands like REI were
moving inventory, but the feedback was
lackluster. Retailers complained that the
generic packaging lacked a story, customers
complained that the bottle was too heavy
for backpacking, and the three-cartridge
system was still confusing. As one product
tester put it in an email to Merrigan,“Why
would you buy the second-best cartridge?”
Merrigan pushed back. You just don’t get
it, he’d tell retailers and customers. But as
sales slowed, he reevaluated. “That was the
wrong response,” he says now. “The hardest
↑ The original design
in stainless steel.
thing is to hear hard truths. It took some humility.”
If the company wanted to grow, its founders realized, it was
going to have to start from scratch. So the team began with a
question: Whom is the product for? “We just didn’t understand
who our core users were,” Merrigan says. “We thought,
Everybody drinks water, and everybody wants it to be clean,
therefore, we can sell to everybody.” In 2016, a fresh Kickstarter
campaign introduced a new model designed for outdoor
adventurers and emergency preppers. Instead of steel, it
was made from lightweight BPA-free plastic, and instead of
three cartridges, it came only with Grayl’s top purifier. The
changes improved margins so much that the company
dropped the retail price to $59.50.
Still, the founders were on edge. “We needed that Kickstarter
campaign to work, or we may not have been a company
anymore,” Merrigan says. Within its first day, the new
bottle exceeded its $25,000 crowdfunding goal. By the time
the campaign came to a close, Grayl had
raised nearly a quarter- million dollars—
more than 14 times what it’d earned through
its first crowdfunding attempt.
The company ended its relationship with
some of its retail partners and turned its
attention to its new target market. With this
laser focus, it soon tripled its reach. Today
Grayl is sold in more than 350 storefronts,
including REI, Canada’s MEC, and Australia’s
Mountain Design. Last year saw tripledigit
sales growth, which Grayl expects to
replicate in 2017. “We walk into stores now
and buyers high-five us,” Merrigan says.
“We’re not the biggest water-filtration company
in the business, but our competitors are
very interested in what we’re doing. And they
should be. We’re coming for them.”
PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY OF GRAYL
22 / ENTREPRENEUR.COM / September 2017