Aditi Kibe-Heal with her sister, visiting Pune, India (1990)

I never planned to be an entrepreneur. But sometimes an idea gets into your head, and you just can’t get it out. 

When I first met Jay Orlean-Taub, my cofounder at Sipgood, I thought his idea was simultaneously insane and brilliant. He wanted to take a million single-use plastic bottles out of circulation by creating a bath bomb for beverages. 

I’d just left a long corporate career, including 7 years at Unilever, because I wanted to do more in sustainability and consumer goods. Unilever has long been a pioneer in this space and I knew that whatever I did next had to build on that. 

Sure, I told him, removing plastic bottles is important, but that’s not the main issue – it’s the water inside them. Access to water goes beyond climate change and sustainability, it’s about women’s rights.

One of my earliest childhood memories is of my grandmother and mother yelling at me for drinking water during a visit to India when I was five. I filled a glass from the sink and was proud to demonstrate my ‘great independence’. Instead, I was bombarded with questions of concern around who had given me the water, where exactly I had got it from, and how much I had drunk. I couldn't understand what I had done wrong. 

It was only as I got older that I realised how precious water is and how intrinsically linked it is to women’s rights.

Around the world, 2 billion people don’t have access to safely managed drinking water. And while it is a human rights issue, it’s typically women and girls who bear the burden. They collectively spend 200 million hours every single day fetching water for their families, with trips averaging 4 hours. This keeps them out of school, paid employment, and creates a huge personal safety risk. 

Growing up in both developed and developing countries, I’ve witnessed this huge disparity first-hand. When I lived in India and Turkey, my family relied on costly water deliveries which called for strategic planning to ensure we had enough for the week. And I once remember a friend in India telling me (in almost disbelief) that she'd heard there was so much drinking water in the West that people even used it to water flowers. 

So, living in Europe and the US, I found it crazy to see cases and cases of bottled water in people’s homes, even though it was readily available from the tap. 

When it came to creating Sipgood, we decided our mission was to make water better for all, and that thinking flows into everything we do. 

Our drops are designed to help you appreciate the water you have at home, encourage you to use a reusable water bottle when out and about (instead of buying a single-use bottle). And for every single drop sold, we donate water through our charity partner Just A Drop, which helps support a village in Cambodia in building a sustainable water filtration system. The Sipgood community has donated over 150,000 litres so far. 

Water is undeniably one of our most precious natural resources, and we want people to truly value it. And, more than anything, we want to reduce the environmental and human impact of the beverage industry.

To learn more and follow the Sipgood story, check us out at https://www.drinksipgood.com.

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