The Alchemy of Loonen Water

0:03Welcome to the Brand Alchemist podcast, where we uncover the magic and mystery of how some of the world's most sought after and newest brands were started and continue to evolve. I'm your host, Taja Dockendorf, founder and creative director of Pulp & Wire, a CPG branding, marketing and launch agency. I'm also an investor in emerging brands and own a few of my own as well. Over the last 18 years, I have worked with, created for, and grown hundreds of companies in the CPG space, like Ryan's Snacks, Allagash Brewing, Ocean Spray, Petco, and many more. Now, here's today's episode.

0:43Welcome to the Brand Alchemist podcast. Today, we're talking with Clara Sieg, the co-founder and CEO of Lunen, a company rethinking one of the most essential things we consume every day, water. Before launching Lunan, Claire spent over a decade as a general partner at Revolution Ventures, investing in early-stage consumer brands that reshaped how we care for our health, build financial security, and support our families. That experience sharpened her belief that best brands solve everyday needs with a simple, transparent solution. The idea for Lunan became personal during her pregnancy, when she grew increasingly aware of the toxins and plastics present in both tap and bald water.

1:24She started as a moment of concern, quickly evolved into a larger mission to make clean, contaminant-free water the most reliable thing we drink. Clara holds a degree in economics from Stanford and has been recognized by Forbes, Bloomberg, and LinkedIn for her work as both an investor and a founder. Clara, welcome to the Brand Alchemist podcast. I am so excited to have you on to talk about Lunen, all things water, how you created the company, and most recently I had the pleasure of trying it too in this beautiful glass bottle at Expo West. So welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for having us.

2:04So let's bring it back to the beginning, where it all started personally, and what was the inspiration for the Lunen brand? Yeah, so I started thinking about water and sort of this broader class of endocrine disruptors and plastics when I was going through IVF. So it was a period of my life that felt pretty out of control and like I had very limited agency. And the more I learned about endocrine disruptors and plastics and how bad they are for you, but particularly studied around fertility. the more I spent time trying to minimize our exposure on a day-to-day basis within our household. And I kind of went through every category of consumer in our homes.

2:50So, you know, with food, we eat organic, we store it in glass. We don't use nonstick pans. With beauty and personal care, you know, the brands that stand for clean, I switched to those. I got rid of synthetic fragrances, tried to minimize parabens and phthalates. And the same goes for home cleaning. Like we use Branch Basics at home. There are a bunch of other brands that stand for that as well and make life a lot easier on that dimension. And then you get to the water category, which is the thing you drink most of, what you're mostly made of. And particularly during pregnancy, your water or fluid levels grow by about 50%, which is sort of a mind boggling stat.

3:28and everything was plastic plastic lined aluminum plastic line corrugate and then when you get to the glass set there wasn't any transparency on what was actually in the water and I just became sort of obsessed with that and the more time I spent on it the more I just felt from a consumer perspective that I really wanted a solution there that was press the easy button set it and forget it in the same way that I had built out the other parts of our house to not have this kind of mental load of evaluating what I was choosing all the time. Because the reality of trying to avoid these endocrine disruptors and plastics is like they're all around us.

4:10You can't completely avoid it. So just set your life up in a way that on a day-to-day basis within your household, you can more or less minimize it. And so the real catalyst for me was honestly, when I went back to work, I transitioned my daughter from breastfeeding to bottle feeding. And I was super conscientious about the formula that I chose for her. And then the main ingredient was water when you mixed it. And that to me was just this aha moment of like, I might be 90 % plastic, but my daughter isn't. And I want to do something about this. And I think there's a real need and talking to more and more moms about it, everybody sort of agreed.

4:53And so I started thinking about how this could come to life. And I reached out to who's now my co-founder, a guy who was on the founding team at Spindrift and led all their operations for the first decade of the business, because he was one of the few people I knew who really knew how to produce and bottle water in a way that had a real attention to quality and that saw the category in a different way. And this really resonated for David because he was intimately aware of the issues with the linings of cans. And so we started thinking about how that could come to life and ultimately got conviction around the opportunity the more time we spent on it.

5:40You know, story after story coming out about plastics in our drinking water, different toxic load in our tap water, forever chemicals, all this sort of stuff. And again, feeling like there wasn't a brand that was doing the appropriate testing on a finished goods basis that was providing that transparency in a really digestible way. And so, yeah, we left our jobs earlier last year, January, February, really got going in March and started exploring how we could bring this to life. And that process took us down, you know, a six-month path of going all over the U.S., testing different springs, pouring through test results, trying to understand which springs were better than others.

6:30And the reality is there are a lot of springs that are much better than other springs, different kinds of water sources that are higher quality than others. But at the end of the day, we live in a globally connected water system and every source has some footnote. You know, our ground has arsenic and radium and nitrates in it. You have seasonal shifts and changes from different weather patterns and surrounding land use. And so ultimately that led us to borrow from the way that the World Health Organization recommends you do water treatment, which is pairing the highest quality source with the highest quality filtration practices.

7:09And that's how the Lunen brand and way and standard was really initially brought to life. Well, I definitely want to talk about your filtration system too, and what makes Lunen unique. But you mentioned something earlier, where microplastics, obviously a huge issue, like you said, we're full of them. But also, there was something you said about the transparency of the source. And you touched on this a little bit. And I think that's really, I mean, you don't have to name names. But you traveled around the country looking, you know, testing these different sources as a water sommelier of sorts. Not a water sommelier.

7:40I have not gotten my certification on that. It's on the to-do list. It is. It's taste. It's the terroir of the water. I mean, and it really is. It does change state to state, location to location. But do you find there's a lot of waters in plastic, there's a lot of waters in glass, that there's not a lot of transparency? Just because it's in glass doesn't mean it's a great water. And did you find that when you were kind of doing your testing and you're like, wow, this looks like it should be a beautiful spring because it's in this beautiful glass bottle. But the source actually isn't as good as we're being led to believe.

8:13I think it's really important for consumers to look for water quality reports that are comprehensive, that test for not just a standard water quality report, but also forever chemicals, disinfection byproducts, herbicides, pesticides, a whole host of things. because again, the reality is a lot of places in the U.S., which maybe used to be amazing sources of water, aren't as great as they once were. Some are still wonderful, right? And so again, it gets back to we really believe in not just claiming purity, but in actually proving it. And we're not the only ones to do that. We just think that standard should exist in the category.

8:57I completely agree because there are a lot of sources that are basically borehole and they've got plastic that's off gassing as they're filling the water into the bottles. I mean, there's lots, there's lots of things that happen that just because it looks like it should be clean water and it's in a glass bottle or it's in plastic doesn't always mean that it is. Yeah, and I think one of the other important things to remember around the water category, it's a fundamentally different supply chain than most other consumer categories because it's a super long shelf life, ostensibly forever. And there's no temperature control required.

9:27So you're sitting on hot trucks, you're sitting in warehouses that are not temperature controlled. And often during transit periods, pallets are outside baking under the sun. And what degrades plastic, it's light exposure, heat exposure, and time. so you are spring sourced purified from the mountain springs in california yeah yeah let me walk you through our process yeah please do that that was that was my next question let's talk process um so we spring source all of our water um we don't really emphasize where um though our spring we're totally transparent on that dimension our spring source today is in the palomar mountains outside of San Diego.

10:06But for us, it's really about how we source, not where we source. So we go to springs that meet our standard qualities. That means we test for them pre-production run and make sure that it doesn't have stuff that's not filterable, fully filterable, right? Because modern filtration is really powerful, but it's not perfect. Disinfection byproducts, forever chemicals, those things are really, really challenging to fully remove from water, no matter what the filtration system is. And so again, we test at the source every production run, knowing that there is variability in every spring, season to season, year to year, surrounding land use impacts that as well.

10:46We've been stainless steel tanker up to our production facility where we've built out all stainless steel piping and physical membrane filtration. And that's an important note. We never have any chemical intervention, never any plastic piping, never any municipal piping, right? So our water stays in our own enclosed stainless steel system. Post that filtration, we rebounce the water back to its original spring footprint. So about 130 to 170 total dissolved solids. We use super high quality natural minerals that we've lab tested. So think Celtic sea salt, not refined table salt. And then we only ever put it in glass and that's a commitment we make to the consumer.

11:26It's also a commitment to me. Like, I don't feel comfortable putting stuff in plastic, plastic line aluminum, plastic line corgate for the reasons that we already discussed. And then on a finished goods basis, we test all of our water, every production run. And we test for basically everything we can, over 350 different contaminants, things from forever chemicals to microplastics to phthalates, bisphenols, herbicides, pesticides, you name it, plus the standard water quality report. and then we make that really digestible so you can QR code from back a label it takes you on the site it shows you all of that I was gonna say because that transparency is key so it's not only on your packaging your water bottle but I'm pretty sure it's all on your website as well to yeah talking about these water quality reports yeah and we've tried to make it uh easier to understand because that was something that I as a consumer was annoyed by like you can call the number and get a standard water quality report and then it's sent to you and it feels like not understandable at all.

12:27And I consider myself pretty well versed in this sort of stuff. And if I'm confused on that, then I think most people are too. And so we try to be reasonably educational about that. And if there are any questions, you can always reach out to us. So the water sounds amazing, but let's take it to the outside of the packaging. So the glass, these are not lightweight glass bottles. I mean, for anyone listening, if you get a chance to open it, it's hearty. This is a thick glass bottle. It has a wider mouth to it. It really is. It was very thoughtful in your design process. So let's talk a little bit about the glass and then we'll kind of talk a little bit more about the Lunen brand and the labeling because you kept it very clean, very simple, kind of everyday pantry without, but at the same time, it feels very elevated.

13:20Thank you. Yeah. So on the bottle design, this gets back to what I was looking for as a consumer. I tend to have a little bit of an obsessive personality. And so these little details just drive me insane. But a lot of the glass bottles on market today don't fit in your car cup holder. And so the result is you go in your car and you put it there and then it ends up sitting on your passenger seat, sloshing around or at your feet and it's just like a bad user experience. So we made a custom mold that's thin enough to always fit in your card cup holder. The benefit of that is also when you go to the gym, you can stick it on the machine.

13:57It fits there. It feels really nice in hand and it, you know, it's a multi-serve bottle, but you can drink it like a single serve. And then similarly on the sort of obsessive detail front, the spout you mentioned is quite a bit wider and we made the glass around it a little bit thicker than normal. And that's really because we want it to feel like you're drinking from a glass. It's just nicer to drink that way. And the last point on that is people are constantly drinking hydration mixes and greens powders and all that sort of stuff. And the foundation of all of that is water. So if you're trying to lead with health and, you know, hydrate in a really healthful way, and you're really conscientious about the ingredients that you're putting into the water, you should be even more conscientious about the base of it all, which is water.

14:48And the wider spout just makes it easier to put that in. And it's elegant, like you said. And that's one thing I really noticed was the wider kind of the mouthfeel of it. Honestly, when you're drinking out of it, it feels elevated, but it feels much more comfortable than like a stock off the shelf glass bottle with like a twist top or something else on it. And I know you were even from down to the cap. And for the women who are aging, yeah like me i'm like postpartum turning 40 this year um starting to see wrinkles and lines everywhere you know the top lip line when you purse your lips to drink from a thin bottle it's those are intractable you can't get rid of them once you have them and with our bottle you don't get them so if you're really on the vein front like i am like there you go there's an anti-aging spin here that everyone needs to be aware yeah totally we're definitely going to start marketing against that but but the cap even i mean this was the cap is even thoughtful trying to keep plastics and everything else even out of the cap which is yeah sure another another important about the the cap piece of it because i think that is a really important note um there was a study last year i think it came out last summer um from france about there being more plastics often in glass bottled beverages than in plastic.

16:04And intuitively, that makes absolutely no sense. Because glass is inert, it can't leave plastic because it's not plastic. But the catch there is the caps. And the source of the contamination is actually like when you think about it and read the study, it actually kind of makes sense. So a lot of brands use decorative finishes on the outside of caps, which are epoxy coatings. And epoxy coating is a fancy word of plastics. And then in transit, those caps, there's, you know, there's a certain amount of abrasion as they're being transited in these big bulk bags and there are sharp edges around that.

16:47Right. So it's creating all these little microchips and effectively like microplastic chips all throughout the bag and those then adhere to the inside linings of the caps and then if you don't sanitize or rinse those pre-application that effectively microplastic powder is getting sealed into your beverage and so the way that we address that is we only use raw aluminum caps so we don't have any coating on the outside of them so that eliminates the risk of even creating that. And then we've also built in what we call a cap car wash on our production line. So the caps go up, they come down, they're rinsed and sanitized twice pre-application.

17:35And then for complete sort of peace of mind on that dimension, I mentioned this before, but we do all of our testing on a finished goods basis. Wow. I mean, that's a lot of work, but it definitely stays true to your ethos of why you started the company. I mean, what's the point of doing all this effort if you put on like a painted blue cap and then it's shoving microplastics into the water? Like that doesn't make any sense. And then you've got this beautiful label on the front, the yellow and blue and the Loon for Loonin. You know, let's talk a little bit about the reason behind the name and the brand.

18:17Yeah, so we talked a little bit about our sourcing strategy, which is it's not so much about where we source as much as how we source and the testing and purity protocols that we really wrap into that sourcing strategy, right? I don't think geography is necessarily a great proxy for purity as much as having proof of it through test results. And so for us, we didn't want to be anchored on one single place, knowing that there are those shifts and changes in every naturally occurring water source, seasonally, annually, etc. So we built a reasonably flexible supply chain so that if a source doesn't meet our standards, we can move on from it.

19:03And that is where the loon is a real inspiration for us. Loons are monogamous in their migratory patterns every year, so they go back to the same lake. year after year, unless the water quality declines and then they stop showing up. And so researchers actually use them as bio indicators for water purity. And for us, that's the way that we think about our sourcing strategy, right? We borrow from the way that the loon does it. And then we love, I don't know how much you know about loons. I'm obsessed with them, obviously. Well, I mean, from Maine, yes, we have loons, but I love this story. I did not know that about water quality though so please yeah so then other parts of it that i really really love crazy is a loon is based on a loon they have this really crazy sometimes haunting call um if you go on youtube and search for loons you can hear it and it's uh they're amazing birds um and for us it's like you should be crazy about your water like you shouldn't that it's the base of everything it's what you're made of like be crazy about your water if you're going to be crazy about anything.

20:04And then the other component is unlike a lot of other birds who push their young out of the nest and then they're off flying, loons actually care for their young a lot longer than most other birds. And so you'll see them after the babies hatch for a number of weeks. They live on their mom's back in the water and that keeps them warm. And you'll notice on our label, the loon is, the loon's head is turned backwards. And that's because the mom is often looking backwards at its baby on its back. So that to me, it was like so foundational to the way that I started thinking about the category and the solution that we wanted to build that it just like resonated on so many levels.

20:50Well, it sounds like you had a strong hand in the creative process on a lot of these pieces. Like you had a lot of ideas and you're like, all right, this is what I want. Yeah, I mean, I had thought about it obsessively for over a year before we even started working on it, right? And for me, I grew up spending a lot of summers on this lake in northern Vermont. It's really remote, dirt road, no cell phone service, lots of loons. And so for me, I was always obsessed with loons. um and my dad's from a tiny town in Germany called Lunen um within a U umlaut um so the EN was I like I always had something that just made sense okay yeah and you have so you have a still and you have a sparkling yeah so I know when it comes to packaging and bottles PSI can always be an issue when you're trying to get the carbonation and sparkling yeah is that something you had to like contend with early on or something that you learned in the process?

21:46So that is where David's expertise has really been helpful. And the few times that I've overridden his expertise, we've learned a hard lesson really quickly. So the still is just crisp clean. It tastes so good. It's really, really refreshing. That's the thing that I actually am most proud of because it's such a pure, unadulterated product that you can't hide behind anything. So the fact that it is that beloved by people is really cool. But my passion project was the sparkling because I've always been a sparkling water fanatic. When I texted a very close friend that I was leaving my job without any context on what I was doing next or what I was thinking about, his response was, what, are you starting a sparkling water company?

22:42And I was like, how did you know? But I really like a high carbonation level. I don't love big bubbles, though. So what we do is we have a very highly carbonated product, but we use a bubble breaker, which is basically like physical agitation to make the bubbles really small. So it still has a really refined feeling. And it's great when you're eating because higher carbonation cleanses the palate better between bites. And you don't have a big bubble that kind of like gives you that gastrointestinal like discomfort to a degree. But yes, to the question of it's hard, like when we did our first production run, the guy who was running the line asked if we wanted to err on the side of underfilling or overfilling.

23:29And I was like, obviously overfill, like we're generous. And David was like, I think we should err on this. I'm underfilling. I was like, you're wrong. wrong that's not what like this is a marketing decision like we need to overfill and our first production run I can't tell you the number of people the bottles exploded on like not like a little bit exploded like like exploded like water all over your shirt we had that happen in one of our initial sales pitches which is like disastrous right like the guy I'm like telling them all about how great the water is and he cracks it open and it explodes all over him so anyways that was a lesson learned.

24:06But we're happy to report that we now appropriately fill our bottles and the risk of being covered in water is far lower. So the risk of a shower is now mitigated, but they are tiny bubbles. And that's a really important piece too, is the carbonation, because people don't really realize this, but there's different levels of carbonation. There's bigger bubbles, smaller bubble, you know, more carbonation, less that beverages usually determine when they want that, the flavor to be. But because you have a larger bottle, you want that carbonation to last longer. So I think that probably also, I would assume that helps the longevity of the product too, when you get to the sparkline.

24:45Yeah. I mean, I think if you, the standard shelf life for a carbonated product is like two years. I think if you drank this at two years, it probably wouldn't be that carbonated. But for the purposes of right now and shelf life, like it's not going to sit on shelf for two years uh even as you open it too and it sits on your table it's good you can still get through that bottle and like still be like nope first stitch is just as good as the last yeah and we've actually gotten that feedback from quite a lot of consumers like shocked that it's still carbonated when they've left it open for like 12 hours i'm like yeah it's pretty carbonated so with these two products the still and the sparkling i mean what does future innovation look like for you and i know the brand is young you're only like six months old that you're just a baby.

25:31But, you know, when you start thinking about, okay, well, what is the next year, two years, five years? And you think about that. Do you think you want to get into like that RTD side? I mean, you already are on the RTD side, but more like flavors or yeah. What is, what does expansion in water look like? Yeah. So I, I like to really bring our team back to sort of where we are today and what the broader opportunity is. And then we can iterate and figure out what works to get us to that broader, longer term vision. But

26:05so a lot of the grounding of what we do and what our opportunity is goes back to that initial sort of audit I did of our house, where I rely on organic, USDA organic certification, really thoroughly. I grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in the 80s and 90s. My mom had breast cancer most of the time I was growing up. She obviously used chemo and radiation to really take care of that and recover, but paired all of those treatments with really changing the way that we ate at home. And we basically ate organic before there was organic certification. And I I mentioned Pittsburgh because it's not really a health bastion, but it is a place where my mom called every dairy farm and made sure we only bought from the brand that guaranteed their farmers, where they pulled the milk from, didn't use bovine growth hormone.

27:02She marched into the schools and made sure that there was at least one table at the lunch table that they weren't sanitizing with industrial cleaner, but instead vinegar and water. And ultimately the school system changed to cleaning all tables with that and also ended up saving money by doing so. So little things where we really changed the way that we ate and interacted with environmental things at home when I was much younger. And it seemed sort of fringe in those moments, like me not being allowed to buy a milk carton at school. and instead going back to my lunch pail and having stuff that my mom had bought from Easton Food Co-op, which was a cooperative in Pittsburgh that we bought most of our food from because they source locally.

27:51But then you fast forward to today and USDA organic certification is an amazing tool for a lot of families to help guide their decision process and trying to avoid a lot of the pesticide use that is prevalent in the US, right? It's not perfect, but it's a pretty great proxy. And I think for us, beverage never got the organic movement fully because water isn't organic. It's not grown. It's extracted from the ground, and then there's processing and packaging alongside of it. And I think a lot of consumers are really concerned around this broader class of endocrine disrupting chemicals, the prevalence of forever chemicals in the U.S.

28:36how often they show up in our tap water, almost half of U.S. tap water, test positive for PFAS, and around the packaging component and a lot of plastics around here. And we're not there yet from a regulatory perspective. And so I like to think that as a brand, we can help move the category forward and give a framework that we hope other brands adhere to from the perspective of the way we source, the way we process, the way we test, and the way we package our water and give transparency along all those steps. And I think the consumer doesn't really want claims anymore, but really just wants to be able to understand what's in their products in a easy to consume, transparent way.

29:28And so for us, that's really the North star. And how that fits into the way that we think about product innovation is really how do we continue to meet the consumer where they are with the constraints that we have, right? With the purity constraints that we set for ourselves, with the packaging constraints, we will never put anything in plastic, plastic line aluminum or plastic line corrugate, right? It's always going to be glass. Or if one day there's some sort of stainless steel invented that you can use on a more single sort of basis or we can get to a place where we have density and distribution to be able to do kind of like reusable stuff maybe we can use stainless steel alongside some of the larger formats but really we're focused on winning and still on sparkling we're going to introduce additional size formats later this year so a little bit of a smaller size because the 750 isn't perfect for everybody um and there are a lot of places like grab and go um that that would love to have smaller sizing um and i know my two-year-old would love to have smaller sizing because she's like it's a heavy bottle for her face and like it's not it's not it um and then next year um we want to start exploring how flavors come to life for us and the probably it's just organic juice inputs um with our water i love that now how are you handling so with all the glass are you just encouraging recycling of the bottle and then because i mean we rely on ready for like that would be a nightmare yeah yeah yeah we rely on federal and state programs for um recycling and crv perfect yeah so the company again it's just a baby, but some of those early learnings, like showering your sales team by accident with carbonation in a meeting, what are some of those early learnings, kind of like ups and downs that you've had in the last, you know, six, seven months as you've been getting off the ground?