Bottle Mate®

On behalf of water carriers everywhere, thank you, Tom and Nancy Shebesta.

Tom Shebesta is the General Manager of Bottle Mate in Lake Isabella, CA, northwest of Bakersfield. You may not remember as far back as February. I wrote about Ozarka Water screwing up its chance to do a good deed. (Read about that fiasco here.)

But I remembered. And so did Tom, who’s in charge of the “entire” Bottle Mate operation out there in the West.

He called me to ask if I’d ever gotten ‘round to getting a Bottle Mate XL from the Pittsburgh Water Cooler Service. When he found out I had not, he made certain he got one into my hands…and it arrived courtesy of the US Postal Service: Your basic great invention. Patented (1991 317.843). Useful as all get-out. And made to last forever – in fact, it’s guaranteed for life.

Paul L Gagnon invented it back in the ‘70s, from a sand-cast mold…made in his backyard with a hair dryer and casting sand in 1971. His daughter Nancy (see above) used to help him in the product development phase when she got home everyday from high school. The original company was called Port-O-Clamp, Inc.

The original Bottle Mate was made of cast aluminum. The company went to plastic injection-molding in the early 1980s. The Bottle Mate XL, my own pride-and-joy, came out in 2000 because of requests for a larger handgrip.

Now along with my blue nylon Bottle Mate came some sales literature. After reading it, I don’t really know why Ozarka (and its owner, Nestlé Waters North America) don’t follow the simple marketing instructions which Bottle Mate has gone to the trouble of including:

What are your marketing tools? One free Bottle Mate handle…Satisfied customers boast to their neighbors and friends for years.

Tom manages the company founded by his father-in-law and he thinks it’s because these large-scale water companies don’t want to go to the trouble. Okay: Lauren Barack of MSN Money says bottled water is one of those “unnecessary necessities” we can live without. You know it’s true; so do I. Maybe – just maybe – the large-scale bottled water companies will do what smaller, local firms are doing to compete more effectively for our increasingly less disposable dollars. A Bottle Mate promotion could deliver a customer-winning edge.

BTW, I have a family member who prefers the taste of Ozarka to our municipal water supply. So we continue to purchase those 44-pound plastic bottles (without the fancy molded-in handles, too). Fortunately, the Shebestas have been there for me. I used the Bottle Mate XL just yesterday to transport those monster jugs from the front porch to the back.

Thanks to Nancy and Tom, I felt the very model of a modern Gunga Din!

Flunking Ozarka

I’m going to ask Ozarka® Brand Natural Spring Water one more time: Please sell me just one of your Bottle Mate® XL water-bottle carriers. Here an extra opportunity to be responsive to your customers (well, me anyway).

I am getting older – you probably didn’t know this. As large as I am, I’ve gotten to the point where I can’t easily wrestle with the 5-gallon bottles (40 lbs or so each) in which Ozarka delivers water to us. The Ozarka routeman leaves them at the front door; our dispenser is at the back of the house.

Yesterday, I saw our routeman, Alex, use this really neat plastic handle to move the bottles. The specialized, easy-to-use tool is made of nylon and glass-reinforced polymers and it slips over the neck of the bottle so someone can just lift it with one hand. The name “Bottle Mate XL” is molded right into the handle. This is some good trick. I immediately wanted one of my own.

I asked Alex where I could buy one; he answered that it was issued to him by the company, it was the only one he had. He didn’t think the company sold them, and the only thing he could suggest was to call Ozarka’s 800 number. (BTW, Alex humped those bottles to the back of the house – the kind of nice gesture I’ve come to expect from Ozarka drivers – thank you.)

Okay, on to the telephone number, 1-800-678-4448. I called Ozarka (it’s one of many water brands owned by Nestlé Waters North America Inc.) and spoke with a very nice woman in Massachusetts. I explained what I was seeking, told her I was a long-time customer – and she replied that the company’s Bottle Mate XL was not available for Ozarka customers. Why not? She didn’t know.

I told her I’d be glad to pay for it...she still didn’t care; just repeated that the Bottle Mate XL wasn’t available for us civilians.

Now, do I waste more of my time trying to get one from Ozarka? Or search the web to find another source? According to the Internet, the Bottle Mate XL, so called because “In response to popular demand,” it has “an improved hand grip 33% larger for big hands or gloves in cold climates,” is manufactured by the Bottle Mate Company – which only sells the items 10 at a time. I’ll keep looking – I’ll find a singleton somewhere.

But right here, right now, there’s an opportunity for Ozarka (which I generally respect) to offer a relevant item, an adjunct to its normal line of products, to fit the changing needs of some of its customers…older guys who’d like to think they can lift 5-gallon water jugs but can’t do it as effortlessly as they used to. Don’t flunk this.

So attention, Kim Jeffery, President and CEO of Nestlé Waters North America. Listen up, Bob Davino, Nestlé Vice President of Marketing. Why not give me a call (713.598.4238)? Tell me you’ll sell one of these Bottle Mate XLs to me. I promise I won’t tell anybody else about it.

PS: If you can’t bend your rules for a good, long-term customer like me, I’ll call Pittsburgh Water Cooler Service in Glenshaw, PA…there’s a Bottle Mate XL for sale right on its website. Then won’t you be embarrassed?