‘We Asked Each Other 80 Questions Before We Started the Company’ — Loonen Founder On Finding the Right Co-Founder & Everything You Need To Know About Drinking Water

So we were just talking a little bit off air and I was specifically like, I don't want to discuss too much because I want my live reactions.

But water is a it's like an interesting market because it's like fairly crowded.

There's a lot of water brands, but I feel like no one had innovated in it in a while.

So why did you even decide to start a water brand?

Tell me everything.

There's a lot to unpack there.

So the water category, I think for a very long time, has had a lot of marketing innovation and changes in packaging in the sense of over the past number of decades, moving from glass to plastic to plastic lined aluminum, plastic lined corrugate, but no real product innovation.

And I just became obsessed with water quality when I was going through IVF and improv.

pregnant.

And I, in that process, learned a lot about plastics and endocrine disruptors and tried to make foundational changes in our home to minimize our day-to-day exposure.

Wait,

can you explain for our audience who doesn't know how plastic and microplastic exposure, like they're like endocrine disruptors and what that even means?

Yeah, so plastics and the broader class of chemicals that are often associated with them, whether it's phthalates or bisphenols, etc., those are known endocrine disruptors.

And endocrine disruptors disrupt the way that hormones work in your body and can impact that.

And so there's a lot of research around how they impact fertility.

Mm-hmm.

Not well.

And so when I was on my own fertility journey, which was longer than we expected and a period of my life that felt like I didn't have all that much agency, I really focused on areas where I felt like I could have some agency.

And one of those key areas was trying to, again, minimize the day-to-day exposure we had in our household to those things.

And it can feel really overwhelming at the start when you start thinking about it because they're unavoidable.

But there are certain foundational changes you can make in your home that make it kind of easy, right? Food, we eat organic, we store it in glass, we don't use nonstick.

Personal care and beauty products, you know the brands that have informed us about synthetic fragrance and bisphenols and phthalates and given you the solution around that.

And the same goes for home cleaning.

We use a lot of vinegar and water and Branch Basics at home.

Yeah, I love Branch Basics.