'Ban the Bottle' brings wave of orders to Haws

Don't believe in the power that luck can play in helping corporate innovation?

Take a look at the last year at Haws Corp., the Sparks manufacturer of drinking fountains.

Faced with the reality that neither of its key product segments drinking fountains and emergency eyewash and shower stations had much sizzle left, the 108-year-old company's executives started looking at every piece of the business for innovation possibilities.

"We tried to assail the status quo," says Michael Markovsky, Haws' vice president of marketing, about the effort that began more than two years ago.

An early success: The redesign of emergency eyewash stations. Following the advice of ophthalmologists, Haws redesigned the stations' flow of water to better remove contaminants from eyes and faces, an innovation it bills as "Medically Superior Response."

Not bad, but the company struck gold when it started rethinking the wall-mounted drinking fountain.

Some 73 percent of Americans, it turns out, don't use drinking fountains because they worry about the units' hygiene. Hence, the $11 billion, 8.6-billion-gallon-a-year bottled water business.

Haws engineers set to recapture some of those consumers with a line of sensor-operated water stations that filter water supplies and allow touch-free filling of bottles and cups by users.

A couple of years in development, the Haws HydrationStation hit the market just as the "Ban the Bottle" movement was beginning to arise on American college campuses.

Quickly gathering celebrity support, proponents argued that bottled water generates tons of plastic waste. High-profile restaurants stopped serving bottled water. Cost-conscious consumers turned to tap water instead.

And Haws had a hit product on its hands as sales of the HydrationStation which carries a price tag of about $1,600 to about $1,900 spread from campuses into other markets.

"It was more kismet than anything," says Markovsky. "It almost immediately became the poster child for 'Ban the Bottle.'"

Although its core drinking-fountain business tends to track construction activity pretty closely, the HydrationStation helped Haws weather the recession while keeping its no-layoffs-ever track record alive. The company employs about 200.

The company is in its fourth generation of family ownership and remains debt-free.

Markovsky says, however, that new products including a couple in the pipeline hold the key to Haws' future.

"If we're going to stay with the same product offerings, we might as well sell out," he says.