A Canadian Company is Selling Bottled Air to China
What started out as a joke is now turning out to be a quite profitable business as a Canadian Company is selling Bottled Air to China for around $15 a pop.
If you are one of those people that believe bottled water is one of the biggest scams in the world, you will definitely not be pleased with this!
The company named Vitality Air started out as a joke when they decided to bottle up Rocky Mountains air and ship it to China, but they never expected it to really catch on.
Although they started the company last year, they just began offering their product less than two months ago and their first shipment of 500 bottles was completely sold out in 4 days.
They just sent out their second shipment of 4,000 bottles with most of it already being pre-sold!
For $15 you can purchase a 7.7 liter can of crisp air straight from Banff National Park! That’s 50 times more expensive than your average bottle of mineral water in China.
The product couldn’t have come at a better time since just a week ago a red alert has been issued forcing more than half of the cars off the road due to the extreme pollution in the country.
Just to put this into simpler terms, the air is so polluted that breathing it for one day is equivalent to smoking 40 cigarettes.
So how did the start-up came to be?
The entire thing started out as a joke when the two co-founders, Mr Lam & Troy Paquette, filled a plastic bag with air and sold it off on eBay for under 0.50 cents.
They did the same thing again, but this time the second bag sold for $160. That was their AHA moment and decided there was some sort of market for this.
Now they’re selling Canadian bottled air all around the world but China is definitely their biggest customer.
But who is buying the product?
Harrison Wang is the Chinese representative of Vitality Air and he says that their main customers are mainly affluent women who purchase the product for their families or to give away as gifts.
The rest of the customers are split between senior homes and high end nightclubs that offer it as a premium to their own clients.
In China fresh air has become a luxury and it’s priced accordingly!
Is bottled air the new bottled water?
Nobody can tell for sure, but there’s definitely a health risk in the region and people are looking for ways to diminish the risk and when there’s demand somebody will come in and provide the supply.
Although Vitality Air is still a startup, they managed to prove that Chinese people will pay money for something most of us take for granted.
Considering that their biggest struggle right now is keeping up with demand, as each bottle is filled by hand, we’ll be keeping an eye out on this industry because who knows how big it could get!
Although family and friends of the founders initially told them to not even bother pursuing this idea we found it very refreshing and somewhat creative! We’ve seen a lot of crazy bottled products before, including air, but nobody in the west actually started a company and developed a solid product in this market.
A few years ago a Chinese man became a multi-millionaire by selling over 8 Million $.80 cans of fresh air in 10 days as it was reported by DailyMail here.
What do you believe that Selling Bottled Air to China or countries with heavy pollution is one of the products of the near-future or will the government intervene and put an end to the core problem?
