An event company pushing for universal water access. Take vice to virtue, let's feel good about feel Our planet is over 70% covered with water.
Despite this, over 2.5 billion people are clinically dehydrated. Around 1.6 billion of these individuals are dehydrated because they do not have the money to access clean drinking water. As a result, almost 25,000 people die daily from dehydration, which comes out to about 17 people per minute. The people in affected regions do not have access to clean convenient sources of drinking water. This me
ans not only death but prolonged periods of unproductivity, sickness, and malnutrition. In the developing world, millions of working hours are lost to inefficient water gathering efforts. Women the world over, are forced on more arduous journeys to supply water while communities face higher death tolls and less productive members. These factors only worsen in the face of droughts which have themselves been on a statistical uptick in the past 100 years. The numbers of dehydration casualties were close to 570,000 in South Africa alone last year. Although the countries experiencing dehydration are continents away, we have the resources available to us to reduce the mortality rate associated with dehydration. Human population is still exponentially on the rise and resource scarcity is destined to become an even greater problem than it currently is. The process of addressing water scarcity has to begin today in order to have a reasonable hope of addressing the problem as it continues to scale. This is an issue with increasing scale in raw numbers as well as geographic reach. Without large concerted efforts to stem the tide of water scarcity, the deaths and detriments of dehydration will only grow in scope. Drink: is an innovative new way to address the growing problem of water scarcity all around the world. Two-thirds of American adults drink alcohol and those 158.5 million American drinkers consume over 4 drinks a week on average. In a less statistical explanation, last weekend, and this weekend and every foreseeable weekend after that will see thousands of house parties, birthday bar crawls and smaller gatherings. The day after these parties though, chances are that people haven’t ended a world crisis. Their night was meant for fun, it was a blowoff. Switching gears, for the past decade or so the world has pioneered the idea of social entrepreneurship that focuses productive industries on solving areas of market failure. Yet for some reason, the world of party culture and alcohol has remained largely untouched. As a stark testament to that, many social entrepreneurship certifications and awards explicitly forbid alcohol industry from certification and count investment in the field as a demerit. At Drink: we believe that this 113 billion dollar a year industry should not be inherently excluded from the pool of innovation in social giveback. The alcohol industry is one that will always be a part of human culture and research shows that consumption is growing year to year. This huge market sector shouldn’t simply continues on as an unwanted stepchild to the socially conscious industry. We know alcohol consumption will not stop. So we’ve come up with a mechanism to capture some of the massive, untapped economic energy of the alcohol industry. We plan to peel off more socially conscious consumers from existing alcohol customer lists, with the most likely market being 21-40 year olds. Then, we divert the economic energy of this alcohol consuming demographic and put it towards solving the greatest looming resource crisis in human history: water scarcity. The way it works is simple. Drink: acts as an alcohol brand, which procures alcohol directly from manufacturers and sells to distributors under our brand name. When we sell a bottle of Vodka to a distributor, we take a significant portion of the would-be profit and channel it to buying and shipping used well drilling rigs to potable water efforts around the world. These rigs then drill wells at cost, under $1000, as opposed to the exorbitant standard of above $8000 per well in the developing world. This allows every bottle of alcohol that we sell to give water to someone who desperately needs it. In order to do this, we have a few options that keep us fiscally solvent. Of course we engage in as much negotiation as possible to maximize profit in the supply chain. To compensate for any additional shortcomings, we may adjust the suggested MSRP at our discretion in line with market research on acceptable price-points. To see this played out in a real life scenario, this example works:
• Our company buys already bottled and labeled Drink: Vodka from the manufacturer at $8 a bottle.
• The bottles are sold to distributors at $15 per bottle for a suggested sale price of $30 in stores
• The resultant $7 puts $2 to water efforts, $3 to marketing, $1 to salaries with $1 profit. This profitable but significant donation structure means that each bottle sold provides years of clean, safe water to a person somewhere in the world. The breakdown for this rests on the example of an all-in purchase and shipping cost of 100k for a rig which can drill easily over 100 wells in its lifetime. The average well serves around 400-500 people across a few villages within short walking distance. 500 people per well, times 100 wells is 50,000 people given wells for 100k. This breaks down to one person per bottle, at $2 coming from each bottle. This structure allows the inevitable purchase of alcohol to become something like a crowdfunding effort to alleviate extreme dehydration all around the world. It also contains the potential to disrupt the extractive price structure of the water market in the developing world, forcing prices down across markets we are active in, to allow access to needed wells at more reasonable prices. Herein lies our competitive advantage over any competitor in the market. We are a brand entirely devoted to providing a massive social giveback around the world. We take an otherwise untouched industry and introduce the equivalent of what Tom’s did for shoes. By providing a socially responsible option for alcohol we deal with the reality that the alcohol industry will never go away and dedicate ourselves to harnessing its roaring economic energy towards ending the plague of human dehydration. We have an opportunity here to change the world without asking people to change their night. Just grabbing the bottle 4 inches to the left is the difference that saves a person’s life
The Upright Citizens Brigade is home for all things comedy. With shows seven nights a week, UCB has become the home for alternative comedy. Whether it’s improv comedy, sketch comed...