[RD (OP)]

The pitch : mountain spring water, in artisan-made ornate glass-bottles, delivered to the homes of chemophobic Californian neo-hippies ... https://livespringwater.com/

Sounds good to you ?, you can invest ... https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/fresh-living-spring-water-as-nature-intended-design-health#/

However ...

#1. Their "live" "unsterilized" spring-water could contain unwelcome guest bacteria. (In California people will sue over a dose of the runs).

#2. The gallon-sphere glass-bottle, with sacred geometry design, looks lovely, but full it will weigh ~6kg, and has no handle. Imagine dropping one  on a sandalled foot  X¬o ,  ( More personal-injury lawsuits).






#3. Suggesting people hang the soccer-ball-sized glass-spheres in their cars  X¬o ...


( Yet more personal-injury lawsuits).


So the livespringwater business-model is less safe, less practical & more expensive than municipal-water, (& ecologically-unsound).

[chris]

Sounds nuts. But then that never stopped anyone...

[RD (OP)]

Sounds nuts. But then that never stopped anyone...

Insanely expensive veblen goods do include bottled-water, but, unlike this product, they're sterilized by UV or ozone.
So won't give consumers the runs.

"livespringwater" claim ...

There are more nerve endings in our bellies than in our brains ...

https://livespringwater.com/

Maybe that's true of anyone who buys their product  ,  but for everyone else it's the other way round ...
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21628951.900-gut-instincts-the-secrets-of-your-second-brain/

[alancalverd]

The route to success is to buy something for free and sell it at a high price to the stupid rich.

The problem in the past has always been that very few people got rich by being stupid, and there's not a lot of stuff lying around for free.

Except, it seems when it comes to water. A neighboring farmer re-opened his 18th century well a couple of years back, and put some of the stuff into bottles for fun at the local church fete. Turned into a million-pound business in two years.

No problem selling spring water with a bit of micro-livestock as long as you call it natural and unprocessed, don't pretend it has any intended use other than to keep wild fish alive, and put a sell-by date on it (as required by the European Union). Any date will do, apparently: Volvic is claimed to have been filtered through rock for 2000 years but still has an expiry date on the bottle!

The only problem these guys have is the use of a plastic (ugh! artificial chemicals and  plasticisers!) reuseable stopper. Make it single-use "to prevent fraudulent refilling with chemically treated water" and stagger from the river bank to the high street bank, swapping free crap for cash as you go..

[RD (OP)]

... A neighboring farmer re-opened his 18th century well a couple of years back, and put some of the stuff into bottles for fun at the local church fete. Turned into a million-pound business in two years ...

Must be a fan of  "Only fools and Horses"    ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Nature%27s_Son_(Only_Fools_and_Horses)

[alancalverd]

How memory shrinks time! "A couple of years" actually predated the Trotters by a decade. The company eventually collapsed after a "contamination scare" that turned out to be groundless, but fortunes had been made in the interim.

[Bored chemist]

... A neighboring farmer re-opened his 18th century well a couple of years back, and put some of the stuff into bottles for fun at the local church fete. Turned into a million-pound business in two years ...

Must be a fan of  "Only fools and Horses"    ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Nature%27s_Son_(Only_Fools_and_Horses)

Or of the Coca Cola corporation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dasani

[alancalverd]

Dasani failed in the UK but the brand is still around elsewhere, being sourced from whatever is locally available.

I'm ambivalent about Coca Cola. On the one hand they are making money by selling tap water to the stupid rich in the West, but they get more criticism for owning tap and bottle water treatment plants in parts of Africa where they are the only purveyors of stuff that is actually safe to drink. Interesting moral question: if a corrupt dictatorship offers a monopoly to a company whose product is beneficial, is that a Good Thing or a Bad Thing?