R&D/Leverage Work Together With Hydranome

Making Sure You're Hydrated – One Sip at a Time

Nottinghamshire, UK /PRNewswire/ - Making sure that people are hydrated by drinking enough water daily has become a mission for one man. And with the collaborative contributions of R&D/Leverage www.rdleverage.com UK, ISBM total Solution provider, and PET Power, a plastic bottle producer in the Netherlands, Fred Housheer is making his entrepreneurial dream a reality. The result of these efforts is the Hydranome, www.hydranome.com, a specialty water bottle lets the user know how much water they drink daily and whether it's enough with the use of an intuitive interactive dial on the cap. The dial helps the consumer track the number of times the bottle has been filled and the dots on the lid show the adequate daily intake as well as the progress of the user to meet this intake.

Housheer noticed a trend in that over the past six to seven years there was a huge increase in the amount of sugar-sweetened beverages people consume while reducing their water intake. "I approached my former design team about designing a water bottle with a counter to track how much water people are drinking as well as indicating the daily requirements," Housheer explains. "My wife and I invested our savings in design and engineering, then the search for production firms and toolmakers started. I first found PET Power who has production facilities in the Netherlands, and they helped me to think about the plastic material – what material we could use for the bottle. They also recommended R&D/Leverage in the UK because they've done many projects with them.Steve Gough, the technical manager for R&D/Leverage, managed the project. "We were contacted by PET Power, inquiring as to our interest in working on this project called Hydranome that involved moulding a bottle from Eastman's Tritan™ copolyester material," explains Gough. "We've done many projects with Tritan™, a resin developed for reusable water bottles. We're the market leaders in handling that resin and PET Power also has great knowledge how to run Triton."

"For me, startup was a big thing," Housheer says. "It was a joy to see the professional way the R&D/Leverage team was working on the mould. They were very supportive of me as an entrepreneur. I might be a small customer for them but it made no difference in the attention they gave to Hydranome to get a successful outcome. I was pleased with the whole operation. R&D/Leverage produced the first batch of bottles so I could start selling them right away from our living room."

Hydranome is selling quite well, and Housheer has a warehouse to hold the first production run of bottles that was recently produced. "We'll no longer be doing this from our living room," Housheer states. "We've sold a substantial part and we're getting more traction. Housheer concludes: "It was a smooth operation and a great collaboration to make sure the end result was a success."