Local with Lisa: Loonen Water

Lisa: A local Piedmont mom is setting the standard for bottled water and has created perfectly pure water. And it's sold right here at Mulberries. Let's go meet her.

Lisa: Meet Clara Sieg. She's the co-founder and CEO of Loonen Water.

Clara: Going through IVF and having a baby, I learned a lot about endocrine disruptors, plastics, and how bad they are for your health. And we tried to make foundational changes in our household that just kind of eliminated them on an 80/20 rule. 

Lisa: But water didn't have a clear answer. There wasn't much transparency about what was actually in it. So, Clara decided to create one.

Clara: Glass is hard. It's heavier, and it breaks. Fundamentally, a better form factor than plastic or plastified aluminum, from the perspective of not having any leaching or plastics in the water.

Lisa: Clara started by sourcing a high-quality spring, then built a first-of-its-kind system around it with advanced filtration, high-quality mineralization, and rigorous testing.

Clara: I spent the last 15 years professionally as a general partner at a venture fund. So I was, you know, sort of sitting on the sidelines of company creation and scaling for a very long time. Always super inspired by the entrepreneurial path, but never really interested in pursuing it, because sitting in that seat, you see firsthand how challenging it is. And this just finally felt like something that I cared so deeply about, and where I saw a big white space that we could do something better for the consumer.

Lisa: Clara says pregnancy and having a baby gave her the confidence to do something hard, even if she didn't know how at the start. A year and a half later, Loonen hit store shelves.

Clara: You name it, we try to test for it. And then again, we make it super, transparent, and even QR, bring back the label it takes you on the site, shows you all of those test results on a batch-by-batch basis.

Lisa: It's now in 200 stores across the Bay Area and available online.

Clara: It's been really fun bringing this to life and building a team around it and seeing it on a shelf. That's sort of the most gratifying part.

Lisa: So, the next time you grab a bottle of water, you might just be supporting a Piedmont mom who's changing the standard one glass bottle at a time.

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