It's all suddenly gone a bit crazy in the world of "enhanced water" since we launched our Firefly waters.
First, Coke announced they were launching Vitaminwater in the UK "in the summer". They paid $4.1 billion for the brand last year, so that wasn't a surprise.
Then Pepsi raced out and bought V Water for a whopping £10 million (peanuts for Pepsi, but pretty steep for a brand with £1.2m of sales).

And now this week Vitaminwater have appeared all over London. Free bottles in Victoria station. A brightly coloured van driving down our street. The local newsagent has a whole new Vitaminwater section, surrounded by wobblers, shelf strips and every bit of merchandising you could dream up. Wow, these Coke guys know how to sell.

Of course we rushed out and bought one of each.
And it's intriguing to see how they've adapted the drinks for us Brits...
As you probably know, Vitaminwater is huge in the US: you can't miss the big bright bottles with their genius laugh-out-loud copy.
But Coke have introduced a few changes over here.
They've upped the vitamins a lot (the US versions only had about 25% of RDA - these are mostly 100%+). They've found some spring water (rather than purified - Dasani lesson learned.).

We've finally made it. Firefly Waters are not only on the shelves - they've won an award.

But it hasn't been plain sailing. As if.

We started working on them last Spring. The brief was simple: "Like water, just better." i.e., natural, low-calorie, lots of antioxidants.
We put a sketch on the wall and started looking up every ingredient with any antioxidant science behind it.

The development went well: we found some good flavours pretty quickly - in particular, green tea and mint was absolutely spot-on more or less from first mixing, despite the hefty green tea content. We had to search high and low for Yerba Maté - weird as it's all over the shelves in Brazil. The only one we couldn't get right was white tea and pomegranate - we're trying again this summer (don't tell...)

Then there was the designs. The vertical stripes were nice, but they disobey every rule in the Ogilvy book - will people really read vertical text?!
Still, they were simple, distinctive, and seemed to get across the natural message, so we went with them. Thanks to Burocreative for their excellent work.

The real head-ache came when we tried to bottle them. We found five bottlers who could meet our exacting standards (filling into a PET bottle without preservatives) - but one was in Italy, one was in Austria, and the three within 500 miles of London each had their issues, from ugly bottles (we couldn't put our lovely drink in an ugly bottle) to issues with our high tea content.
There was one that ticked every box - and we were all set to bottle with them (better not name names) until they had a massive breakdown weeks before our launch, and put off all new projects for six months. So we had to go into overdrive and find a plan B. Meaning a different bottle, different labels (we couldn't call them organic, because the new bottler didn't have certification. Aaaghh.), and at least six months off our collective lifespans.

But we got there. The first bottles came off the line on 21st March, in time for an Easter launch in Harvey Nichols and a nice reception at the Food & Drink Expo.

We're making a few tweaks - the green tea and mint was a tad dry on the first run, and our lovely eco-friendly paper labels are crinkling a bit in the fridge, so we might have to switch to plastic labels until we can find a crinkle-free paper. And we're still hunting for that organic-friendly bottler

But the nice thing is, people are loving them. Even a few people saying "you know, I'm drinking them more than Firefly", which is, er, good, I guess.
And the awards. Our first big one. I was in Moscow anyway to speak at the Global Soft Drinks congress, but given that every drinks company I'd ever heard of had entered, I never expected to win - I practically leapt onto the stage to collect the trophy. Never need an oscar now...

So Firefly Water - "the antioxidant water". Hope you like.