Have your own reusable water bottle sale

If there's one thing that irks me most about America's consuming habits, it's our obsession with bottled water. There is absolutely no reason to drink the stuff: It's thousands of times more expensive than tap water; it's not as well-regulated for safety as tap water; it is dreadful for the environment (even when bottles are recycled); and, most of it is just tap water, anyway! So, on the week of Earth Day this year, some friends and I spent our lunchtimes selling BPA-free Nalgene bottles in two sizes (16-oz. and 32-oz.). We only ordered 100, thinking they would sell slowly. Au contraire, we sold out almost immediately and took orders for about 200 more by the end of the week (read the local newspaper article here). (UPDATE: We have since sold over 400 bottles as of November 2008)! Such success was not without a lot of planning though--I tried to sell reusable sandwich wraps several months earlier only to fail miserably; I had learned my lesson. Here's what to do:

1) Contact your regional distributor of Nalgene bottles. I used Adventure 16 in San Diego. They generally have minimum orders (they sell to stores), but if you say you're a school, they might let you off the hook. The nice thing about them being a distributor is super cheap bottles. Ours cost $2.40 and $2.91 respectively, allowing a markup for fundraising and making it easy to break even.

2) Clear it with the administration, student services person, or whoever handles fundraisers and stuff like this. We had a table and chairs reserved for us in Center Court.

3) Publicity is key! I had announcements running in the PTA e-newsletter, an automated call home to every family, an email sent out to all faculty, PA announcements (click here to download) everyday for a week leading up to the sale, posters, and flyers (click here to download). I also made a YouTube advert using Apple Keynote and put it on YouTube (found here). The ad was shown to every science class at the school, so every student saw it. The BEST thing to do: create a Facebook event asking everyone to invite their friends. I had hundreds of people "attend" just in that alone.

4) Have order sheets (click here to download) ready in case you sell out. People wanted these really badly even after we had no more left.

5) Cut and hang this in front of your table (click here to download).

5) Make sure you have a place to store them on campus. They do take up a lot of space.


Good Luck!!