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By ELIZABETH HARRISON Missoula Inbusiness
For Gabe Bravard, bottling water for the family business always
came first. While other teenagers were out playing sports, Bravard
was developing a sound work ethic at his father's dealership in
Havre.
"I had to bottle water before basketball," said the 29-year-old
Bravard, now manager of Culligan Private Reserve in Missoula.
At 6-foot-5 Bravard looks like he could easily be found on the
basketball court, but these days he spends his time designing
private labels and managing clients for the franchise's
fast-expanding small packaging plant.
Since the plant was added in 2004, the company has grown 100
percent annually, Bravard said. Culligan, which used to focus
primarily on selling 5-gallon water jugs and installing water filter
units, now sells an average of 7,000 half-liter bottles per day.
"It's a healthy form of advertising," said Waunda Bravard, Gabe's
mother and the company's co-owner. She added that most people will
keep their plastic bottles for a few days and refill them, while
fliers and business cards are usually tossed within a day.
Along with businesses, Culligan's 375 private-label clients have
included individuals getting married or graduating, and politicians
running for office.
Bank and restaurant logos and grinning faces wrap around the
hundreds of clear plastic bottles filled with Culligan's purified
water lining the shelves along a wall in the front office.
Bravard, who designs and prints each label himself through Adbobe
Illustrator and a custom-made label printer, said 90 percent of the
clients he works with only provide the logo. The rest is up to him.
"Cost-wise, it helps to do everything in-house," Waunda said. "We
started doing our own labels when they went from 6 cents to 15
cents."
But all the hard work pays off, considering Culligan's closest
competition is in Seattle.
The Bravards have signed up with freight companies to ship custom
bottles to the rest of the state, as well as parts of eastern
Washington, Wyoming and Idaho.
"Since it's private labeling, there are no boundaries," Waunda
said. "When you're a franchise, you can only deliver within your
franchise area, but private labeling is open."
Despite their success, Bravard said he does not anticipate they
will expand small packaging to other states because freight costs
set them back about $5,000 a year, and big cities are usually
equipped with their own private labeling companies.
The Bravards also like to keep things local and small.
All of their boxes are made in Montana, and any labels they can't
design or don't have the equipment to do are made elsewhere in the
state. Their purification system, which consists of stripping city
water through softening, carbon filtration, ultraviolet, and reverse
osmosis, happens in the warehouse behind their offices.
Culligan has 21 employees - four of whom are in small packaging,
bottling and deliveries. Most of the employees are teenagers working
through high school.
But unlike Bravard when he was their age, Culligan now has a
bottling machine that performs most of the work with the punch of a
button.
Still, Bravard's solid work ethic earned him the 2006
International Bottled Water Association's Plant Manager of the Year,
where he beat out large-scale companies like Arrowhead and Nestle.
Proud mom Waunda sent in the application, unbeknownst to her son,
who showed up at the awards ceremony in jeans.
"Everyone was in suits and ties!" he said, laughing.
Waunda smiled at her son.
"It's a fun place to work," she said. "Every day is a different
day."
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