Culligan’s new water pitcher takes aim at your kitchen counter

In the filtered water space, there is one company that has dominated brand awareness for decades. Water pitchers and filtration devices from Brita can be found in so many millions of homes and offices around the world that the term market saturation is more than just a pun.

But there’s another water filtration company that, despite lower kitchen visibility, is actually a bigger player in the clean-water game. Culligan, founded in 1936 as a water softening and filtration service company, became known for its white-glove service.

Often installed in basements or storage closets, Culligan’s equipment was as utilitarian as a water heater or furnace. Once the system was installed in a home or office, its users hardly gave it another thought, or look. “It was the technician that was actually working with the product,” says Kathy Chi Thurber, Culligan’s new global president of consumer products. “The products didn’t have to be beautiful, but the technicians had to be able to talk about our history, our capabilities, our research, and innovation.”

Now, as a private 15,000-person company that pulled more than $3 billion in revenue in 2023, Culligan is embarking on a total brand and strategy overhaul. And aggressively so. Within the past five years, Culligan has acquired 362 companies in the clean-water industry, from local water purifiers to filter companies to component manufacturers. It’s positioning itself as a dominant player in a world where water safety and water scarcity are of increasing concern.

Out of the basement and into your kitchen

One priority is to start competing more directly in the consumer space, bringing its equipment out of the basement and into the hands of water drinkers everywhere. “We’d never really given an eye to the consumer, and that has 100% changed,” says Chris Quatrochi, chief product and technology officer at Culligan International.

To venture into the Brita-dominated consumer market, Culligan turned to the industrial design firm Ammunition Group. Known best for its work designing Beats by Dre headphones and products for companies like Polaroid, Square, and Lyft, Ammunition was tasked with helping Culligan develop products that appeal to regular consumers. It also updated the brand to tell those consumers that Culligan is not the box-in-the-basement brand they may have known in the past.

“Our portfolio has not been the greatest from a, I would say, beauty perspective,” Quatrochi says. “If you really want to show that you are leading edge from a water-quality perspective, you have to have a product that demonstrates that.”

Ammunition started by applying its deep product design background to creating a water filtration pitcher that embodies this new company focus. Building on its 2020 acquisition of the water filter maker ZeroWater, Culligan’s ZeroWater Technology line of three handheld pitchers and two countertop dispensers is the company’s first foray into the consumer space.

Designing a better water pitcher

Ammunition’s design focused primarily on the ways people actually use filtered water pitchers. “One of the constraints is putting it in your refrigerator,” says industrial designer Robert Brunner, Ammunition’s founder. Research into the market showed that more than 70% of water pitcher users, particularly those in the U.S. and Western Europe, keep their pitchers in the refrigerator, often in the door of the appliance.

At the same time, most of the pitchers on the market don’t actually fit into a fridge door all that well. Their rectangular shape and bulging handle tend to take up a lot of space, and need more room around them to be moved in and out.

Ammunition rethought that form factor to better fit inside the refrigerator door, using a rounded square shape for the pitcher that allows it to fit more like a carton of milk. The pitcher also has an innovative open-ended handle that cuts down on its overall bulk and allows more stuff to fit in the refrigerator door’s shelves alongside it, while also being more ergonomically comfortable to carry and hold.

“Figuring out how to have that single connection point for that handle so it’d be mechanically robust and reliable—it was actually a fair amount of engineering effort to make sure that could work when it’s getting filled up with water,” Brunner says. “The handle is extremely important, because when this thing is full, it’s quite heavy, and you have to be able to manipulate it, carry it, pour it. We wanted to maintain this simplicity.”

The design team also thought about the spout shape and the challenge of pouring water for people with dexterity and mobility issues. That led to considerations about one of the key parts of using a water pitcher: refilling it. Ammunition designed a sliding lid that makes holding the pitcher under the tap and refilling it easier.

The lid’s circular shape became a recurring theme in the design of the pitcher line, as well as the broader work Ammunition is doing across Culligan’s other product and service categories. “The circular element is really the most natural shape to route water from one place to another, pipes being the most obvious example,” says Christopher Kuh, vice president of Ammunition’s industrial design studio. “It’s really an important and core element.”

Another differentiating factor is the built-in water-quality meter. Measuring total dissolved solids (TDS) at the scale of parts per million, the digital meter slots into the pitchers and the countertop dispensers to give users a clear readout of how well the filter is functioning—and when it’s time to replace it.

“The TDS meter actually is going to start to read a value above zero at some point in time, which gives you a clear indication of the end of filter life,” Kuh says. In a clever turn, the meter can be removed from the pitcher or dispenser to dip into, say, a glass of water direct from the tap to see just how much the filtration system is doing.

A bigger rebrand moment

These design moves were informed by deep user research Culligan has conducted over the past three years. Thurber says Ammunition was game for putting its design prototypes in the hands of users from the very early stages and taking their feedback to inform new iterations of the designs before landing on a final product that looks and feels different from what’s already out there.

“We all know who the major competitor is that has, like, 60% to 70% market share,” Thurber says. “It would be very hard to break through if we were not serious about what we wanted to do, and if we were not game-changing in our design and our functionality.”

But this doesn’t mean Culligan is abandoning the more utilitarian water products that have kept it in business for nearly a century. Instead, Ammunition’s design approach for the pitcher is being extended throughout Culligan’s product offerings, including the industrial-scale water softeners and filtration systems that still live in basements and utility closets, as well as the company’s large and growing business in office water coolers. Some of those redesigned products will be coming online in the next year.