Q24N – A Canadian company which started out bottling Rocky Mountains air as a joke as seen its product fly off the shelf in China, with its first shipment selling out in four days.
Vitality Air was founded last year in Edmonton to literally selling bottles of air to smog-ridden China.
“Our first shipment of 500 bottles of fresh air were sold in four days,” Vitality Air’s co-founder Moses Lam told the Telegraph in a phone interview. Currently, a crate is carting an additional 4,000 bottles to China, but a majority of those bottles have already been sold.
Vitality Air sell the bottled air for 100 yuan or just over US$15 for a 7.7 litre can of Banff National Park Rocky Mountain air. That’s 50 times higher than the cost of mineral water in China.
Most of their customers live in big cities in the northeastern and southern parts of China where severe pollution warnings have become a common occurrence.
Vitality Air’s Lam admits that he started out the company as a joke as well when he and co-founder Troy Paquette filled a plastic bag of air and sold it for about US$1 on the auction site Ebay. A second bag sold for US$160. “That’s when we realised there is a market for this,” says Lam
Beijing artist Liang Kegang pulled in US$770 last year for a glass jar he claimed to have preserved from a trip he’d taken to southern France. The year before that, multimillionaire Chen Guangbiao sold pop-sized cans of air purportedly taken from less industrialised regions of China and sold for 5 yuan, or 77 cents.
Vitality Air sells bottled fresh air and oxygen across North America, to India and the Middle East. But China remains its biggest overseas market.
What Vitality is struggling with the most is keeping up with demand. Claiming they bottle every bottle by hand, Lam stated, “It’s very labour intensive but we also wanted to make it a very unique and fun product.”
What Vitality is struggling with the most is keeping up with demand. Claiming they bottle every bottle by hand, Lam stated, “It’s very labour intensive but we also wanted to make it a very unique and fun product.”
“We may have bit off more than we can chew,” he added.
Vitality Air’s success comes as an enormous, delightful surprise, considering it began as a joke selling something entirely free at the moment, and something everyone needs but almost everyone takes for granted. Lam’s parents have told him, however, not to quit his day job, and he hasn’t.
