Yahoo Lifestyle How Thankyou Water Revives
Justine Flynn. Photo: Supplied
Justine Flynn, Daniel Flynn and Jarryd Burns were just university students when they first heard that 900 million people worldwide didn’t have access to safe drinking water. “We were really confronted [by that fact],” explains Justine. “We had no money and zero experience, but we knew that with
enough passion and belief in the cause we could make it work.”
In response, the group of friends sat down and came up with a simple, yet powerful idea: what if they started a company manufacturing bottled water and all the profits went back to funding
water projects in developing nations.
“At the start it was quite difficult,” Justine, then a marketing student, admits, “because we were juggling our degrees at the same time. It was a bit chaotic.”
Fast-forward five years, and Thankyou water is stocked in Coles, Woolworths and 7-Eleven stores nationally. The company has made more than $1.8 million in profits, all of which has gone to fund projects in 13 countries, mainly in Sub-Saharan Africa and South-East Asia.
Alongside bottled water, Thankyou now manufactures food and body products. Each product comes with a unique code that can be entered into an interactive map on the company’s
website to chart exactly where the money goes. “That was something that was really important to us,” says Justine. “People need to see where the impact is that they are making.”
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