PATH Water’s co-founder and CEO Shadi Bakour shares three branding lessons, including why leaders should stop resisting collaborations.

By Carla Kalogeridis

Shadi Bakour is an entrepreneur who finds motivation in tackling the world’s largest problems. In 2015 he co-founded PATH Water, which launched a sustainability-focused aluminum water bottle to challenge businesses and consumers to rethink the bottled water industry. Today, PATH is a global brand partnering with individuals and brands like Kevin Hart, Ryan Seacrest, Guy Fieri, Ninja Fortnite, Adidas, Dropbox, Whole Foods, Apple, Yellowstone National Park, and more.

PATH is the first water packaged in a certified refillable and 100% recyclable BPA-free aluminum container. Since its inception, PATH has helped save more than 250 million single-use plastic bottles from oceans and landfills. The product is sold in all 50 United States plus seven countries.

Working collaboratively with partners, PATH has put its aluminum-bottled water in more than 55,000 locations around the world. The company has exclusive licensing deals with Nickelodeon and Hasbro. “Our whole approach to business has been the power of collaboration,” says Bakour. “Collaboration helps us make a larger impact and build a larger business much faster. We’ve learned that the new age of business is collaboration.”

Bakour isn’t claiming he invented the concept, but he has harnessed it more effectively than most entrepreneurs. “If you look at successful brands across the world, you’ll see that many have leveraged each other to make a larger brand impact,” says Bakour. “You can create win-win situations where you’re adding value to each other’s businesses and creating synergy to grow.”

He frequently cites a favorite African proverb: If you go alone, you can go fast; but if you go together, you can go far.

“It’s not really about what I can extract from the other organization or person,” he says. “And it’s not about what I can just give away, because I have to build a business with sustainable, profitable growth. It’s about how can we work together, and at the same time, what added value can I bring to the table?”

Here are three branding lessons Bakour has learned along the way.

Lesson No. 1: Go Against the Grain

As a child of immigrant parents, Bakour says he was “not the coolest-looking kid” in school.

“You could probably measure my weirdness by measuring the gap between my buck teeth,” he jokes. “But in that journey of not really being accepted among my peers at a very young age, it allowed me to think about how I can do things differently. It gave me an outsider’s perspective and taught me that sometimes going against the grain can be a really good thing.”

When he started PATH, at the core of everything he did was one question: How do we do things differently than how they’ve been done before?

“That one question goes to the essence of our product, which is a bottled water company that doesn’t want to sell you any more water because our product is in a reusable container,” he says.

Lesson No. 2: Put Ego Aside and Collaborate

The PATH Water idea really took off in San Francisco International Airport in 2019, which had banned the sale of single-use plastic on its property. “By some act of God and a lot of hard work, we took over the entire airport and created a catalyst for our business,” says Bakour. Because San Francisco is one of the tech hubs of the world, they were soon approached by an executive at Salesforce.

“Salesforce was really excited about our product,” he says. “They’re very anti-plastic, and they’re impact focused.” PATH was a very small business at the time — about $100,000 in sales — and it was just getting into 7-Elevens in Northern California. Salesforce wanted PATH to feature its logo on the PATH bottle.

“If you know anything about beverage or food, it’s all about brand equity,” Bakour says. “We were focused on building our own brand, right? We thought there wasn’t as much value in private labeling because you have no brand equity. That was the ideology planted in our brains at a very early stage.”

Eventually, Bakour says they gave Salesforce a “little, tiny spot” on the back of their bottle. “We fought tooth and nail over that little piece of real estate on our bottle,” he recalls. “When it comes to collaboration, ego can be the killer of growth. For a long time, we really resisted this idea of collaboration. Later, we had another opportunity where a big investor wanted us to make them a special bottle. So slowly over time, we started to let go of this idea that we had to be the only brand front-and-center on our bottle. We started falling more and more into this idea of collaboration.”

With the new shift in thought came a new program called Partnering to Save the Planet. “Over the past few years, that program has been growing like wildfire,” says Bakour. “Most people know us for our retail product at Whole Foods and Target — 100,000 retailers. But now we’ve partnered with all types of organizations, and this program we’ve created is completely banning single-use plastic within each partnering organization.” Recent program partners include Madison Square Garden, SpaceX, and several hotel groups. 

“You won’t find it in the business books and few advisors will counsel you about this, but collaboration has opened up our sales channel and opened up the door for us in so many different ways,” he says. “By partnering with these organizations, we are leveraging our brand but also their brand equity. We’re lean on their brand equity to create more trust with our consumers, to create different experiences with them. When you have these different organizations building pyramids of our product in the middle of their facility, there’s added value that we never would have considered.”

Lesson No. 3: Most New Ideas Are Recreations of Old Ideas

Through the collaboration strategy, Bakour says he came to realize that even when you’re going against the grain, you probably still don’t have a purely original idea.

“Our licensing idea really came from one of our partners, someone from the fashion industry who had zero experience in the beverage space,” admits Bakour. “He looked at our product not as a bottle of water, but as a fashion accessory. It completely changes your approach to how you would sell or promote this product or how you would even build the brand. One of the key strategies when it comes to fashion is licensing. So, he brought this idea from the fashion industry, a strategy of accessorizing our product to an industry that largely was focused on brand equity.”

Bakour says through this one strategy, PATH learned to cobrand and partner with different organizations to eliminate single-use plastic and make a larger impact together. “We launched into retail licensing — which was a completely different concept for us — but a known strategy for our partner,” he says. “I realized that at the end of the day, most ideas are not really original ideas — they’re just recreations of ideas that already existed in the past. Few ideas out there are actually new or original.”

Bakour says that most entrepreneurs look back and think, “Well, this is the way things were done for so long, and there’s a reason for that.” However, he says, business leaders forget that the world and the economy are changing daily, as are the needs of the global economy.

“We should use the lessons from the past and the reasoning behind them, but we should always question them,” he advises. “Always try different approaches and new angles and see how the old ideas integrate into the new age of the world.”

Mission-Focused Makes Money

Bakour says focusing on PATH’s mission of reducing the world’s use of single-use plastic opened his mind to new-old ideas.

“Even though we take a little backseat with our own brand sometimes, by featuring all these other brands and putting them in the spotlight of sustainability, we’re not just giving it away — it is a collaboration, a partnership. We’re helping people make sustainable choices and look like they are sustainability leaders. In addition, serving different communities and audiences increases your own impact.”

Here are the questions that Bakour says all leaders should consider:

1. What are we doing with like-minded organizations to collaborate and leverage each other to create synergistic value?
2. How has our ego limited certain opportunities to work with others that may have been beneficial for us?
3. Have we worked with people or organizations from different industries? And if so, how has that impacted our story? How has that brought a fresh perspective to what we’re doing?

Bakour encourages leaders to also keep their minds open about who they might collaborate with. “Sometimes you stand your ground and turn down the opportunity to work with a particular brand, making a statement in doing so,” he acknowledges. “But we’ve even partnered with plastic-bottle water companies. It’s interesting because if we are true to our mission, and we really want to make a larger impact, then by offering them this sustainable option, we are making a larger impact. We haven’t turned down any organizations to date — even if they don’t fully align with our purpose.”

Bakour says PATH has even opened its doors wide to some of the biggest beverage brands, realizing that if PATH can tap into these large distribution systems and networks, that’s how it can make a larger impact. 

“When these companies have asked to get involved with us, we’ve said yes,” he says. “It’s kind of like making an impact from inside the belly of the beast.” 

What’s in a Name?

When asked how he came up with the PATH brand name, Bakour admits it was a long process with many twists and turns.

“I always believed that a strong brand name has four or five letters, and it should be a word commonly used in day-to-day conversation,” he says. “A brand name is important. One of my co-founders actually thought that Smart Water made him smarter, and even when I told him it didn’t, he still kept drinking it.”

Bakour and his team settled on PATH because they believe water is the path forward. “It’s a path to a more healthy and sustainable future,” he says. “We are all on this path together. It’s a cool word that has different meanings for different people. Follow your path. Choose your own path. Join our path. Join us.”