Rick Scoville started out to "kick Perrier in the derrier," but he forgot to cover his own.
In any other state, it might never have come to this sort of shoot-out between the two men. But this was Texas, after all. Texas has always bred its men stubborn.
They squared off in the supermarket aisles of the boom towns of the old Southwest. One was a city kid up from the streets, brash and fesity, a shameless self-promoter who in his ads had promised "to kick Perrier in the derrier" when he introduced Artesia Sparkling Mineral Water in 1980. His challenger was a soft-spoken country boy from the hills, a fourth-generation Texan who hoped to save the family ranch by selling the water he used to dip from his daddy's spring. As a pair of Texas archetypes, they might have stepped out of the pages of some potboiling saga of sweat and dust and family feuds.
Their disagreement was nothing much more than a public spitting contest, waged through the columns of the local press. But by the fall of 1985, it had escalated into a full-blown legal brawl. The charges included copyright infringement, unfair competition, fraudulent advertising, and violations of federal racketeering statutes. At issue, really, was nothing more than bragging rights: which man could claim that his was the more genuine of the homegrown Texas waters.
Even today, there are people in San Antonio who think Rick Scoville and Ron Bownds a bit squirrelly, who wonder if this water feud of theirs has gone too far. On the other hand, water has always been a precious commodity in these parts. In the past century, it was sustenance for thirsty cattle and hard-driving cattlemen who made the yearly trek north to Abilene.Today, it is a pricey designer drink. Water, in fact, is now big business in Texas and in every other state, the fastest-growing beverage on supermarket shelves. And with profit margins ranging to 25%, neither Scoville nor Bownds was eager to relinquish his claim.
San Antonio boasts that it's the most entrepreneurial of American cities, and the story of Rick Scoville and Artesia Waters would be instantly recognizable to any student of the entrepreneurial revival. Scoville had been transplanted at age five from West Hartford, Conn., to Kansas City, Mo., and then San Antonio, where he grew up a scrappy, redheaded Anglo attending working-class Mexican-American schools. By the third grade, Scoville had a newspaper route and an egg route, and he had cornered the market on painting fluorescent house numbers on the curbs of his neighborhood's streets. An erratic student, Scoville flunked out of the University of Houston and served a tour of duty in Vietnam before returning to complete his degree. Launched into the corporate world at H.B. Fuller Co., a manufacturer of industrial adhesives, he rose quickly to become one of the company's top 10 salesmen. And just as quickly, he found himself very bored.
Inspiration came in 1979, while Scoville was cooling his heels waiting to make yet another sales pitch. Picking up a magazine, he read about Perrier's dramatic rise in the mineral-water business in the United States. He didn't know much about water, really, except that the water in San Antonio, purified by its 176-mile journey over the limestone of the mineral-rich Edwards Aquifer, tasted pretty good to him. He had seen the health-conscious crowds at his exercise club. He had heard the refrains of club-soda-with-a-twist at his favorite bars. If Perrier could make money shipping bottled water all the way from France, Scoville figured he could make beaucoup d'argent right at home.
The initial tests bore out his hunch: the waters of the Edwards Aquifer were lower in sodium and higher in magnesium than Perrier's. With $25,000 borrowed from a Houston bank, he set up shop in an old Pic-A-Pop Bottling plant in San Antonio, just off the freeway. There, he dug a well and began pumping. Since Perrier then came in three different size bottles (6 1/2 ounce, 11 ounce, and 23 ounce), Scoville put his in Texas-size containers (7 ounce, 23 ounce, and 32 ounce). More to the point, he set his prices strategically below the foreign imports. And in contrast to Perrier's understated green bottles, Scoville's new amber bottles featured a white and blue waterfall on the lable, topped proudly with a Texas Lone Star. Say au revoir, Perrier, say howdy, Artesia.
At times, Scoville sounds nostalgic for the rough and tumble of those early days of 1980. Unable to find distributors, he sold his water himself from the back of his van, "a bit like an old-time medicine salesman." To convince bar owners to try his product, he would cart in samples of Perrier, Artesia, and plain club soda to run blind taste tests in such cities as Dallas and Houston. And in sumpermarkets, where grocery managers would line up 10 rows (or "fronts," as they are called) of Perrier next to 2 of Artesia -- in a very real sense dictating consumer preference -- Scoville would quietly walk down the aisles and rearrange the lineup when the managers weren't looking.
That first year, Scoville lost money: with only $112,000 in sales, his volume was not enough to cover overhead and pay for a modest advertising campaign on billboards and radio. So he tried another marketing strategy. Rather than rearranging bottles on supermarket shelves, he began offering premiums to retailers that would give his product prominence: build a small display and win a satin jacket; build a large display and win a pool umbrella. And instead of paid advertising, he began to test the potential of free advertising -- public relations -- by pitching himself to the Texas media as the patriotic underdog, the American David challenging the French Goliath. Why send dollars abroad, he would ask, when you can have "a starspangled, sparkling mineral water from deep in the heart of the Texas hill country."
