David Walker has two goals: Buy an NFL team and win a Super Bowl. His path to get to that goal? Water. Who inspired the life-altering pathway? Black women.
Now, with his Positivity Alkaline Water brand and through the help of the Russell Innovation Center for Entrepreneurs, the product will soon be available in 40 Walmarts across Atlanta.
Walker recently brought his Positivity Alkaline Water to rolling out to discuss his goals and the role Black women have played in helping him attain them.
What went into the name of this brand?
Every relationship starts with positivity, so we like to make sure that everybody has some.
By way of background, I’m a business attorney. I’ve been doing corporate law for 25 years. And I have an outrageous goal to one day own an NFL team and win the Super Bowl trophy. Because of that outrageous goal, law is not going to get me there. I love my clients, I love working with business owners, I don’t do any bad news law, it’s all fun, but to get into that level of NFL ownership, you have to develop a business model that’s going to put you in that orbit.
I went to a bottled water plant 10 years ago and fell in love with the bottling process. I have an engineering degree from Michigan, and I went in to negotiate a deal on behalf of a client that sold equipment to bottle and beverage companies. I just said, “Hey, I want to be in bottled water one day.” And they showed me a little bit about the plant and how it works. I started to problem-solve within the industry, like, “Where would I fit? How can I fit into bottled water if I wanted to get into production?”
One of the things I noticed was a lot of companies were being sued for taking resources out of one state and taking them to another. The Environmental Protection Agency wasn’t happy with all of the heaviness of water, the roads, the emission output, and the plastic. I started talking to the engineers, who showed me how they would keep all the plastic and ship it back to their supplier for credit. They said bottled water was getting a bad rap because the plastic is very valuable … so I decided to build small micro water bottled plants for our community. They’re going to drink the water locally, buy it locally, and return the bottle. We’re going to build 1000s of these plants, I’m going to buy an NFL team and win a Super Bowl … some people said, “Hey, that sounds great, but if you don’t know how to sell water, you’re going to have a plant with a lot of water just sitting there…” so we started with a purified water brand called Integrity… every summer, I would have a truckload of water and started a conversation in the community.
One of the things I heard Black women repeatedly say was, “How come you don’t have any alkaline water?” This was in 2016, and the women would explain to me how they get five-galloon jugs of it and use it for health, fitness, or for a family member battling cancer. They also told me it helps with your skin or washing your vegetables … so I decided to do it. With the name, I was like, all of the Black women who told me about alkaline water were super positive, so let’s call it Positivity Alkaline Water. So we made the bottle with the words nice and big so you can see it when you walk into a store. Also, the women told me about pH levels, so I also put that on the bottle.
