Salacious Drinks is celebrating ten years in bottled water this year a whole decade of exploring springs, obsessing over minerals, falling in love with new bottles, and convincing the world that water is a luxury category worth caring about. And since it’s our anniversary, we’re taking readers behind the scenes to talk about the things nobody ever asks about… but should.
Last time, we dove into our name where it came from, what it means, and how that single word became part of our identity. (If you missed it, go back and read it — it’s one of our favorite stories.)
Today we’re talking boxes. Specifically:
How does one ship glass bottled water all over the world without destroying every bottle along the way?
Because trust us this is a whole journey. And if you’ve never tried to ship a case of glass bottles to someone in a different state (let alone overseas), you would be shocked at how many things have to go right.
The Early Days: Brown Boxes and Packing Peanuts
When we launched, we were operating on pure passion, caffeine, and zero real-world logistics training. We were water people not warehouse engineers. We cared deeply about sourcing, terroir, carbonation, and bottle design. We did notcare (yet) about boxes.
So what did our shipping operation look like in 2016?
Honestly: whatever boxes we could find.
Brown, unbranded, no identity, no inserts, no cushioning tech just a plain box stuffed with packing peanuts and prayers.
A typical order went something like this:
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Find a random box
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Fill it with styrofoam peanuts
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Nestle five or six glass bottles inside
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Add more peanuts until the box bulged
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Tape the life out of it
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Hope it survives
We look back on those photos and just cringe. It was chaotic. It was ugly. It was… functional-ish.
But here’s the funny part nobody complained. Not once. Our customers were absolute angels. No one ever emailed to say, “Hey, I loved the water but why did my living room look like a snowstorm when I opened the box?”
And if you’ve opened a peanut-filled box, you know exactly what we mean.
The Problem With Glass (and Couriers)
People assume the challenge is the glass itself. And yes, glass is fragile. But the real danger isn’t stillness it’s movement and impact. Packages travel through a mini obstacle course on their way to someone’s door:
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Conveyor belts
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Sorting machines
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Trucks and vans
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Drops, bumps, cold, heat
Every one of those steps can turn a perfect bottle into a shattered mess. Add carbonation into the equation and you’ve got pressure, gas, and tiny glass fragments basically a champagne grenade.
And don’t forget: water is heavy. Twelve bottles of sparkling? That’s up to 30 pounds in a single box. Couriers toss that weight around like laundry. If your packaging isn’t dialed in, it’s game over.
The Moment We Had to Respect the Box
It took us longer than it should have to ask ourselves an obvious question:
“Would you want to receive this in the mail?”
That was the turning point.
Because shipping isn’t just logistics it’s part of the brand experience.
Premium water deserves premium packaging.
Not because it’s fancy but because it protects the product, holds the story, and sets the tone.
Slowly, we started testing:
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Molded pulp inserts
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Custom cardboard grids
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Bubble sleeves
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Foam pockets
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Corrugated double-walls
We started learning the language of packaging the way we had learned mineral content and carbonation. We started studying what wine importers did, how breweries shipped bottles, and how European water brands handled exports.
Boxes became a science.
The Solution: Purpose-Built Packaging
Today, our packaging looks nothing like our first year.
We have a custom-built shipper (and variations for different bottle shapes) designed to handle the biggest shipping enemies:
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Impact (from drops and conveyor transitions)
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Vibration (from trucks and aircraft)
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Orientation (because boxes don’t always stay upright)
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Temperature shifts (mostly for carbonation stability)
Inside the box, bottles are individually separated so they never touch each other. The inserts absorb shock instead of transferring it. The outer box has specific crush strength. The fluting matters. The void fill matters. Even the tape matters.
Nothing about it is accidental anymore.
Is it perfect? Of course not. Nothing in logistics is ever perfect. But the success rate speaks for itself our bottles reach doorsteps in New York, Los Angeles, Dubai, Berlin, Tokyo, São Paulo and beyond with very few casualties. And for glass and carbonation, that’s a win.
Shipping Glass Is a Hidden Barrier to Entry
There’s something interesting people don’t realize:
Shipping is actually one of the biggest barriers to entering the bottled water space.
Anyone can post pretty bottles on Instagram. Anyone can sample a flight of waters at a tasting. But moving cases through UPS, FedEx, USPS, DHL, local couriers, freight, and international customs… that’s the real game.
A premium water company isn’t just selling water.
They’re shipping geology.
They’re shipping terroir.
They’re shipping fragile art objects shaped like bottles.
If you can’t ship safely, you can’t scale.
If you can’t scale, you can’t survive.
That’s why this story matters. It’s not just “how do you protect glass” it’s “how do you build a business around something fragile, heavy, and expensive to ship and still make it accessible to the world?”
For us, the answer was patience, research, money, trial, error, and a lot of broken bottles.
Ten Years Later: Gratitude for the Journey
When we look back, those early boxes tell a story. They remind us we started scrappy. They remind us we learned the hard way. They remind us our customers loved us enough to stay through the growing pains.
Now we get to look at our custom packaging and feel proud not because it’s glamorous, but because it means these waters make it safely from ancient springs and volcanic aquifers to people who care.
And that’s really what Salacious Drinks is about.
Bringing natural, single-source, glass-bottled water to the world intact.
Next behind-the-scenes topic coming soon.