Ep. 5: Loonen · Clara Sieg & David Kimmell on Balancing Parenthood and Entrepreneurship & the Two Days That Made Them Partners

Loonen is bottled water that starts at a spring, moves in stainless steel, and goes into glass and only glass, never plastic. Every batch is tested by an outside lab for more than 350 contaminants, and the results are behind a QR code on the label. It launched at the end of last year, is now in Sprouts, and has turned into the bottle influencers and celebrities can't help posting on social.Behind it are two people who came at this from opposite sides of the table: Clara Sieg and David Kimmell. Clara spent over a decade as a venture investor. Loonen came out of her own experiences during IVF and early motherhood. For the operating half, she called David Kimmell, who was on the founding team at Spindrift and spent nearly a decade running operations and R&D there.In this conversation we get into why Clara calls having a kid an accelerant rather than a tradeoff, the two painful days of questions they ran before signing anything, and the night David chose a basement over General Mills. We also talk about the trade show Clara lost the argument on, the shipments that arrived on doorsteps as ice cubes and glass shards, and where the name (with extra letters) comes from.+Find Loonen: ⁠www.loonen.comMore about Lucas: ⁠www.lucasballasy.com⁠++The Long Aisle is hosted by Lucas Ballasy, CEO of Barrel, a digital agency for CPG brands. Each episode goes behind the scenes with a founder or operator building for the long haul — how they think, how they live, and what keeps them going. Learn more at ⁠www.thelongaisle.com⁠.