Online water company Wazoo has fallen into administration.
The company was launched in 2019, describing itself as a disruptor in the market for clean and nearly-clean drinking water. After a stock market float that raised £42bn, the company paid to have its branding everywhere – on TV, on football shirts and on celebrity ‘Wazoo Ambassadors’. The company’s stated aim was to own the market for water, worldwide. It believed that internet sales would simplify the customer experience, build brand loyalty and deliver riches beyond compare for its founders. It did achieve the latter. Of the £42bn raised from city investors, £41.5bn was paid to its founders in dividends and other remuneration.
The company enjoyed some success, but customers said that Wazoo’s nearly-cleanTM bottled water was no different to what came out of their taps and cost 200 times more. The on-line service did offer consumers greater convenience, but customers became more savvy. They realised that if they had to get off the sofa to collect water at the front door, it was only a short further walk to the kitchen tap.
The company diversified into a range of waters of different qualities. The ‘Mayfair’ brand was 99.9% pure, the ‘Devon’ brand was 50% pure (and contained live 'friendly bacteria') and the ‘Windermere’ brand was so impure that it could not legally be sold as water. Despite massive marketing spend, consumers were unimpressed and moved to alternatives – milk, beer and dehydrated water products. Customers were literally drying up.
At the end, the company’s stock market value had fallen to forty seven pence. The founders blamed the customers. ‘We were ahead of our time and we were too sophisticated for our customers. The market for clean and nearly-clean water was not ready for our tech-savvy on-line service. We’ll give it another ten years or so and then we will do it all again.’
Image: congerdesign - Pixabay
It has been announced that the entire World Wide Web will be closed to all cyber traffic on Wednesday of next week while engineers work to remove a giant ball of pubic hair that has formed in one of the pipes, believed to be under Bermondsey in South London, caused by the sheer volume of pictures of genitalia being shared by people on dating sites and elsewhere.
Workman will insert a giant drain snake, similar to the device used to unclog a domestic bath or sink pipe, at around 6.00 am, hoping to be finished before people log on after work.
The snake, or auger, to give it its technical name, will then be turned manually by up to five hundred burly men, stripped to the waste, until the offending ball of pubes is broken down before being extracted in long sodden strands which will then be recycled and used for wigs, sweaters, and, in the case of some of the finer strands, bleached and woven into gowns for cash-strapped brides-to-be.
An internet spokesman told newsmen: 'We became aware of increasing delays in data flow during the last few months so sent a remote camera down an internet manhole close to where the problem was most severe.
'We subsequently discovered a large ball of matted pubes in the pipework at Bermondsey, almost certainly caused by people sending each other pics of their dicks and growlers via Tinder and suchlike.
'Hopefully, we'll get this one sorted fairly quickly, although we may be delayed and forced to use flamethrowers if the pubes are matted and bound together with any gobs of spadge or fanny batter.'
image from pixabay