"A company founded serendipitously after a $150,000 impulse buy three decades ago is celebrating its silver anniversary.
For the summer of 1982, Linda Griffin Slagel and her sister, Gale Reece, had committed to helping their dad, Bill Griffin, start his business, Highbridge Springs, bottling water from a spring that ran through 32 underground acres of a quarry he had bought on a whim during the mid '70s.
"Dad said, 'Let me go down and show you what I've got, girls.' We didn't even know he'd bought it. He didn't tell anyone for five or six years that he'd even purchased it," Griffin Slagel said about 96 above-ground acres and the old quarry-turned-mushroom farm below ground south of Wilmore that her dad had picked up in a Jessamine County bankruptcy auction.
His original intent, she said, was to use the space as a naturally climate-controlled warehouse for the wholesale grocery business he was a part of. Griffin attempted to flip the property shortly after buying the bankrupt mushroom farm by trying to sell it to a large French mushroom company, but when that fell through, it sat.
To make the former limestone mine suitable for storage, engineers told the Griffins they'd have to do something with the thousands of gallons of water that poured through the mine creating levels of humidity unfit for proper storage. "He said, 'Let's bottle it,'" Griffin Slagel said of her dad.
In 2007, seeing bottles of water on store shelves and on top of coolers in offices is nothing new, but it was essentially unheard of a quarter century ago. It was slow going for Highbridge Springs the first few years, which was good for Griffin Slagel as she and her sister, who left the company in 2005 as head of the storage side, had to hand-fill all the bottles with PVC piping attached to the filtration system.
Today's mostly automated system can fill 2,000 five-gallon water cooler jugs, but the early days saw around 20 getting filled, and as business picked up, a 320-bottle day. That feat warranted a celebratory photograph, Griffin Slagel said.
"We used to have all of our five-gallon accounts on a map of Lexington with a little pin of it," she said. "We bottled it, we sold it, we delivered it, we came back and we billed it."
A 1986 company picnic was the first time her father, who died in late 2001, pointed out that the company had more non-family members than relatives working for them. It was also the same year the storage company, Kentucky Underground, was started.
Business in the mid '80s was picking up, thanks in part, according to Griffin Slagel, to an annual Halloween bash that saw customers switching from competitors just to be invited.
"The first time I went to a grocery store and saw a gallon bottle of water on the shelf that I didn't put there, I thought 'Wow, we're big time now,'" said Griffin Slagel, who now employs 45.
But it wasn't until the drought of 1988 that the company hit its stride.
Strict water restrictions around the Bluegrass led to an unprecedented demand for their water, so much so that the manager of a Georgetown Kroger asked the company to rent an unmarked truck for the rest of its deliveries as the store was inundated with customers who followed the Highbridge Springs truck off the highway.
To keep up with the demand as much as possible during the drought, Griffin Slagel said she didn't take a day off from May 6 through Sept. 10. Even with the nearly 24/7 work, Highbridge's reserves never came close to running dry. Less water came into the massive underground, man-made cavern as the drought was so strong it affected the water table that feeds the spring, but the reservoir in the back corner of the complex fell to only half-capacity.
The expanded business has lead to expanded capacity. Since the drought, the height of the dam has nearly doubled so it can hold five million gallons, and the amount of bottled water on hand can fill approximately 30 semis.
"If the water goes out in Paris, you can come down and get three truckloads, now," Griffin Slagel said.
The success of the last 25 years has allowed Griffin Slagel to give back to the Lexington community as well as others in the eight states their smaller bottles are distributed to and beyond.
The company supplied aide to victims of Hurricanes Andrew, Hugo and Katrina, and shipped 13 semis inside of 12 hours to Meijer stores following the 2003 blackout that affected the northeast and parts of the upper Midwest. "If you don't give back, you don't get," she said in talking about the numerous 5K races and Troubadour Concert Series they help sponsor and refresh.
The consolidation of the bottled water business over the last decade has brought them from being on the verge of entering the International Bottled Water Association's large company category to being a "drop or a drip" compared to the Dasanis, Aquafinas, Perriers and Dannons of the world, she said. In order to keep competing, at least on a local and regional level, to ensure celebrating another 25 years, Griffin Slagel said the company is now offering a wider variety of products and services.
"What we want to go to now is what we call 'the water solution company.' If you've got a problem, call me — we'll fix it," she said. Included in the new services are solutions in the commercial and soon residential realms like coffee (because, as Griffin Slagel said, bad water makes bad coffee) as well as tap water filtration and others.
Though the company has had offers to sell, Griffin Slagel is happy where she and the company is, even if it is 100 feet below ground. "When you start like that, it sure does mean a lot more to you. And you appreciate the people, the work these guys do, because dog-gone-it, you did it. You know what it is like."
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