Memobottle was born from two major societal frustrations that founders Jesse Leeworthy and Jonathan Byrt decided they had to do something about. Firstly, the single-use water bottle epidemic: 525 billion single-use bottles were purchased and consumed last year (1 million every single minute), despite 91% of the global population having access to clean drinking water; not only is this environmentally disastrous, but costs 1,400 times more than tap water. Both memobottle founders grew up in a coastal town just south of Melbourne, Australia. They were raised in an environmentally conscious community, and encouraged to reuse and recycle. Secondly, Leeworthy and Byrt were tired of the inability to fit cylindrical bottles into bags. They found that they were always carrying laptop bags, satchels or backpacks to university/work and either had a big bulge in their bags from the bottle, or had to leave the bottle at home and buy a single-use bottle during the day. In order to overcome these frustrations, the founders realised that they needed to create an alternative that was more convenient, practical, and sustainable in design. It had to inspire people to move away from the single-use culture. An inspired and challenging journey began, initially most of the work being done at night while they still held day jobs. In a relatively short time the memobottle was born - a slim, reusable water bottle designed to fit in your bag. Leeworthy, a Product Design Engineer, realised that the shape of the conventional reusable water bottles was somewhat of an inconvenience, so he designed memobottle to be flat and in the shape of the international paper sizes - A5, A6, A7. ”We had a brainstorm about the items that we carry in our bags and realised most of them are flat in shape. It didn’t make sense for our water bottles to be cylindrical”. “Somewhere along the line, society became fixated on designing cylindrical shaped bottles. Rather than making a product that conforms to the status quo, we decided to create something that is easy to transport but still holds the functional aspects of traditional bottles.