Chinese snapping up bottled air from Canada
MOSES Lam started selling air as a joke. His family told him “don’t give up your day job”. Now they’re eating their words.
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A CANADIAN who started selling bottled air online as a joke has now turned his idea into a successful business due to demand in China.
Vitality Air co-founder Moses Lam said he was goofing around with a group of friends when they decided to see if a bag of air would sell on eBay.
“We wanted to do something fun and disruptive so we decided to see if we could sell air,” Lam told CNN.
The bag was bought for $US0.99 ($AU1.37) and a second bag sold for $US160 ($AU221).
The Edmonton resident soon realised there was a market for the air and began hand bottling air in canisters in Canada’s Rocky Mountains every couple of weeks. Bottles are left for 10 hours in the pristine environment and Lam said demand was so high they couldn’t keep up.
The bottles have been snapped up by the Chinese since Vitality started selling in the country about two months ago.
“Our first shipment of 500 bottles of fresh air were sold in four days,” Lam told the Telegraph in the UK.
A crate of 4,000 more bottles being shipped to China was also mostly sold.
The success of his venture has been pleasant surprise for Lam, who was mocked by his family and friends when he first told revealed his idea.
“My parents told me not to quit my day job,” he said, adding that despite the success of the product he was still working at a bank in Canada.
Clean air has become a valuable commodity in China, with residents in the country’s north living under a cloud of heavy smog. Earlier this month Beijing issued its first ever red alert because of deteriorating air quality, forcing schools and businesses to close.
Vitality air customers are willing to pay about $20 for a 7.7 litre can of its air, which is 50 times more expensive than a bottle of mineral water in China.
It also has customers in America, India and the Middle East but China is its biggest market. Most are affluent Chinese women who buy for their families or give away as gifts.
But retirement homes and even high end night clubs have stocked their product.
“In China fresh air is a luxury, something so precious,” Vitality’s China representative Harrison Wang told the Telegraph.
Lam told the New York Daily News that after breathing their fresh air, pregnant women have told him that they have felt their babies kick for the first time.
“It’s definitely not a hoax. I don’t think this is a play on desperate Chinese people — at the end of the day, people have the right to purchase whatever they want,” he said.
“We’re almost no different than the bottled water industry — you can get water out of a tap in China, but people would rather drink Evian or Dasani or other imported water, so why should air be any different?”
Lam is not the first person to think of selling air.
Last year Beijing artist Liang Kegang sold a glass jar filled with air from southern France for over $1000.
Chinese millionaire Chen Guangbiao was also selling soft drink cans of air for $1 each in 2013 to make the point that China’s air was so bad that the idea of bottled fresh air was no longer fanciful.
Professor Wallace Leung of Hong Kong Polytechnic University told CNN that bottled air was not a practical solution to China’s air pollution problem.
His research is centred around the effectiveness of face masks and said efforts should be focused on filtering out dangerous particles from the air.
“One bottle of air wouldn’t help. I would be very cautious.”
Originally published as Chinese snapping up bottled air from Canada
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