Stratus Produces Water from Nothing. Questions?

James Margolles is a tall guy. When he stands next to his company’s groundbreaking “water cooler” and companionably places his hand atop it, there is a sudden but fleeting C3PO/R2-D2 vibe. But Margolles is not a droid (to say the least); he is an entrepreneur. Like many a brilliant and initially understated startup in the U.S. of A., James and Katie Margolles’ inaugural company was birthed in a garage in 2006 – this one in the Florida Keys; the tropical archipelago strung off Florida’s south coast. How to describe the glorious and incomprehensible Florida Keys? “It’s lots of little islands connected by bridges,” Margolles summarizes; an early glimpse of the no-nonsense approach that has defined the guy’s entrepreneurship. “No-nonsense” doesn’t mean humorless. James Margolles is a guy with a baked-in, benevolent smirk – and what a writer less obsessed with vocab might damnably refer to as a “twinkle in the eye.”

He and his family are recent Santa Barbara locals by way of Costa Rica, where they’ve spent the past six years remotely, and successfully, running their Florida company, Island Pure – whose sustainable, bottle-free water, ice, and coffee system handily shrinks the normally elephantine carbon footprint associated with home and office water delivery. The Margolles’ move from Florida to Costa Rica to Santa Barbara suggest they can’t live without a beach. They were actually chased back to the beach following a brief stint in the Rockies, where James and Katie hoped to actualize a next-step H2O dream. Floridians in Colorado. How’d that go? Margolles doesn’t equivocate. “We were like, ‘It’s too cold! There’s no way!’ I mean, I didn’t even see snow till I was 32 years old.” What prompted that move to Colorado in the first place? “I’m a fly fisherman, and spending a lot of time in Colorado, I’m seeing how low the rivers are that I used to fish, seeing all the reservoirs with the bathtub rings around them.” The American West is increasingly Drought Central, and it was there Margolles hoped to “land and expand” on a crazy-sounding water solution even more sustainable than the bottle-less Island Pure model. “But eight months in Crested Butte, which is at 10,000 feet? It was hardcore.”

Watery Big Bang

We’re speaking in Margolles’ offices on Santa Barbara’s sun-soaked Riviera. His new company, called Stratus, makes an aesthetically pleasing and – yeah – revolutionary water cooler; polished aluminum, clean lines, a dashboard enlivened with colorful GUI. Rollout of a new water cooler doesn’t normally suggest ticker tape parades and above-the-fold hollering in the NY Times. Stratus’ water cooler, though, actualizes the murmured Latin “ex nihilo” – a spooky phrase invoked in awkward discussions about the Big Bang. It means “Out of Nothing.” James? “Take a look,” he says, gesturing at Stratus’ Cloud Water Station. “No water lines, no pipes, no plumbing. There are no bottles. All you need is an outlet.” 

He means an electrical outlet. You roll this thing into your home or office, plug it in, and water comes out of it. I examine the machine as an audience member examines the levitating magician’s assistant for evidence of wires. The silver obelisk plugs into the wall like a toaster and there are no other connections. I push a decorative blue button and cool water fills my cup. I cautiously sip, and it is delicious. I look at Margolles with furrowed brow, a neanderthal puzzling over nuclear fission. “Hey,” he says charitably, and tosses up his hands. “I don’t claim to be the smartest guy in the room.”

H2OMG

Need we mention that water is a big deal? The wet stuff is perhaps the fundamental ingredient for life on Earth and makes up about 60-70% of the human body. For perspective – the most strikingly successful hedge fund manager is but 12 gallons of water buttoned into a charcoal grey Attolini suit. A scant 1.2% of the water on Earth is potable water – and we are feverishly pouring that into factory farming, water-intensive ag, and flush toilets. As our recklessly thirsty race of Nimbys bitterly argue over ginormous desal plants and dammed river valleys… we are aswim in H2O. “There’s more water in the atmosphere than all the lakes, rivers, and streams on the planet combined,” Margolles says, “…an estimated 37.5 quadrillion gallons of water. So we’re tapping into a pretty abundant source.” 

Uh… what source? It’s like this; Stratus’ Cloud Water Station/conversation piece sucks H2O out of the air, cycles it through an unforgiving ten-fold gauntlet of high-tech filters and microbe-annihilating UV, and neatly dispenses it into your favorite cup. The attractive silver Cloud Water Station slakes our collective thirst without intervening plastic, huge delivery trucks, and other carbon footprint-swelling features of modern water consumerism. No plastic, no bottles, no pipes, no trucking, no hands. Plug in your whispering Cloud Water Station and water shows up out of nowhere; five gallons a day with this model. The press has a question, here sanitized for polite consumption: What the Hell?!

World-Changing Tech and You

“People think that we invented this,” Margolles says. “We didn’t. This technology has been around for 30 years. In the Middle East air to water generation has been around a long time. Stratus is just taking the technology that’s already available and trying to make it mainstream. That’s our goal. Our niche has always been office water coolers. You’d asked me, ‘Is it scalable?’ There are companies that do that, and they have semi-truck size units that will make thousands of gallons a day.” Stratus is picking up where Margolles’ still-soaring Island Pure left off, while benefitting from Margolles’ mastery of a space he’s grown to love. “We’re the home and office water cooler. That’s what we’ve done for 20 years in Florida. I know what I’m good at.”

The vaguely biblical miracle of water coming out of nowhere may inspire a degree of consumerist genuflection, but you still need attentive mortals to make the model fly. Crappy customer service was an early irritant/motivator for Margolles, and he is all over it. “We basically take the position ‘just drink the water and let us do the rest’. This is all microprocessor controlled and the filters all have timers. So if the water quality doesn’t meet a certain pureness, there’s an alert. If a filter needs to be changed, it’ll tell you. It’s not like most water coolers, where you’re like, uh, is this thing actually clean? We have a schedule where we go out every so often and do preventative maintenance. Usually we’re there before anyone ever calls.” Stratus makes other efforts on behalf of the home planet. 

“Sustainability’s always been a passion of mine,” Margolles says. “So we have a partnership with 1% For The Planet. We kick back 1% of our gross to environmental causes. We’re interested in conservancy in places like Haiti and Africa where they don’t have access to clean water.” And why Santa Barbara? 

“It’s an awesome town, and beautiful! The people here are super cool, we’ve already made awesome friends. Our kids have a good crew at school…” Never mind that James is also a surfer. Of course. And there is one other thing that figures into the travelling Margolles clan having gone to ground. “I promised my wife,” Margolles says with sudden warmth, growing animated. “The past seven, eight years since leaving Florida, we’ve had that whole adventure of Costa Rica, and then the pandemic came and changed everything, and we did even more traveling. Now? My son, he’s doing the Friday night lights and basketball at the Page Youth center. There were no organized sports where we were, right? My daughter does horseback riding. We’re like, roots down!” Stratus’ CEO grins with the serenity of a guy whose thirst has been massively quenched. “We’re very happy to be here.”