The gap
Filter companies sell subtraction. They will tell you, accurately, what their media removes, and stop talking the moment the water leaves the cartridge. Supplement companies sell addition. They will sell you a bottle of minerals and say nothing about the water you are putting them into.
Both are half right, and the half each one leaves out is the other one's product. Filtration strips calcium and magnesium along with the contaminants — that is not a defect, it is how membranes work. Mineral supplements assume a glass of water they never examine.
We would rather sell you the second half and lose the margin on the first than sell you a filter and let you drink empty water for a year.
What we will not do
- We will not make health claims we cannot support. Our alkaline drops change the pH of the water in the glass. They make no claim about the pH of your body, because your body regulates that itself and any brand telling you otherwise is selling you something.
- Published performance, not adjectives. Every system lists what it reduces and the capacity it does it for. A filter without a stated cartridge life is a filter with something to hide.
- No subscription you have to fight to leave. Cartridges last six to twelve months. We will remind you. You can ignore the reminder, and there is no card kept on file for it.
- No fear marketing. Municipal water is a genuine public health achievement. It is also a floor. Both things are true and we are not going to frighten you to sell a filter.
How we build things
Matte composite, borosilicate glass, brushed steel, unbleached paper. A housing that sits under a sink for a decade should be serviceable with one wrench, and a thing that sits on a counter every day should be worth looking at. The consumable part of our filters is the cartridge, and only the cartridge — we do not build sealed units that get thrown away whole.
The name
Vale is a valley — the ground water runs through before anyone touches it, and where it picks up the minerals that make it taste of somewhere. That is the whole idea of the company in one word: take out what the pipes added, leave in what the ground did.