DORNBRACHT - Butterfly Trading

DORNBRACHT the SPIRITof WATER Water
WATER
The LAST LUXURY of our CIVILIZATION
WATER SIGNIFIES LIFE,
even “life plus”. These days it has become an undeniable, established fact that
water is always the silent companion at a business meeting or spontaneous
meet-up with friends, a serious meeting or a “fun event”. Most of the time it
is even an expensive brand of bottled water, which highlights at once what
you do or do not want to be. This was not yet the case five years ago. Water
used to be the raw ingredient for the washing machine, for the toilet, for
cleaning dirty pans and plates. If you went to a meeting, you were not given
water, at best a mediocre filtered coffee from the coffee machine. Water until
recently was a functionalised substance, cheap, at best it was used for the
needs that we dealt with quickly and without giving them much thought. For
instance, the morning shower with an anonymous soap or the mouthful of
water from the municipal fountain if we were thirsty when passing.
The perception of water is changing slowly, continuously, consistently. Water
is changing into the generator for deliberately staged everyday rituals. Today
in many niches these no longer only express a new understanding of culture
but even a cult. Water is also now being ennobled in German to “aqua”, evident
also in the naming of top restaurants. Water is being discovered as the
cultural force and increasingly venerated as a cult. Water rituals are a cult and
depending on the context are being converted into metaphors for purity, originality,
vivaciousness, naturalness, and in the wake of the great storm, also the
expression of divine power. They ultimately demonstrate human dependence
not on themselves but on the unavailable. In our everyday lives bottles of
mineral water, now even something profane and non-aesthetic, dominate the
course of events. Water has become the silent companion – everywhere.
Mineral waters are the clearest expression of development. And even of its
excesses. Bottles of mineral water, whose contents, seen realistically, are of
much less importance than the staged design of the container, demonstrate
the power of the placebo effect. We have had Perrier, Evian, Badoit, but
France alone does not have the power of the future. Today water must come
from the Fiji islands to achieve validity as ambassador of civilised purity or
even be bought as rainwater from New Zealand, as demonstrated by Colette
Editor DAVID BOSSHART
Photography STEPHAN ABRY
in Paris. Today it seems this is the only way to produce real added value
and people are willing to pay a small fortune for it. The same is true of the
bathing sphere – the more that can be done with the physical condition
of the water, with temperatures, with sensory and tactile differences, the
more modern it is. We can assume that the prestige value of water will
continue to rise.
An unavoidably more global world will not value the material content of
goods, but the immaterial message they convey!
Mineral water will be the water of the middle classes of the future as it represents
a standard that not everyone can afford. We differentiate ourselves
through the better basics – access to better water, to better air, to a better environment.
The shell – the design, the formation of the channels of the message
– will be the brands in the battle of differentiation in communication and
in advertising. The intensifying struggle for the best mineral water brands is
a good example. This is where the game of distinction of the middle class
takes place. The rich or even the very rich will want to differentiate themselves
by being able to show off their own personal water source on their
property which they will use for water for the housekeeping tasks, as their
personal drinking water, and the water for entertainment in their park with a
pond, a fountain, waterfalls and many other ideas. They will no longer need
brands as they are their own measure. True luxury is always very elusive and
is always outside established terms of reference.
Let us just take a last element: In the western world we are experiencing
the transition from a “birthing culture” to an “aging culture”. No longer the
giving birth, the emergence, the “always new”, but growing old, slowing
down and maturity are the central themes. This is where economic added
value comes into play. This is where the force of the elementary, the search
for the essential gain importance. Interest in anything merely fleeting, like
high-performing, fashionable products, is lost. Instead there is a deeper layer
of longing for the simple, symbolic and valuable, that promises stability.
Imagination blossoms and that stimulates business. Water with minerals,
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