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Key Takeaways A health scare in Keller’s family revealed how limited existing water-filter options were.
Keller and Carlisle spent three years engineering a system from scratch, prioritizing quality over speed.
Rorra offers premium water filtration solutions featuring a countertop filter designed to encourage daily use and trust, as well as a filtered showerhead.
When his young daughter’s eczema worsened, Brian Keller tried everything modern parenting prescribes. Nothing worked. Desperate, he replaced the ordinary showerhead in their bathroom with a filtered one. Within a couple of days, his daughter had perfectly clear skin. The speed of the change forced him to go online searching for a reliable filtration system. But what he found surprised him. “Pretty much one plastic product after the next,” he says.
He called his longtime partner, designer and engineer Charlie Carlisle. “I think there’s a pretty big opportunity here to build a business like the Dyson of water filtration,” he said. Little did they know they’d spend the next three years building a filtration system piece by piece, rejecting shortcuts.
The result is Rorra — a science-backed water filtration company offering a countertop unit and filtered showerhead. Both run tap water through a multilayer carbon and media setup designed to reduce chlorine, disinfectant byproducts, PFAS, and 50+ other contaminants. In less than a year on the market, the company has placed over 10,000 drinking-water systems in homes across the country and reached an eight-figure run rate.
Related: How Can a Working Mother Be Successful These Days? 6 Strategies for Success as an Entrepreneur and Parent
The problem with tap water
While studying U.S. water infrastructure, the founders discovered some sobering stats. The average tap water pipe is 45 years old, and many are more than a century old. Chlorine and other chemicals, including lead, are in almost all American tap water, including compounds linked to increased risks of kidney and bladder cancer.
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