on November 02, 2025
Written by Loonen Co-Founder, Clara Sieg
Writing has always been how I make sense of things. I spent the past 15 years investing in early-stage consumer companies, which meant most of my writing lived inside investment memos and pitch decks – clear, structured, and wildly impersonal – or in the chaos of notes on my phone.
Earlier this year, with a new baby and a lot more perspective, I decided to make a change. I moved from investing in ideas to building one of my own. Becoming a mother has given me a new relationship with risk and a different sense of scale. The hard things stopped feeling so hard, and the small things stopped feeling so important.
Now, in these first steps as a founder instead of an investor, I’m finding real comfort in writing as reflection. It’s a way to think through what’s shifting in work, in business, and in motherhood, and how those threads connect. My hope is that sharing here becomes a place to trade experiences and make sense of change together.
While I generally cringe when people post about personal things, a core part of my journey from investor to founder has been learning to embrace embarrassment. So I’ll start where much of this began.
For me, getting pregnant and staying pregnant was a long road that eventually led to IVF. I now have a daughter I’m wildly in love with, who feels the same way about bananas.
Along the way, I started researching, changing habits, and learning. I learned to be more mindful of what I put in and on my body. I learned that fertility is deeply impacted by the growing presence of hormone-disrupting substances in our homes and environments. And I learned just how pervasive plastics and the broader classes of endocrine-disrupting chemicals are in our daily lives – and that it’s not just a pregnancy issue.
Now, as a mother, I’m determined. I may be 90% plastic at this point, but my daughter is not.
I’ve made changes and found cleaner alternatives across nearly every category – food, beauty, personal care, home cleaning. But when it came to water, things got murky.
When the most basic thing isn’t clear
Water is what our bodies are made of. It’s our most consumed nutrient and the delivery system for every other. It’s what we mix our babies’ bottles with. It should be the most trustworthy thing we consume.
But it’s not.
Nearly half of U.S. tap water contains PFAS or “forever chemicals” that accumulate in our blood and don’t break down. Over 80% of tap systems test positive for lead. There are still no federal standards for microplastics in either tap or bottled water.
And bottled water? It’s less regulated than tap and wrapped in marketing jargon instead of transparent information.
As I kept digging, THIS IS INSANE became a refrain.
The more I learned, the more it felt absurd that we treat water – the most fundamental input into human health – as an afterthought.
Making the change
I spent years as an investor working with founders on their companies. An important part of investing is simply pattern recognition, gathering which characteristics in founders tend to correlate to better outcomes. I saw over and over again that the best founders are deeply self aware: they know what they don’t know and surround themselves with people who do.
For me, that person was David Kimmell.
David and I have known each other for years. He was on the founding team at Spindrift, where he led operations and R&D for nearly a decade. He’s spent his entire career building and fixing CPG supply chains, which means he knows exactly how the system works, and just how broken parts of it are.
We spent months talking about how this could come to life and what it would take to do it well. Along the way, we tested how we worked together and whether our instincts really aligned. We built a long list of questions to draw out how we each approach problems, think about culture, and define success. It was a little all over the place and definitely not comprehensive and I lost the notes I took while we were having the conversations, but the important part was we had the conversations. Things started to flow more naturally (water pun!) and our vision took shape.
And so, when the idea for cleaner, truly transparent water clicked for him and he signed on as my co-founder, I knew we had something worth betting our careers on.
Building Loonen
Conviction builds slowly and then feels like an imperative. What started as a self-protective obsession, became an urgency to create a solution. This is how Loonen was born.
We’re working to bring you the cleanest, most transparent bottled water on the market. It’s spring sourced, filtered for contaminants, and tastefully balanced with minerals. Every batch is third-party tested & certified, results are always shared, and we only ever bottle it in glass.
There’s a reason this doesn’t exist yet: it’s hard. The industry is both hyper-competitive and capital-intensive. Modern contaminants are insidious. Plastic is everywhere.
But that’s the gap we’re here to close.
Why the loon
Loons are ancient, particular creatures and one of the oldest species still flying. They choose their lakes carefully, returning year after year to the same clear water. They’re fiercely protective of their young and famously loyal, but that loyalty has limits. When a lake becomes polluted, they stop showing up.
We built Loonen in that same spirit of discernment. To hold ourselves, and what we consume, to a higher standard.
Loons are nature’s standard-bearers for water purity. We hope you’ll borrow from the loon and stop showing up for bad water, too.
Because it’s time for a standard we can actually trust.
