Our Story
From beach struggles to Bowwa® Buckets
How it started
I grew up in Canada, on canoe trips. A week in the wilderness, portaging between lakes with canoes overhead and everything you need in a barrel on your back. If the harness lets go, it is not an inconvenience, it is the problem for the rest of your trip. You learn early which gear is worth carrying and which is not. If you have heard me in one of our ads and wondered about the accent, that is the reason.
I moved to Australia in my early twenties and swapped the lakes for the surf. Bowwa started on the beach at Port Macquarie, about as far from those canoe trips as you can get, and the gear problem turned out to be exactly the same.
There was no plan. There was a bucket with a handle that gave up halfway across the sand and not enough hands to make up for it. Anyone who has tried to carry towels, gear and a couple of kids in one trip knows the feeling.
So I designed the Strap. A patented harness that turns a bucket into something you can wear, with pockets on the outside and your hands free. That was the idea, and for a while that was the whole business.
Then I went looking for a bucket
A strap is only as good as the thing it is strapped to, and what I could find on hardware store shelves was not it. There is no sense designing a better way to carry a bucket that splits after one summer.
So I started writing to manufacturers trying to find someone who could make me a bucket worth the trouble.
I found them in Spain. And then I got completely sidetracked.
What they were already making was better than anything I had thought to ask for. Moulded from PolyAl, the plastic and aluminium recovered from used Tetra Pak cartons. Flexible enough to squeeze under one arm, tough enough to stand on. And they looked good, which I genuinely had not expected from a bucket. Matte, speckled, a bit industrial and a bit designer at the same time.
I ordered a few to try. I have not really stopped since.
Now I'm a bucket guy
I did not set out to sell buckets. I set out to sell a strap, and the Strap is still here. But somewhere between the first sample and the first proper order, the tubs became the business, and I have made my peace with being the bucket guy.
They have ended up in places I never pictured. Potting benches and greenhouses, laundries, boots and utes. Quite a few living rooms, and holding firewood beside a fireplace too.
The reason they work is the same reason I got sidetracked in the first place. They are genuinely tough. They happen to look good. And every one of them is made from cartons somebody already threw out, which is the part that impressed me most. You do not often get all three in one product.
Made in Spain from 100% recycled material. Aussie owned, still run out of Port Macquarie.
I read every email that comes in and I answer most of them myself. If something is not right, I would much rather hear it from you than read about it later in a review.
Andrew Kowalewski, founder, Port Macquarie
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