About Us
 Dad,
tell me a story. A really silly one.
OK Alec. Well, once upon a time, as all good
stories start, in fact, it was late one afternoon.
Alan was drinking his favourite beer in the
sun in the backyard, waiting for the barbeque
to heat up to grilling temperature. In the shade
nearby lay his new baby son, Alec, also drinking
from his own favourite bottle. Down in the garden,
the attractive, intelligent and devoted woman
who was both Alec’s mother and Alan’s
wife was mowing the lawn. Alan thought to himself,
‘Could life be any sweeter?’ Alan
thought not. Not unless he could persuade her
to put down the push-mower for a minute and
go get him another beer.
Suddenly, he had an idea! Wouldn't it be cute
if Alec was able to hold his bottle in a little
baby-sized neoprene holder like his dad's beer
bottle holder? Wouldn't it be great if it kept
the milk warm for longer and cooler for longer,
for all those times when mum and baby are on
the run? Wouldn’t it be nice if the neoprene
bottle holder was easier for little baby hands
to grasp? Made it more fun to hold? Made it
less likely to be dropped? Wouldn’t it
be cool if you could give little baby bottle
holders as gifts to your mates when they became
fathers for the first time? Wouldn't it be awesome
if Alan was able to quit his day job, build
a website, get some of these things made, and
make millions of dollars selling them over the
Internet? Wouldn’t it be better if he
stopped asking all these questions and went
out and did something about it?
First things first: he finished his beer. Then
he cooked the steak and sausages (note to US
visitors: the shrimp thing is a myth). Then
he washed up, bathed the baby, put him to bed,
and prepared a nice hot bath for his wife (after
all, she mowed the lawn). Finally, he asked
her if it was a good idea.
Then he largely ignored her opinion, and the
Milkooler was born, and Alan's vision came true
(except for the last bit about the millions
of dollars).
Milkooler is the vision of one visionary man, the expression of one expressive
individual, the dream of one dreamy, good-for-nothing,
never-amount-to-much Aussie layabout with too
much time and not enough sense. But it’s
also fun to have around, and great to have on
your baby’s bottle at a backyard barbeque
around feeding time.
Milkoolers are hand-made by highly-trained
Swiss craftsmen in a complex multi-stage process
that can take several months, from hand-selecting
only the finest free-range, air-cured materials,
through to agonizingly-slow, micro-surgical
completion, in a manner passed on from father
to son down through the generations and now
only practiced by the men folk in one tiny isolated
village where each individual Milkooler must
be wrapped in finest goose down and shipped
out by donkey from the tiny, avalanche-threatened
mountain meadow valley to our waiting seaplane
that can only land in the glacier lake one morning
a month due to the prevailing weather. That’s
why they cost so much. Not to mention the exchange
rate against the Swiss Franc.
Actually, that’s not strictly correct.
In fact, the reason they cost so much is that
we’re only manufacturing them in very
small numbers until I can convince my wife there
might be enough demand to warrant borrowing
some money from the bank to pay for a larger
print run. Until then, as anyone who knows anything
about printing and assembly will tell you, if
you’re printing only a few hundred at
a time, they’re pretty expensive.
So, it’s up to you: pay a premium price
and be safe in the knowledge that you’re
one of only a handful of other parents of exceedingly
good taste to own a set of Milkoolers; or tell
all your friends to buy lots of them, so that
I can convince my wife of the potential demand,
we can get a loan, the price can come down,
and all the world can own a Milkooler, or at
least, all the people in the world who need
a little neoprene jacket for their baby’s
bottle. After all, I wouldn’t dream of
forcing one on everyone, that’d be terribly
selfish of me. There’s the breast-feeders,
for starters, although you can express milk
with a pump and serve it in a bottle, there’s
nothing wrong with that. OK, what the heck,
I want everyone to own one. Even the childless.
Put your spare change in it, or a few pens and
pencils, or one of those funny little Coke cans
they sell in Japan. Pass a law, make it so,
bring it down from the mountain, ‘cos
the money would be great. I quit my job.
As long as we’re coming clean about the
price, you remember the whole thing about the
Swiss mountain village with the hand-crafting
and the donkey-shipping? Well, that wasn’t
strictly correct either, not so much in the
“only the names have been changed to protect
the innocent” sense of the phrase “strictly
correct” either, but more in the “not
a word of it was true” sense, wherein
the Milkoolers are actually currently made by
a perfectly good Australian manufacturer of
such products. Which is not as interesting as
the whole Swiss thing, but at least the real
answer is not “child-labour sweatshop”.
And no matter the cost, we won’t be using
child-labour to manufacture Milkoolers. Not
ever. Because my wife has told me we won’t
be having any more kids, and Alec’s not
going to be able to make more than a few a day
for the next couple of years, what with pre-school
and everything. And me? Well, I’ve just
had another great idea…
Alan Jones
Founder
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