Splash

Client: Splash
Location: Seattle, WA
Industry: Nonprofit and Social Enterprise
Date: 2019 – Present

Splash is a nonprofit organization focused on providing safe water, sanitation, hygiene, and menstrual health solutions to children in urban Asia and Africa. In 2018, they established a mission-aligned social enterprise to scale production of their child-friendly handwashing and drinking stations and enable other organizations to purchase and use Splash stations for their own projects. Their manufacturing supplier was having quality issues and was unable to scale their manufacturing capacity to match Splash’s planned growth. This led Splash to search for a new supplier that could help manufacture their stations while eliminating these problems.

Improving water, sanitation, hygiene (WASH)conditions have the potential to prevent at least 9% of the global disease burden and 6% of all deaths, and this work has only become more important given the COVID-19 pandemic.

Founded in 2007, Splash partners with governments to provide WASH and menstrual health solutions for children in some of the world’s largest cities. Early on, they identified a need for improved handwashing and drinking water stations, but were unable to locate high-quality, child-focused products. In response to this market gap, they developed their own drinking and handwashing stations that are durable, child-appropriate, and promote positive handwashing and drinking behaviors.

After a decade in the sector, they began receiving requests to purchase their stations from other organizations, validating the market gap they had seen years earlier. They ultimately arrived at the decision to launch a social enterprise to fill a growing need for well-designed stations for their own programs and enable other groups to use their stations to improve their projects around the globe.

Moving forward with mass production of stations, Splash noticed that their manufacturer was having reoccurring product quality issues. Splash also realized that the manufacturer was not equipped to scale up as initially planned. Luckily, Splash had received a reference from another social enterprise who credited E-BI with helping them create a reliable, robust supply chain for their products. Splash began working with E-BI in late 2019 and was quickly impressed by their capability to provide streamlined manufacturing services from production through logistics support. Splash also appreciated partnering with a company who could provide services beyond manufacturing, such as:

• Serial number implementation: Via their expertise and past experience, E-BI designed and implemented serial number plates for Splash’s handwashing and drinking stations beginning in October 2020.
• Mold production and inspection: E-BI provided and inspected multiple new station and riser molds as Splash’s demand increased.
• Sourcing new tap options: Splash’s previous taps had quality issues, leading E-BI to provide Splash with multiple alternative tap options.
• Prototype production: E-BI produced a full-size, useable prototype of a newly designed handwashing station.
• Quality Assurance/Quality Control: E-BI greatly reduced the number of quality issues by improving and maintaining high-quality control standards for every production batch of stations.

Despite 2020’s challenges due to COVID-19, E-BI helped Splash produce five times as many stations compared to the previous year. The strong partnership between Splash and E-BI allowed the successful deployment of thousands of handwashing stations to schools in India and Ethiopia to coincide with the emphasis on hand hygiene as part of the response to COVID-19 response in 2020.