Brit businessman enters canned fresh air market, sells to Chinese at £80 per bottle

A British businessman has followed the footsteps of a successful Canadian entrepreneur who exports bottles of fresh air to China. Leo de Watts 'harvests' the clean air from Britain’s countryside and sells the smog-free air at £80 (AUD$164) a bottle.

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The clean air comes from breezes in Dorset, Yorkshire, Somerset, Wiltshire and Wales. Since the 27-year-old businessman from Gillingham started the venture, he has sold 180 580-millilitre containers to Chinese buyers. However, because inhaling the fresh air would last the buyer only a few seconds, some buyers just keep the bottle as a novelty and never open it, reports The Telegraph.

As de Watts is now based in Hong Kong running an events company, it is his friends back home who do the harvesting. They place bottles in adapted fishing nets and hold it high to 'collect' the expensive air. The trapped air bottles are left open for 10 minutes to capture the place’s aroma as well as to ensure no bugs or grass are included in the bottle.

De Watts says that each place where his team captures the fresh air has a unique aroma, although he describes the British breeze as the “Louis Vuitton or Gucci” of fresh-air. If the air was harvested from Dorset it has more ocean scents from the breeze that flows up to the Jurassic Coast and the nearby pastures.

Because Yorkshire air is often filtered through more flora, its scent has subtle tones of the surrounding fields. The breeze is collected from hill tops, packaged, sent to Dorset and shipped to China. “Our customers all have high disposable incomes and want to buy gifts for someone or someone or someone wants to use it,” de Watts shares.

He thought of the idea when he read of people importing bottles of fresh air from Edmonton-based Vitaly Air, a Canadian company that harvests the clean air from the Rocky Mountains and began exporting the breeze to China in October 2015. Because its first shipment of 500 bottles were sold in four days, Vitaly shipped in December a crate with 4,000 bottles which are advanced orders, says Moses Lam, co-founder of Vitaly, according to The Telegraph.

Initially de Watts thought it was ridiculous. “When someone bottled water everyone thought it was ridiculous, now you have Evian and Volvic – why not bottled air,” adds the young entrepreneur who says his business is just a cottage industry with a few people collecting clean air in the countryside. The brand name he gave the fresh air is Aethaer, an old Greek word for pure fresh air.

To celebrate the Chinese Lunar New Year, Aethaer would be sold at 25 percent off at HKD$9,888 (AUD$1,795) from the original price of HKD$13.333 (AUD$2,421) for a 15-jar gift set.