Haws Corporation

In 1906, a master plumber and city sanitation inspector named Luther Haws was on his rounds at a Berkeley public school when he noticed the children drinking from a single shared tin cup. He went home, drew up the idea, and patented the drinking fountain — a sanitary fixture that would replace the cup with running water and that almost every reader of this page has used hundreds of times without remembering. The Haws Sanitary Drinking Faucet Company was incorporated in Berkeley in 1909, and is still in business: now headquartered in a 210,000-square-foot facility in Sparks, Nevada, into which it moved in 1996, and still owned by the Haws family — across the third, fourth, and fifth generations.

The firm designs and manufactures the fixtures that quietly underwrite American hydration and emergency safety: drinking fountains, bottle-filler stations, and the related plumbing products in the hydration line; emergency drench showers, eyewash stations, and decontamination shower assemblies in the safety line, which the firm added to its catalogue in the 1950s. Products are sold globally through roughly eight thousand distribution locations and are specified into schools, transit terminals, parks, hospitals, laboratories, refineries, and the long list of public and industrial environments that need a clean source of water at hand or an emergency means of getting a chemical out of an eye.

What distinguishes Haws Corporation in its sector is the combination of patent-original heritage, family continuity, and category dominance. Few American manufacturers can claim to have invented the product they sell; fewer still have remained family-owned through five generations of ownership; and the drinking fountain is a category for which Haws is, in many specifications, the default supplier. The 1996 move from Berkeley to Sparks consolidated production, engineering, and distribution into the single Nevada facility from which the firm now operates.

The practice has worked with Haws Corporation at the Sparks manufacturing facility on Lean process implementation across operations.