To the Design Engineers at Thermos

I know I'm a geek, but I just wrote this note to the design engineers at Thermos:

It's not often that a product as routine as a water bottle gets me motivated enough to write a letter to the company about it.  Your intak bottle, however, is worth the trouble.   

My wife picked four of these up for our family a few weeks ago.  We go through water bottles like we go through, well, water.  Most of them do the job, though occasionally you wonder how anyone could be shameless enough to create such a lousy product.   

But when I saw the intak bottle, I was immediately struck with the quality and ingenuity of the design.   Click, it's open, with the lid back out of the way--where it stays until you shut it.  Snap, it's closed tight.  Flip the latch, no fears of leaks.  It's easy to clean (which, as Chief Bottle Washer, is a must-have feature), easy to carry and hold, and--oh, yeah--it has just the right sized opening for drinking--without spills and without having to suck and slurp and make a bunch of noise.   

In a word, this bottle is brilliant.   

I'm not an engineer, but have always appreciated the simple elegance of a good design where it is evident that the designers actually dug into the lives of the people they were designing for.   Keep doing what you're doing and I'll keep telling everybody I know about how great these bottles are.