A resort, its springs and the landmark above them.

Arrowhead takes its name from a shape on a hillside. Above Arrowhead Springs, on the edge of San Bernardino in Southern California, a large pale mark in the shape of an arrowhead lies on the slope of the San Bernardino Mountains. The feature, known simply as The Arrowhead, is California Historical Landmark No. 977, and English Wikipedia notes that Lake Arrowhead, its reservoir and Arrowhead Water all take their names from it. How it formed is debated: in a 2007 paper in The California Geographer, the CSU San Bernardino geographer Norman Meek noted that the first direct record of it is an 1864 photograph and argued that it may have been made or shaped by people as an advertisement for the hot-springs resort below.

That resort gave the water its start. Hot springs at the foot of the mountain drew a series of hotels from the 1860s, and nearby cold springs on Strawberry Creek, in what is now the San Bernardino National Forest, became the original source of Arrowhead water, The Desert Sun reported in 2015.

The brand’s starting date depends on the source. English Wikipedia’s article on the water gives 1894 as the year the brand was introduced, the same year it gives for Puritas, a Los Angeles water the company later merged with, and dates the formation of the Arrowhead Springs Company to 1909. Its article on the Arrowhead Springs Hotel instead says the company was founded in 1905, when a new hotel was built. Both agree on what came next: the water was carried from the springs to Los Angeles in glass-lined railroad tank cars, and in 1917 bottling moved to a new plant in the city.

An arrowhead, a name shared with Puritas and a mountain slogan.

The emblem is the landmark itself. The brand’s name comes from the mark on the slope, which English Wikipedia describes as presiding over San Bernardino and the valley below.

For decades the name shared space with another. English Wikipedia says the Arrowhead Springs Company merged in 1929 with the company that marketed Puritas water, and that the two brands were bottled in the same plants and sold together until the 1970s, sometimes on containers labelled “Arrowhead and Puritas.” The Arrowhead business also bottled seltzer, fruit-flavoured sodas and ginger ale for other brands.

The brand has been tied to Los Angeles events. English Wikipedia says Arrowhead was named the official water of the 1932 Olympic Games in Los Angeles and returned to the Games when the city hosted them again in 1984, and that in 1993 the brand bought the naming rights to the new arena in Anaheim, which opened as the Arrowhead Pond.

Its words have stayed close to the mountain theme. English Wikipedia records “It’s Better Up Here!” as a trademarked tagline for the brand, and notes a 24-ounce bottle introduced in 1996, flavoured waters by the early 2000s and the Aquapod bottle in 2006, shared with sister brands such as Deer Park. The brand is sold across the western United States, and English Wikipedia, citing the brand’s site, says it is bottled from 13 springs in the region.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all water names: vitaminwater, Liquid I.V., Core, Crystal Geyser, Deer Park, Arrowhead and Harrogate. Water brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family companies that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger food and drinks groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a restaurant table.

A water brand’s identity is usually carried less by what is in the bottle than by a label, a name and the place or idea it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its products are actually made and bottled.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From Beatrice to Perrier, Nestlé, BlueTriton and Primo Brands.

Arrowhead joined the European water houses in 1987. The New York Times reported in 1988 that the American arm of Perrier had bought Arrowhead from Beatrice Foods in 1987, a deal that made it the largest bottled water producer in the United States. Nestlé took over Perrier in 1992, and the American business, renamed Nestlé Waters North America in 2002, ran Arrowhead in the West alongside regional spring waters such as Deer Park in the Mid-Atlantic and Poland Spring in Maine.

In April 2021 Nestlé completed the sale of that business to One Rock Capital Partners and Metropoulos & Co., which renamed it BlueTriton Brands, based in Stamford, Connecticut. On 8 November 2024 BlueTriton completed its merger with Primo Water to form Primo Brands Corporation, according to the company’s release, and Arrowhead is now one of that group’s brands.

The original source has become a long-running dispute over permits and water rights. The Desert Sun reported in March 2015 that the bottler’s permit to pipe water from the national forest had expired in 1988; California’s State Water Resources Control Board ordered the company in September 2023 to stop drawing from most of the springs, the Associated Press reported, and in July 2024 the U.S. Forest Service denied its permit for Strawberry Canyon, a decision BlueTriton said had no legal merit and challenged in federal court, Just Drinks reported.

The name needs care online. Arrowhead is also the name of Lake Arrowhead and of many unrelated businesses; the water brand’s site is arrowheadwater.com.

For a design guide, Arrowhead shows how a brand can borrow its whole identity from a single landmark, a shape on a mountainside that names a lake, a town and a water. Compare Deer Park, its sister brand born at a Maryland railroad hotel, and Crystal Geyser, another Californian spring water. For this guide we use canyon ochre, mountain blue and chaparral sand with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Arrowhead’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.