Oasis Brand Guidelines: Columbus Water Coolers Since 1910, Now a Culligan Brand

A plumbing-supply maker turns to cold water.

Oasis is a water-cooler brand from Columbus, Ohio, with more than a century behind it. English Wikipedia dates the company to 1910, when it was founded in Columbus as the D.A. Ebinger Sanitary Manufacturing Company, making toilets, sanitary fixtures and plumbing supplies. After changes in what it made, Wikipedia says, it was renamed the Ebco Manufacturing Company in 1935 and moved into new categories: drinking fountains, water coolers, dehumidifiers and refrigeration parts.

The Oasis name came in the 1940s, when, according to Wikipedia, the company began selling these products under it. For decades Ebco remained the company and Oasis the product line, a split that lasted until the company took the product’s name in the 1990s.

The company tells its early history as a series of firsts. Its timeline, published on its European website, says it marketed its first electric refrigerated water cooler in 1911, developed a point-of-use “bubbler” in 1922, placed all of a cooler’s components inside one compact, streamlined case in 1944, marketed its first electric dehumidifier in 1949 and designed its first Hot ’N Cold model in 1954. Elsewhere on the same site it calls the 1911 machine the world’s first electric water cooler. These are the company’s own claims.

Wikipedia records how the business grew in Columbus after the war. By 1950 it employed about 200 people; in 1953 it began a major expansion with a windowless, air-conditioned factory; and after adding dehumidifiers and juice dispensers it had grown, by 1960, into a much larger plant in the city. The company says it has made dehumidifiers ever since, and Wikipedia lists them alongside coolers and fountains as a product category today.

Coolers, fountains and bottle fillers.

Ebco went abroad in the 1990s. In 1992, Wikipedia says, it set up a manufacturing site in Ireland to make and distribute its products for European and Middle Eastern markets, citing the trade paper Building Services News and the Irish Times. In 1996 the company renamed itself Oasis Corporation because of the popularity of its Oasis products, and by the 1990s, Wikipedia says, it held the majority of the market for bottled water coolers in its industry.

More plants followed. The company’s timeline puts the start of production at Gliwice, Poland, in 2001 and at Monterrey, Mexico, in 2003. Oasis also bought a rival, Sunroc Corporation, then the third-largest maker of bottled water coolers according to Wikipedia; Wikipedia dates the purchase to 2003, while the company’s own timeline gives 2004.

The product line kept changing. The company lists a removable reservoir side panel for easier servicing in 1974, its first countertop water cooler in 1985, its first point-of-use systems in 1990 and the WaterGuard system for loading bottles without spills in 1991. Later came the Kalix point-of-use cooler in 2006 and the Onyx countertop range in 2009. Wikipedia names the Kalix coolers and the Aquapointe and Versafiller bottle fillers as popular products, and says the company holds several patents on water cooler and dispenser technology.

In April 2019 The Maritime Executive carried an announcement from AquiSense Technologies of a partnership to build its Quasar UV-C LED treatment platform into Oasis products, including water coolers, fountains, bottle fillers and point-of-use dispensers; an Oasis vice president said then that the platform fitted into the company’s electronic bottle fillers. In 2020, the company says, it introduced foot-switch activation, a contactless version of the Kalix mains-fed cooler and freestanding bottle fillers.

Oasis’s European website sorts the range by setting, from corporate campuses and fitness facilities to schools, healthcare and transport hubs, and offers BIM files, service manuals and technical bulletins for specifiers. The company states that it holds ISO 9001:2015 and ISO 14001:2015 certification.

Water at the point of use.

Water dispenser makers sell into rooms that most people pass through without noticing: the office kitchen, the staff room, the school corridor, the gym lobby and the hotel back-of-house. Their brands have to work for two audiences at once. One is the person who fills a glass or a bottle several times a day; the other is the facilities manager, architect or procurement team who chooses the equipment, signs a rental or service contract and answers for it afterwards.

The product types shape how these companies present themselves. A freestanding or countertop cooler fed from the mains is usually shown as a tidy appliance in a bright workspace, often next to a choice of still, sparkling, hot or chilled water. An under-sink system is a different kind of sell: the boiler, chiller and filter sit out of sight in the cabinet, so the visible part of the brand is a slim tap on the bench, and the photographs tend to concentrate on its finish and profile.

Bottle-filling stations and drinking fountains bring the category into schools, universities, gyms and public spaces, where the language turns to refills, durability and easy cleaning. Here the brand appears on a sturdy wall unit rather than a kitchen fitting, and the messaging is aimed as much at the people who maintain it as at the people who use it.

Much of the selling still happens in person, at facility-management, building and hospitality trade fairs, in showrooms and through dealer and distributor networks. Many of the names in this field have also changed hands through mergers and acquisitions, so a brand’s history often runs through several owners, and its identity has to stay recognisable across catalogues, service vans and installer manuals in many countries.

Patriarch, then Culligan.

Oasis Corporation did not stay independent. On 1 September 2005, Wastewater Digest published an announcement from Patriarch Partners that its funds had acquired certain assets of Oasis Corporation, including its operating subsidiaries in Mexico, Ireland and Poland. The business would operate as Tri Palm International but keep selling under the OASIS brand, and leases had been agreed so that the Columbus factory could keep running. The new chief executive named low-priced imports from China and retail competition as the pressures the company faced. Wikipedia says the business was later renamed OASIS International.

The next owner was Culligan. Wikipedia lists Culligan as the parent company, citing The Wall Street Journal in August 2019. In August 2022 the UK Competition and Markets Authority, in its decision on Culligan’s planned purchase of Waterlogic, described Culligan as making bottle-free coolers through its Oasis and Blupura brands, and said Culligan produced them for UK customers in Poland, Mexico and Italy. The European Oasis website names the owner of the OASIS trademark as LVD Acquisition, LLC, trading as Oasis International.

Wikipedia gives the head office as Columbus, Ohio, with production facilities in Mexico and Poland, a European headquarters in Ireland and an office in Shenzhen, China. The company says it sells to more than 80 countries from manufacturing sites in Europe and North America. A different organisation, a Bible-publishing ministry working in Africa, also calls itself Oasis International and has no connection with the cooler maker.

For a design guide, Oasis shows how a product name can outlast the company name it was sold under, from Ebco to Oasis Corporation to a brand within a larger water group. Compare Culligan, its current parent, and Elkay, the Chicago sink maker named after its founders. For this guide we use a Columbus navy, a fountain steel grey, a cool aqua and an enamel white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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