Pelican Water Brand Guidelines: A DeLand Salt-Free Softener Brand Folded Into Pentair

Three founders and a business in DeLand, Florida.

Pelican Water Systems was a home water-treatment brand based in DeLand, Florida. The company behind it was Enviro Water Solutions LLC, which traded as Pelican Water Systems, according to a press release issued on 5 June 2013 by the private-equity firm Trivest Partners. The same release names the founders as Ronald Stanley, Richard Stanley and Chad Galloway, and describes the business as a designer and marketer of a complete line of branded water purification products for the residential market.

The sources give two founding years. Trivest’s 2013 release says the company was founded in 2004. Pentair’s announcement of its purchase in 2019, as carried by WaterWorld, says it was founded in 2007, and a December 2022 post by the water-treatment retailer US Water Systems also gives 2007. We record both years rather than choose between them.

What set Pelican apart in the 2013 description was how it sold. Trivest said that nearly all of Pelican’s sales were direct to consumers, driven by online lead generation and by the company’s website, rather than through a network of local dealers. Trivest also said Pelican’s products combined a high-quality design and an attractive appearance with technology certified by various industry organisations; those are Trivest’s words, written at the time of its investment.

Under the 2013 deal Pelican became the 13th platform investment of Trivest Fund IV, a fund the firm said was dedicated to founder- and family-owned businesses. In the release, Ron Stanley said the founders had planned to run a broad sale process but decided after a first meeting that Trivest was the right partner. Woodbridge International advised Pelican on the transaction, and Akerman Senterfitt acted as legal counsel to Trivest.

Salt-free softening, sold direct.

Pelican’s signature range was NaturSoft, a line of salt-free water softeners. Trivest’s 2013 release listed it first among the company’s products, followed by whole-house water filters and iron removal systems. The release set out the case the company made for salt-free systems as an alternative to salt-based softeners: no salt to replenish, no backwashing and no brine discharge. It added that several jurisdictions in the United States had begun to restrict salt-based systems, which Trivest presented as a reason for the market it saw.

Model names show how the range was organised. The retailer US Water Systems, which stocks parts for owners of older systems, lists the PC600 and PC1000 whole-house carbon filters, the NaturSoft NS3 salt-free conditioner and the PUV ultraviolet systems among the Pelican equipment it supports, alongside combined salt-free and salt-based packages and iron and manganese systems.

By the time of its sale in 2019, Pelican had broadened the ways it reached buyers. Lincoln International, the investment bank that advised Trivest and Pelican on the sale, described the company that year as a vertically integrated direct-to-consumer platform offering proprietary point-of-entry and point-of-use water treatment systems, sold through direct-to-consumer, wholesale and online retail channels. Lincoln said Pelican had introduced what it called an “In-Home DTC” channel, a direct sale made in the customer’s home. NS Energy reported on 13 February 2019 that the company employed 79 people.

Pentair’s current page for the brand still carries the Pelican Water Systems name, with replacement filters, warranty information and a contact route for owners of older systems.

How water companies present themselves.

Water softener and filtration companies sell equipment that most customers rarely look at. A softener usually sits in a cellar, a garage or a utility room beside the boiler, and a filter cartridge hides under the sink or on the incoming pipe. So the brands in this guide put a lot of effort into the pictures around the product: a resin tank and a brine cabinet shown clean in a bright room, a cartridge photographed alone on a white background, and, again and again, a clear glass of water.

Much of the trade is sold through installers and dealers rather than over a shop counter. In North America many companies work through networks of local dealers, whose liveried vans carry the brand name from house to house; in Germany and its neighbours, plumbers and heating engineers specify and fit the equipment, and the makers run training centres and seminars for them. That makes the installer as much the audience for a brand as the household that pays for the system.

Trade fairs play a similar role. The Water Quality Association’s annual convention brings the North American residential and commercial water-treatment trade together, and ISH in Frankfurt, the trade fair for heating, sanitation and building services, is where many European makers show new softeners, filters and controls to installers and wholesalers.

The companies themselves range from family firms and foundation-owned businesses to units of large industrial groups, and several have changed hands more than once. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it now and where its equipment is made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Into Pentair, then into Pentair Water Solutions.

Pelican did not stay independent. Pentair, the water-treatment group, completed its acquisition of Pelican Water Systems in February 2019; NS Energy reported the completion on 13 February 2019, and Lincoln International confirmed that Trivest had sold the business to Pentair. Pentair’s chief executive, John Stauch, said at the time that Pelican added new and complementary products and services to Pentair’s residential portfolio and brought growth opportunities through its multi-channel approach. NS Energy also reported that Pentair had agreed in January 2019 to buy Aquion, a maker of water conditioners and filters for homes and businesses.

The Pelican name has since been retired as a standalone brand. Pentair’s brand page for Pelican Water Systems now says that Pelican “was a trusted name” and that the brand has evolved into Pentair Water Solutions; it offers help to owners of legacy Pelican systems and directs other buyers to local Pentair Water Solutions experts. In November 2026 the old pelicanwater.com address redirected to Pentair’s water softening and filtration pages. In its December 2022 post, US Water Systems wrote that the Pelican brand had been discontinued for years and that Pentair no longer sold the original Pelican products, which is why the retailer began stocking parts for those systems.

That makes Pelican a brand with a clear beginning and end: founded in DeLand in the mid-2000s, built by three founders on online direct sales, grown under private-equity ownership from 2013, sold to Pentair in 2019 and folded into a parent’s house brand. Its history sits within the wider American home water-treatment trade, alongside names such as Culligan.

For a design guide, Pelican Water shows a water brand built around a name, a website and a single signature range rather than a dealer network, and how such a name is absorbed after a sale. Compare Culligan, the water-treatment brand begun in Northbrook, Illinois, in 1936, and Aquasana, another home water filter brand. For this guide we use a Gulf blue, deep navy, shore teal and dune sand with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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