Zip Water Brand Guidelines: The Sydney Heater Maker Behind the HydroTap

A Sydney heater maker from 1947.

Zip Water traces itself to Sydney in 1947. The company says it started out making kitchen and bathroom heaters, and English Wikipedia’s biography of the businessman Michael Crouch describes Zip Heaters as a small Australian company formed in 1947 to market kitchen and bathroom water heaters. The news agency AAP, in a report carried by SBS News on 3 July 2017, said Zip had been making drinking water systems at Condell Park, in Sydney’s western suburbs, since 1947.

The turning point came in 1962, when Crouch bought the business. Both the company’s own history and the Wikipedia biography date the purchase to that year, and both describe Zip as a small maker of heaters at the time. Under Crouch the range moved from household heaters towards boiling water for places outside the home: the company says that during the 1960s it made over-sink boiling water heaters for canteens, restaurants, factories and office kitchens.

Exports came next. According to the Wikipedia biography, Crouch appointed Zip distributors in Singapore, Taiwan, the Philippines and Thailand from 1982, engaged a distributor for Great Britain in 1987, formed a wholly owned subsidiary to handle UK distribution in 1991 and set up a subsidiary for New Zealand in 1996; a distributor for Europe followed in 2002. The same article says Crouch remained chief executive of Zip until December 2013.

The consumer brand is Zip Water, but the company name has also appeared as Zip Industries: AAP used it in 2017, and Good Design Australia’s record of the brand’s 2015 award names Zip Industries as both designer and client.

From the Tea Tap to the HydroTap.

Zip’s products have always been about water on demand. The company says it installed a boiling water tap fed from an under-sink pressurised cylinder in 1970, and that it went on to make on-wall instant boiling water heaters and a smaller wall model called the Miniboil; its own pages date those wall units to 1975 in one place and 1980 in another. The Zip Tea Tap, which the company dates to 1985, was an under-sink system that it says delivered water within one degree of boiling at the touch of a button, and Zip says it was fitted in the kitchens and Members’ offices of Parliament House in Canberra.

The product that now carries the brand is the Zip HydroTap. Zip says it introduced an air-cooled, under-bench filtered system in 1996 and in 2012 launched the HydroTap All-In-One, which it describes as giving filtered boiling, chilled and sparkling water, plus ordinary hot and cold, from a single outlet. In 2017 AAP described the company’s instant boiling and cold water taps, “such as the Zip HydroTap,” as a familiar sight in office kitchens and some homes, and said they were installed in 76 countries.

Other ranges followed, by the company’s account: the HydroChill range in 2018, which it pitched at businesses moving away from bottled water; a contactless model, the Touch-Free Wave, in 2020; and the G5 generation from 2021, updated in 2024 with a refrigeration system using R290 refrigerant gas.

Design has been part of the pitch. Good Design Australia records the Zip HydroTap Arc and Cube design range in its 2015 Good Design Awards, in the domestic appliances category, designed in Australia by Zip Industries; the company says that range also included an Elite style and new platinum finishes. In 2023 the same awards record the Arc Plus and Cube Plus, a redesign credited to the consultancy Design + Industry with Zip Water. The award entry says the changes answered complaints about spluttering, uneven flow and the level of fizz from the sparkling outlet. Zip says it has also won a Gold accolade for the Zip Micro, a compact under-bench unit.

Water on tap.

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.

An Australian name with a US owner.

By 2017 Zip was owned by the investment firm Quadrant Private Equity, which sold it that year. AAP reported on 3 July 2017 that the Sydney-based company had been taken over by Culligan International, the US water treatment group, for an undisclosed sum, after a planned listing on the Australian share market was dropped that May. AAP said Zip employed about 700 people and that Culligan would keep Zip’s manufacturing in Sydney.

Zip’s own site now says that Culligan International acquired Zip Water in 2017, and its footer describes the brand as part of the Culligan International Group. The company runs country websites for Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, China, South Africa and the United Arab Emirates. It calls itself a market leader in drinking water solutions and the HydroTap its flagship product; those are its own words. Within Culligan it sits alongside other workplace-water businesses, including Quench in North America.

For a design guide, Zip Water shows how an appliance maker can treat the tap above the sink as the face of the brand, with the machinery hidden under the bench and the visible spout entered for design awards. Compare Culligan, its owner since 2017, and Billi, which sells boiling, chilled and sparkling water taps in Australia. For this guide we use a deep navy, a water blue and a brushed silver with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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