Over the years, one of the biggest trends we've seen in water bottle design is the collapsible bottle that compacts down to pocket size when empty. It's appeared in rollable Vapur bottles, crushable Hydrapak bottles and scrunchable Bübi bottles. The Hydaway offers a slightly different take on the trend, its silicone body compacting like an accordion into a flat, pocketable disc.
When Hydrapak designed the Stash bottle, it eliminated the bulbous base and pop-up top seen on its SoftFlask to create a smaller, flusher collapsed form. The bottle still has a protruding cap that keeps it at 2 in (5 cm) thick when packaged up, however. With its soft-sided, accordion-like folding action and flat cap, the Hydaway bottle manages to compact just a tad thinner, measuring 1.25 in (3.2 cm). On the downside, it is larger in diameter at 4.25 in (10.8 cm) compared to the Stash's 3.5 in (8.9 cm).
The Hydaway bottle has a food-grade silicone body and BPA-free plastic cap and base. It's billed as taste- and odor-free. The screw-on cap includes a pop-up drinking valve and watertight sealing.
While the Hydaway's collapsed form looks smooth enough, its full-sized bottle form looks awkward. It essentially looks like they glued together large and small collapsible camping cups – like the Sea To Summit X-Cup – onto a central ring. Unlike the accordion camping cup, which expands into a familiar cup shape, Hydaway's dual-cup tumbler makes for a rather strange form that doesn't look particularly ergonomic for drinking or carrying. It's hard to say for sure without trying it, but nothing about the design looks like something we want to hold for hours on a day hike.
It would appear we're moving against the mob on this one. The Hydaway has more than tripled its Kickstarter funding goal, raising just over US$70,000, with a few weeks still left on the campaign clock.
The early bird specials have gone, but the bottle is still available for the estimated-retail-price pledge level of $20 and you can select between 12- and 21-oz (350- and 600-ml) sizes. Both bottles share the same 4.25 x 1.25-in collapsed dimensions, but the large bottle measures 6 in (15.2 cm) when expanded and weighs 5.5 oz (160 g), while the small bottle measures 4 in (10.2 cm) and weighs 4 oz (110 g). Deliveries will begin in August if everything continues along smoothly.
Source: Hydaway Bottle
