San Juan Capistrano-based Seychelle Environmental Technologies Inc. posted $5 million in sales of its water filtration products for the 12 months through June, nearly quadruple its revenue compared with two years earlier.
The jump put Seychelle in the No. 1 spot on the Business Journal’s list of fastest-growing public companies based here.
“We’re moving very aggressively and people are finding us,” Executive Vice President Dick Parsons said.
Seychelle employs about 30 people here, an increase from 19 a year earlier.
The company sells water filters and pumps to treat water from various sources. It also offers portable products such as water bottles, canteens and straws with built-in filters.
All of its filters are proprietary, and designed to remove chlorine, chemicals, heavy metals and other contaminants and pollutants often found in water.
They are approved for use by the U.S. General Services Administration for government and military purchasing, as well as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
“Units of special forces, the Navy SEALs, the British commandos use our products around the world,” Parsons said. “They don’t always have municipal water. You can drink out of river streams, lakes, even contaminated water” with Seychelle’s products.
· Headquarters: San Juan Capistrano
· Business: water filters, bottles, other portable products
· Founded: 1998
· Ticker symbol: SYEV (Pink Sheets)
· Market value: about $6.7 million
· Notable: No. 1 on Business Journal’s list of fastest-growing public companies based here
The company also supplies emergency relief organizations.
It’s making inroads in the retail market, too.
The water filtration business used to be a niche market, according to Parsons, and “now it’s moving into a mass market” as an alternative to bottled water.
Seychelle turns out its products at an assembly line at its headquarters in San Juan Capistrano. The technology for its filters is patented.
Products for domestic sale are put to the test by U.S.-approved independent laboratories, Parsons said.
“Based on what the Environmental Protection Agency says, we’ll test for the 95 most dangerous chemicals, insecticides, and so on,” he said.
Seychelle’s products have been tested in 16 other countries and distributed to 28, according to the company.
“In different places they want to test for different things,” Parsons said. “For example, South Africa is more concerned with cholera and salmonella, not so much heavy metals.”
The business began in 1995 under founder Carl Palmer, who set out to sell water bottles and filters to missionaries bound for various locales where water supplies would likely be unsafe for them.
Latest Go-Round
It’s Palmer’s latest go-round in the water business. He founded Aq-RO-Matic, a reverse-osmosis home and office water business, in the 1970s, and later sold it to Atlanta-based Coca-Cola Co.
Seychelle’s latest sales push is for a recently developed radiological filter it’s selling in Japan, where the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster earlier this year has heightened concerns about the safety of drinking water.
The new filter “removes 100% of the major contaminants found in water,” according to Parsons. “25 million people in Japan are drinking potentially contaminated water, and we’re moving in that area.”
Parsons predicted more growth for the company as concerns about water safety grow.
Download the 2011 OC’s FASTEST-GROWING PUBLIC COs list (pdf)
