In 2015, young Port Townsend resident Cash Walcome was featured in his hometown newspaper because of his clever invention designed to prevent faucet leaks both inside and outside the home. Eight years later, that invention, the Aquor House Hydrant, is just days away from being on shelves at The Home Depot at stores throughout Washington State.

National placement in big box stores could be just around the corner.
Aquor Water Systems, the company Walcome founded with two of his college buddies, Kamil Slusarski and Shawn Tramble, isn’t just getting noticed by The Home Depot.

Inc. 5000, which ranks American companies by overall revenue growth over a three-year period, recently ranked the plumbing manufacturing startup at number 1535 nationally and at number 19 in Seattle.

“The team is really excited about it,” Walcome, a 2010 graduate of Port Townsend High School, said of the listings.

“We were surprised. We didn’t expect to be ranked that high. The road for the future seems pretty cool.”

Walcome, Slusarski, and Tramble were Phi Kappa Sigma fraternity brothers at the University of Washington when they founded Aquor Water Systems. Walcome was a junior studying sales and political economics at the time.

Walcome’s inspiration for the House Hydrant came from a similar product his father, Richard Walcome, created and patented to replace spigots on boat decks.

The younger Walcome enlisted help from an engineer and a family owned and operated factory in China to modify the original design for home use for those who don’t want to replace an existing faucet or who simply want to make using a garden spigot easier.

Walcome said the House Hydrant is scheduled for shelf placement at The Home Depot the second week of September.

The first time Walcome was interviewed by The Leader, his fledgling business was home-based. Today, he and his business partners work out of a small office in Bellevue with the company’s 14 other employees. He said the growing company will transition to a bigger office space next year.

The House Hydrant lies flush with a home or building’s exterior wall, not only preventing costly and wasteful leaks but also avoiding frozen pipes and the inconvenience of threading a garden hose.

Walcome called the traditional hose-threading spigot “outdated” and said that the Aquor House Hydrant is “easy to use,” taking just seconds to connect.

The entrepreneur stated that when the House Hydrant is used outdoors, no foam cover is needed to prevent pipes from freezing.

“Our system is seven times more freeze resistant,” he said. “So, you don't have to do any kind of foam cover or anything like that. You can just close the cover and it will be winterized and good to go.”

The company sells other types of hydrants as well, including the Ground Hydrant, Marine Deckwash, RV City Water Inlet, and the Universal Hydrant. Photos of Aquor Water Systems’ products can be found at aquorwatersystems.com along with pricing and details about how the products work.

Walcome indicated that partnering with The Home Depot was always a dream of the business partners, but he said that convincing the corporate giant to embrace the House Hydrant was “a really long process.”

“It took a lot of persistence, proving ourselves, especially early on and getting a lot of traction,” he stated.

“If they want to onboard you, they vet you by putting you on their online business first, so you show up on Home Depot online. They want to see some sales going on online. So, for a year we had to put a lot of effort into the e-commerce side of Home Depot to gain traction to show that people will buy the products.”

The House Hydrant is indeed offered at homedepot.com. It sells for $84.95.
The next step is to see how the product sells in stores that are in the company’s market, "so that you can have boots on the ground to make sure that you can get a successful launch,” Walcome explained about the corporate giant’s philosophy.
“In September, we'll have people from our team going to all the stores in Washington State to train the employees, meet with the store managers, do little demo days to people coming in, kind of like a Costco pop-up type of thing,” he said.
“And we'll kind of start there, gain some traction and hopefully build that up to launching into more stores.”

Walcome said his team spent a considerable amount of time and effort revamping the House Hydrant’s packaging.

“That was quite a project, because previously our core business was selling direct to customers through our website or through Amazon,” he said.

“So, our packaging wasn’t very retail, brick-and-mortar friendly.”

The Aquor team is excited as they prepare to make site visits to The Home Depot stores scattered throughout Washington, but Walcome noted that a lot of work will be involved.

“We know that there's a ton of opportunity out there for us,” he said.

“So, we're really kind of pushing ahead to make sure this Home Depot launch goes really well in Washington because ultimately we would like to be nationwide. That's kind of the core mission that the team is rallying behind right now. You know, do a really good job here in Washington, be a really great partner for Home Depot, and then build off of that to try and go national in the next couple of years.”