Most people hear “design award” and picture furniture, cars, or consumer electronics — the usual suspects. A dog water bottle doesn’t immediately come to mind. That’s part of why we entered one.
Otto won at the 19th International Design Awards, and the honest reaction from people who heard about it was usually some version of: “Wait — a pet product?” That reaction is exactly why the award matters, and why it’s worth explaining what a competition like this actually evaluates.
What the IDA actually judges
The International Design Awards aren’t a popularity contest or a shelf-display competition. The jury panel looks at a product across several dimensions at once: the quality of the design thinking, how well form follows function, the material choices, the manufacturing approach, and whether the product solves a real problem or just looks like it does.
That last part is the filter that matters most. Plenty of objects look beautiful and work terribly. Plenty of others work fine and look like nobody cared. The IDA is specifically looking for the overlap — objects where the aesthetic is a direct expression of how the thing works, not a coat of paint over something generic.
What we submitted
Otto entered as a consumer product. The submission included a walkthrough of the mechanical design and the reasoning behind each decision — why the cap rotates instead of detaching, why magnets instead of threads, why a squeezable body instead of a rigid one.
The decisions the jury saw
Every feature on Otto exists because something else failed first — either in our own prototyping or in the products that were already on the market. The jury looked at each one not just as a feature but as a design decision with a specific rationale.
The rotating bowl. On every other dog water bottle, the surface the dog drinks from sits on the outside of the bottle when it’s closed. That means every time you pack it away, that surface — wet, used — goes straight into your bag. Otto’s cap rotates on a custom hinge so that the bowl folds inward when closed, protected inside the bottle. It stays clean. No separate piece to lose, and no mess transferred to your bag.
The magnetic seal. Screwing a cap shut sounds trivial until you’re doing it one-handed with a dog pulling at the leash. The magnetic closure on Otto removes that friction entirely: push the cap down, it snaps shut, and you move on. No threading. No wondering whether it’s actually sealed. The click tells you.
The soft silicone body. Rather than relying on gravity to dispense water, Otto’s squeezable body gives the handler direct control over flow — less waste, more precision. When empty, it compresses for storage. The material choice serves two functions with a single decision.
The carabiner handle. The handle clips to bags, belts, and leashes, but also lets the bottle stand upright on its own. It doubles as a brake mechanism — another utility patent — controlling how the bottle sits and stays put.
These aren’t features stacked on top of each other. They’re a connected system where each part informs the next. That’s the design thinking the IDA was evaluating, and it’s the reason a product in a category not known for design attention stood out.
Why it matters for a dog water bottle
Design competitions tend to gravitate toward categories where people already expect good design — electronics, furniture, architecture. Pet products are rarely in the conversation, partly because the industry has historically optimized for price rather than experience.
That’s changing. Dog owners — particularly the ones who carry their dogs’ gear alongside their own every day — have started expecting the same thoughtfulness from pet products that they get from everything else in their lives. A water bottle you use on every walk should be as well-designed as the bag you carry it in.
Otto winning an IDA award doesn’t prove that point by itself. But it’s evidence that a jury of professional designers, looking at the product purely on its mechanical and aesthetic merits, reached the same conclusion: this category deserves more care than it usually gets.
The patents behind the award
Otto is protected by one aesthetic patent and three utility patents. The aesthetic patent covers the overall visual and ergonomic form. The utility patents protect the specific innovations: the rotative cover and integrated bowl, the flip cap’s hinge structure, and the handle’s brake mechanism.
Patents and awards serve different purposes, but they share a common requirement: the work has to be genuinely novel. You can’t patent an obvious solution, and you can’t win a design award with a predictable one. The fact that Otto holds both is a reflection of how much of the product’s simplicity is the result of solving problems nobody else in the category bothered to solve.
For a closer look at the mechanical decisions behind the flip cap and magnetic seal, the engineering article walks through each one in detail.
What we took from the process
Entering a design competition forces a kind of clarity that normal product development doesn’t always demand. You have to explain every decision to people who have no stake in your product’s success, no familiarity with your category, and no patience for marketing language. If the reasoning doesn’t hold up under that scrutiny, it doesn’t matter how nice the renders look.
Going through the IDA process confirmed something we’d believed but hadn’t tested against outside judgment: that the decisions we made — fewer parts, integrated function, honest materials — hold up when evaluated on design merit alone, not just as a marketing story.
That’s the version of “award-winning” we’re comfortable standing behind. Not a badge for the packaging, but a confirmation that the thinking behind the product is sound.
Otto is currently in the final stages before launch. If you’d like to be among the first to get one, join the waitlist — early members get a launch-day discount.
