Local 6-Year-Old Wins Liberty Bottleworks ‘Back to School’ Art Contest

Yakima 6-year-old Klay Koler will be seeing his handiwork come off the factory line, as Liberty Bottleworks puts the winning design for the Back to School Art contest into production today.

Koler's design beat out more than 40 other submissions from kids ages 5-13 from around the country, and bested four other finalists in the last round of voting. Seven dollars from each bottle sold with Koler's design will be donated to the art program at Children's Village, which is dedicated to serving children with special needs.

Koler and other students from the school took a field trip to the Liberty factory last month, where they designed entries for the Back to School contest, had lunch and received bottles of their own to take home.

"This contest garnered a lot of attention online bringing in dozens of entries. With every new entry the excitement level at Liberty went up," said Liberty Co-founder Ryan Clark. "We were floored by the fun, simple approach Klay's design offered and we knew it had a place in the finals. From there it was up to our online community. All the entries were great and the five finalists were the best of the best, we are honored to work with Klay as the winner as his story is great and his school does such good work."

The winning design received more than 550 votes on Facebook.

The design is being printed on Liberty's new 16 oz. kids bottles using a one-of-a-kind cylindrical digital printer to transfer the artwork onto Made-in-the-USA bottles. The back to school bottles will be sold on www.libertybottles.com and through participating retailers. The 16oz. kids bottles retail for $18