Hydro Flask

“They changed the quality. They changed the price. They've changed some of the manufacturing techniques. I don't even really drink out of the bottles anymore.”

“And then when the investor bought out my partner, Cindy, right? Yeah. It put him to 51%. I was at 49 and he brought in the corporate playbook and said, here's what we're going to do. And this is what it's going to look like. And I took a look at it and I said,…”

“I call everybody into the office to tell him that we're closing down and the phone rings and the lady at the front desk says, there's this guy here who wants to see you. And he says, Travis, I'm here to talk to you. And I said, I'm sorry, I'm not hiring and I'…”

“Well, so after she left and I started hiring new employees, that second, 40,000 bottles came in and we ran out of money. We had about 10 employees at that point and had no more money in the bank on a Wednesday night, I remember. And so I write this letter that…”

“Unfortunately, what happened was he said that we were not going to be able to get into REI within a year, and I knew that we probably could, and he was adamant that he wasn't even going to try, and so we had to let him go and replace him with a larger firm, bu…”

“I called the list and finally I found a local banker who was a big Hydro Flask fan and he really believed in it. And he said, all right, yeah, I'll lend you the 250 to get the second 40,000.”

“My grandparents took out a second mortgage on their house and we borrowed and sold everything that we could just to keep buying more bottles.”

“Yeah, I think Clean Canteen was the first, and when I found out that they were doing vacuum insulation, I thought, oh man, it's over, you know, we're out of business, because they're selling the single wall so well, I'm sure they're going to sell the double wa…”

“What we did was we design patented the design, the shapes, and the sizes of the bottles, and made sure that it was on the packaging front and center patent pending or patented. And what I found was that a lot of people who Maybe would have been competitors saw…”

“We had about six colors. And he says, fine, I'll take a case of each. And so once we got the whole foods order, just for that one binned location, I basically used that all across town.”

“I said, I'll give you a 24. And then you tell me how you did with the 24. And he sold 22 of the 24 doors and opened them up.”

“Yeah, yeah, about five, 25, five-fifty, yes.”

“So we're selling anywhere from 20 to 50 bottles a day at that point for the two days.”

“We had an 18 ounce that was 1999, and we had a 21 ounce that was 2499.”

“Sold everything we had. We sold all of our clothes and furniture, and that's-”

“It was about 10,000.”

“We got two. There was a red one and a blue one, 18 and 21 ounces. And went down to Waikiki Beach and put ice cubes in it and started just handing them to people. And they would get out of the water from surfing and they would see the ice and they'd say, wow, y…”

“I drew it all out, and I'm kind of embarrassed to say, but about five years ago, somebody pointed out that I'd basically just drawn a scuba tank, and It was the first ones just look like a scuba tank.”

“My brother came up with the name hydro flask and I hated it. I thought it was a terrible idea. I didn't like the word flask, but we had to have something printed on the bottles. So we went with it”

“So finally on the very second to last day, we find a factory that had a vacuum and it wasn't very big. It was kind of the size of a motorcycle, which isn't huge for the vacuum world. And they were doing these little vacuum insulated Japanese milk bottles.”

“So I sold a surfboard, I sold a moped, and I took off to Shanghai in May of 2007”