Case 40 — Hydro Flask · Scott Allan · 2016

You own one fast-growing product in a category anyone can enter. Do you sell to a conglomerate at four times sales, or keep building on your own?

It is early 2016. You run an insulated-bottle company in Bend, Oregon, with 52 employees, owned since 2012 by the investor group that bought out the founders. Sales have grown from about $12 million then to about $54 million last year, on a reputation among hikers and climbers and a growing place in specialty outdoor retail. You make one kind of object, a double-walled steel bottle made in China, and so does everyone from Yeti down to private label. Helen of Troy, a listed consumer-products group from El Paso that owns OXO, offers $210 million in cash, about four times last year's revenue, and promises to keep the company and its people in Bend.

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