Michael Sorensen

Sorensen is not a founder; his parents are. He joined Trove as a marketing assistant while studying at Brigham Young University and spent about a decade working up to vice president of marketing, which means he ran marketing through the years Owala went from relaunch to the top of the American bottle market. By April 2024 he was Trove's chief executive. He is the public voice of the brand and, on the evidence of his interviews, an unusually candid one.

The marketing he oversaw is the sneaker playbook applied to a bottle. Pandemic-era giveaways from 2021 sent free bottles to the first 5,000 buyers through checkout. Limited Color Drops, announced to the minute and excluded from every discount, began to sell out in under an hour, with backorders that ship ten to twelve weeks later. Collaborations with Disney, NASA, Joanna Gaines and the San Diego Zoo extended the calendar with other people's intellectual property, and an Urban Outfitters exclusive resold for over $100. The fans did the rest: a subreddit of more than 22,000 members is run by a volunteer moderator who describes the strategy, approvingly, as creating FOMO.

What makes him worth studying is that he says the uncomfortable part himself. He told Fortune that avoiding becoming just another trend is the number one internal topic at the company, and that Owala is "not going to try to just be them again", meaning the brands already in the market. He also admits that "there's always an element of luck", and credits part of the early growth to the pandemic. The open question is whether the range he is now building, a tumbler with a handle and the SmoothSip Slider, turns a hit lid into a durable brand, or simply divides the same customer across more objects. The company discloses no figures, so that question cannot yet be answered from outside.