Steve Sorensen

Sorensen is an inventor first. With his wife Kim he started the company that became Trove Brands in their Utah living room, close to 25 years before Fortune profiled it in 2025, around a protein-shake mixer with a wire whisk ball inside. He invented the ball, and BlenderBottle became the business that paid for everything after it. In Owala's own account he is also the inventor of the FreeSip, and the origin story he tells is one of observation rather than vision: the company noticed that many people were using their BlenderBottle shakers as everyday water bottles, and asked why it did not make a dedicated one.

The research that followed produced the line that explains the product. "You have the straw people, and you have the spout people," Sorensen said, and every bottle on the market forced a buyer to pick one. The FreeSip lid serves both: sip upright through a hidden straw, or tilt and swig from a wider opening. It sounds trivial, and it is the kind of small functional improvement that gives a latecomer a reason to exist in a market other brands have already divided.

The contested part is the first launch, and it is a useful failure. The bottle was first sold under the BlenderBottle name and largely flopped; buyers did not understand why a shaker brand's bottle was meant for drinking water. It was pulled, refined, and relaunched in March 2020 as Owala. The record does not say precisely who made the call to separate the brands, and I have not attributed it to him alone. What is clear is that the product was right and the name was wrong, and that the family was willing to pay for that lesson rather than push a good design through a brand that could not carry it. Owala's October 2023 press release still named him chief executive of Trove; by April 2024 his son Michael held that title.