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The Founder's Notes

Founder index · Hydro Flask · 2009–2012

Travis Rosbach

The lesson that travels

“A founder can be right about the product and still be right to leave. Rosbach sold at $12 million of sales; the brand he started was worth $210 million four years later, and he has said he was elated about it.”

Rosbach grew up in Salem, Oregon in the 1980s and 1990s, went to the Virgin Islands after high school to join his father, and qualified as a dive instructor and a private pilot. He was living on Oahu with his partner, Cindy Morse, when the two learned that plastic water bottles could contain BPA and found that the metal bottles on sale did not keep water cold enough. He designed his own, modelled on the idea of his grandfather's thermos, and was told by manufacturers that there was no market for it. (Some accounts, including Wikipedia, give his co-founder's name as Cindy Weber; the Bend Bulletin, writing at the time of the sale, uses Morse.)

The couple came back to Oregon nearly broke with 1,500 bottles on their way from China and started selling at the Portland Saturday Market, the Deschutes County Fair and the Munch & Music concerts in Bend. The company was registered as Steel Technology LLC in 2009 and sold the bottles as Hydro Flask. The early product decisions are the ones that later mattered: insulation that kept ice through a hot day, a wide mouth, and colour used as a way for the buyer to make the bottle theirs rather than as decoration. The first customers were the outdoor crowd of central Oregon, and the brand spread through the Pacific Northwest, Hawaii and Southern California on their word.

Rosbach sold his interest in 2012 to a group of investors, when the company had more than $12 million of annual sales; his relationship with Morse had ended and she sold too. He has described being constantly on aeroplanes and not sleeping properly for five and a half years. He is not the person who built the brand into a $210 million acquisition or a 2019 phenomenon, and he has never claimed to be. What he built was the object and its first community, which is the part a buyer cannot add later.

§01 — The hard calls

  1. 2009

    Design a bottle around one measurable promise — cold water all day — and sell it in person at markets and festivals rather than through retailers who said there was no demand.

    The outdoor community of central Oregon became the first customer base and the brand's reputation, which every later owner traded on.

  2. 2009

    Offer the bottle in colours from the start, so the buyer chose it rather than simply bought it.

    Ten years later colour and a flat powder-coated surface were exactly what a teenage subculture wanted to customise. Nobody planned the VSCO girl; the founders built the canvas.

  3. 2012

    Sell out to an investor group at about $12 million of sales rather than raise money and keep running the company.

    The investors hired an experienced operator and sold to Helen of Troy for $210 million four years later. Rosbach left most of that value on the table and has said he was elated by the sale anyway.

One of these is set up as a tutorial — you make the call before you find out what Travis did.

Face the decision

§02 — Around this founder