Individuals have lengthy had a love affair with the reusable water bottle. However this yr, our relationship with these vessels has morphed into one thing extra akin to an obsession.
Contemplate the fixation with the Stanley tumbler. When the model not too long ago launched $45 limited-edition pink cups for Valentine’s Day, hoards of individuals stampeded Goal and Starbucks to snag one. In center colleges, proudly owning Stanley bottles has turn into a brand new type of social currency among girls. All of this has led Stanley’s revenues to skyrocket from $73 million in 2019 to an estimated $750 million in 2023.
Stanley is simply the most recent in a protracted line of water bottle manufacturers that has come out and in of vogue. We’ve cycled via Nalgene, Camelbak, Klean Kanteen, S’properly, Hydro-Flask, and Yeti, simply to call a number of the biggest hits. The reusable water bottle sector is now price simply shy of $9.3 billion and is about to develop to $12.7 billion by 2032. However we don’t want the numbers to inform us the market is booming: Most of us don’t suppose twice earlier than shopping for the cool new bottle, regardless that our cabinets are already overflowing with older variations.
Stanley could also be grabbing the headlines, however different manufacturers are at the moment working to knock it off its pedestal. One contender could possibly be the upstart Owala, which launched in 2020 and was the top-selling bottle available on the market final yr (although not the top-selling tumbler, which is distinguished by its wide-mouth high), in response to the market analysis agency Circana. Moreover being named certainly one of Time‘s greatest innovations of the yr in 2023, writers at New York and Bon Appétit magazines gushed with such superlatives as, “greatest ingesting vessel on planet Earth.” Already, limited-edition Owala colours promote for $400 on secondhand markets.
[Photo: Owala]
Throughout the web, everyone seems to be attempting to wrap their heads round why water bottles have remodeled from a utilitarian receptacle into an object of need. I’ve some concepts.
To grasp the present increase in water bottles, we have to return a decade, when the trade stopped concentrating on males with utilitarian bottles to carry on out of doors adventures and blue collar jobs. As a substitute, S’properly pioneered a brand new method of pitching bottles to ladies as trendy but eco-friendly equipment—a playbook that different manufacturers have copied. Quick ahead to 2024, and the style trade is now beneath assault for accelerating the local weather disaster. On this context, the reusable bottle is one of some seemingly, digital, sustainable purchases that permit individuals to really feel the dopamine hit of consumption with out guilt.
Stanley has deployed this technique successfully, nevertheless it’s not the one one that may play this recreation. Different manufacturers are actually ramping up their efforts to be the subsequent It water bottle.
The Bottle As a Style Accent
On TikTok, younger ladies publish their enormous collections of Stanley tumblers that are available in a variety of pastel colours and female patterns. Why would anybody want so many bottles, particularly from a model that touts how long-lasting and sturdy its merchandise are? The reply, it appears, is fashion. Coordinating your bottle along with your outfit has turn into a technique to assert your social standing.
Sarah Kauss pioneered this concept when she launched S’properly in 2010. On the time, she acknowledged that the market was crowded with bottles, however none had been significantly engaging to have a look at. So she designed a bottle with a pleasingly curvaceous form and pitched it to a brand new viewers involved not with performance, however with model. “There wasn’t something like a trend accent,” Kauss mentioned, on the How I Built This podcast. “It actually wanted to catch your eye and be lovely.”

[Photo: S’well]
S’properly bottles had been successful. Kauss managed to get the merchandise into shiny ladies’s magazines together with Vogue, and commenced designing them in a wide selection of female colours. Inside six years, the model was making $100 million in annual income. The success impressed different water bottle manufacturers, corresponding to Hydroflask, to observe go well with and goal ladies.
It’s ironic that Stanley has turn into successful with younger ladies as a result of it is likely one of the final water bottle manufacturers available on the market to focus on them immediately. Stanley was based 110 years in the past and helped invent the insulated vacuum bottle that retains drinks cold and hot. However from the beginning, it marketed itself as a rugged model, widespread with outdoorsmen and building employees.
It had no plans to alter course, however a trio of influential ladies at a suggestion weblog referred to as The Purchase Information satisfied Stanley to start being attentive to feminine shoppers. Ashlee LeSueur, cofounder of the weblog, first stumbled throughout the Stanley Quencher tumbler in 2017, appreciated its design, and commenced recommending it to readers, who had been largely moms. She finally bought a meeting with a gross sales affiliate at Stanley, and argued that the model ought to be advertising and marketing its bottles to ladies and launching extra female-oriented colours.
The model wasn’t satisfied. “Among the executives had a very tough time imagining a extra female-leaning coloration palette on the Stanley merchandise,” LeSueur mentioned on The Journal podcast. “[Stanley] had developed a really robust, very respected model over 100 years. That hashtag #StanleyStrong was actually necessary to them, and so they didn’t need to do something that they felt would compromise the power of that model identification. So it did take some convincing.”
Then, in 2020, Stanley employed Terence Reilly as model president. He had spent the earlier 5 years at Crocs, serving to to remodel the ugly shoe right into a viral sensation and a footwear juggernaut. LeSueur’s perspective made numerous sense to Reilly, and the corporate started partnering with feminine social media influencers and launching limited-edition colours. The brand new technique labored.
Nice Design Wins
Aesthetics alone have by no means been sufficient to drive a reusable water bottle’s success. Manufacturers additionally must maintain innovating to develop merchandise that carry out properly and provide a greater ingesting expertise. And types that don’t have struggled. Nalgene, as an illustration, stubbornly refused to reengineer its plastic for a very long time, even when it turned clear that it contained a toxic chemical called BPA. Klean Kanteen straws make a whistling noise when ingesting that many shoppers discover off-putting.
In the meantime, extra revolutionary manufacturers are attempting to rethink the bottle-drinking expertise from the bottom up. Owala, as an illustration, has created an award-winning new bottle idea referred to as the FreeSip. “On the floor, you’d suppose there was nothing extra primary than ingesting water from a bottle,” says Michael Sorensen, CEO of Trove Manufacturers, Owala’s father or mother firm. “However we actually consider that there are nonetheless methods to make it higher.”
As Owala’s product growth crew studied client habits, they found that customers fell into two camps when it got here to ingesting from a bottle. Some appreciated sipping from a straw; others appreciated pouring the water into their mouth. So the model developed a brand new ingesting system that mixes each approaches right into a spout that can also be related to a straw. This implies which you can sip from the straw once you’re within the automobile; however if you wish to drink water sooner on the health club, you’ll be able to tip the bottle and drink from the spout. “By making a hybrid, we’re in a position to seize extra of the market,” says Sorensen, who beforehand had been Trove’s vp of selling. “Nevertheless it additionally signifies that a buyer can select the way in which they drink at any given second, which isn’t one thing they might do earlier than.”
The bottle has gotten rave evaluations from suggestion websites, however Sorensen realized that Owala additionally wanted to compete aesthetically. So the model created a novel look, which mixes completely different hues in a single bottle, like a violet physique, with a neon yellow high, and a blue deal with. The aesthetic stands out from different manufacturers available on the market, which are typically monochromatic. “Our preliminary colorways scared everybody on the firm as a result of they had been so completely different from what was on the market,” says Sorensen. “A significant retailer advised us they didn’t need it as a result of the colours appeared juvenile. However we leaned into that as an indication that we most likely had one thing disruptive right here.”
Owala was proper. To many shoppers, the colours had been enjoyable and lighthearted. And now, on social media, Sorensen says Owala’s wild colorways have come to signify self-expression.

[Photo: Purist]
The Sustainability Argument
The water bottle market is poised to proceed rising. And there are a lot of different manufacturers effervescent up, attempting to win over shoppers, together with Takeya, Purifyou, and Purist. All of the competitors is resulting in aggressive advertising and marketing efforts to attempt to get us to purchase one more water bottle, even when we now have many completely good ones already. This overconsumption is dangerous for the planet—and types are contributing to the issue by creating limited-edition colours, which capitalizes on shoppers’ FOMO.
From the beginning, water bottle manufacturers have argued that they’re within the enterprise of saving the planet. Nalgene, which launched in 1949, marketed merchandise to campers and aligned itself with the Go away No Hint motion, which urged individuals to not litter whereas tenting or climbing. And regardless that Kauss was targeted on the aesthetics of the S’properly bottle, she made sustainability a part of the model’s mission.
Right now, all reusable manufacturers make some sort of environmental declare: They argue that utilizing a bottle means not shopping for a single-use plastic bottle, which takes uncooked supplies to make and will find yourself in a landfill, the place it can sit for a whole lot of years since plastic doesn’t biodegrade. Proudly owning dozens of bottles that pair along with your outfit of the day will not be a sustainable resolution; in spite of everything, it takes way more sources to create a vacuum-insulated stainless-steel bottle than it does to create a single-use bottle. And once we finally get tired of a water bottle, it’s prone to find yourself in a landfill, since few are recyclable. The onerous layers of plastic within the bottle won’t biodegrade whereas the stainless-steel will languish and go to waste.
Sorensen, Trove’s CEO, acknowledges that customers are going via numerous bottles. He says Owala is at the moment engaged on recycling techniques to permit clients to ship them again after they’ve reached the tip of their life. However in the end, be believes the bottles are doing extra good than hurt. “It’s not like individuals throw away their final one after they get a brand new one,” he says. “They rotate them, akin to a bit of clothes of their wardrobe. And by doing so, they’re not utilizing 1000’s of single-use plastic bottles.”