Gen Z’s most-coveted product of 2024 is…a water bottle?
Stanley, the brand behind the now-ubiquitous Stanley water bottles (trust me: you’ll start seeing them everywhere), is a 111-year-old company that’s been on a tear the past few years: sales have grown 10x from $70M in 2019 to $750M (!) in 2023. Each new launch sells out rapidly, and Stanley’s TikTok hashtag has amassed 700M views.
What happened exactly? Stanley offers a good case study in savvy modern marketing.
To back up, Stanley was founded in 1913 by William Stanley, who actually patented the steel vacuum-seal bottle. For a hundred years, the company marketed itself to men, and particularly to outdoorsy men—campers, fishermen, hikers 🏕️🎣🥾 The product ethos was imbued with a certain…machismo; in 2012, Stanley’s marketing still mentioned that its products resonated with “a 30-year-career veteran policeman” and “a retired Army soldier.”
It all traces back to a group of moms in Utah.
Linley Hutchinson, Ashlee LeSueur, and Taylor Cannon are the founders of The Buy Guide, an online shopping blog and Instagram account started in 2017. Ashlee LeSueur happened upon the Stanley Quencher at a local store in 2019, and immediately fell in love with it. The Quencher was a lesser-known Stanley SKU at the time, with a handle and a tapered base to fit into a cup holder. The Buy Guide women thought it was perfect for an on-the-go mom.
They also thought the product was woefully under-marketed and under-appreciated.
They reached out to Stanley to tell them their thoughts, but the company wouldn’t listen. So the women took matters into their own hands: they bought 10,000 cups wholesale and set up a Shopify store for their community. The first 5,000 cups sold out in four days; the second 5,000 cups sold out in an hour. In Taylor Cannon’s words: “It blew [the Stanley executives’] minds. They couldn’t believe how quickly we sold through our cups.”