Today's Guest

Travis Rosbach is a serial entrepreneur and the founder of Hydro Flask, the world’s most-used water bottle, and the Tumalo Group, his latest venture where he advises would-be entrepreneurs. He discusses the moment in Honolulu where he, along with then-girlfriend Cindy Weber, recognized the need for an environmentally-friendly reusable water bottle – and the Hydro Flask was born. Rosbach founded Hydro Flask in 2009 and sold the company in 2012 to a group of investors who then grew the business and sold it in 2016 to Helen of Troy Limited for $210 million. Rosbach shares his entrepreneurial journey and how Hydro Flask’s explosive popularity resulted from some things he planned, such as the product’s unique logo and design, and others he didn’t – such as becoming the darling product of the VSCO girls.

Resources Shared

• Hydro Flask
• The Tumalo Group
• Thryv

Episode Transcript

(Please excuse grammatical errors due to transcription)

Gordon Henry:

Hey, hey, this is Gordon Henry at Winning on Main Street. Normally on this show, our guests run or advise small businesses, but this week we're bringing you something a little different, someone whose little startup became pretty big. Really big, in fact, have you ever seen the Hydro Flask? It's the water bottle that's pretty much everywhere. It's particularly become a phenomenon with millennials, gen Z, and college kids.

Our guest, Travis Rosbach, is the inventor of the Hydro Flask. How and why Travis invented Hydro Flask, how Travis's Bottle became a global phenomenon and Travis' own entrepreneurial journey is the subject of this week's show. What should you, our listeners, get out of this episode? Just about every great business idea starts with solving some problem. Let's listen to how Travis spotted and solved a problem and where it led, and how that approach might help you in your business. The show is brought to you by Thryv. Small business runs better on Thryv.

So Travis, welcome to the show.

Travis Rosbach:

Thank you, Gordon. Thanks for having me.

Gordon Henry:

Yeah, super excited to have you. And I'd love for you to just start kind of at the beginning of your journey. Where did you grow up? What were you like as a kid and why were you interested in making this bottle?

Travis Rosbach:

Yeah, let me start out by saying I'm missing a tooth. I smashed my face on a rock, broke some bones, and it's five weeks before my dentist can get me in. So I'm a little bit mumbly. But I'm going to do my best with sans tooth.

So yeah, Travis Rosbach. I was born in Salem, Oregon, and I met my dad when I was about 14. He lived in St. Croix, the US Virgin Islands. He actually still lives there. And so I went down to the Virgin Islands and started scuba diving. He owns multiple scuba diving shops, Cane Bay Dive Shop, and started scuba diving and hanging out in the Virgin Islands at about 14. Kind of went back and forth, Salem in St. Croix, St. Thomas, St. John, Puerto Rico growing up. And as soon as I graduated South Salem High School, I was on my way back home to the Virgin Islands where I became a dive instructor, dive master later, went on to get my 50 ton US merchant marine captain's license, boat captain's license, and did that for a lot of years and traveled all over the world, boat captaining, scuba diving, just traveling for the heck of it in the off seasons, predominantly in the summers.

And then one day I was on this yacht, I decided to quit, long story there. But decided to become an airline pilot and fly sea planes. And so came back home to Salem, started flying, September 11 happened. Got grounded, had to kind of reevaluate, came over to Central Oregon to start rock climbing. Ended up finishing my pilot, all the certificates, airline transport pilot, all that. Went back home to the Virgin Islands and started flying for the Seaborne Airlines. Did that for quite a while and then started to get bored, little bit of island fever.

So I moved to Florida and started flying jet charters, predominantly Lears, Falcons, Hawkers, things like that, big jets all over the country and kind of international. Did that for quite a while. But I always really wanted to be an entrepreneur, I always wanted to own a business.

I didn't really know the word entrepreneur, but I really knew I wanted to be a businessman. I wanted to own businesses. So moved to Bend, Oregon. I had a girlfriend at the time, and we started a fence company building wooden fences. Had no idea how to do fences, but did quite well building fences and hiring people really who knew how to build fences way better than I ever could. Did that. And after a while I got really cold, the ice and snow and digging and lava rock got kind of old. And so took off to Oahu, started a sign screen printing and embroidery, kind of a agency, Oahu Signs and Screen Printing, and did very well with that. And then one day it just hit me that something happened. Sure enough, 2008 had kicked in, 2009 had reached the Hawaiian Islands.

Gordon Henry:

Recession.

Travis Rosbach:

Yeah. And it took a little longer to reach Hawaii because people had booked out their vacations six months or a year at advance. And so they still had those obligations. But I knew that things were going to be different. And then one day I was just thirsty. I was downtown Honolulu running some errands, and I wanted to get a reusable water bottle and went into the sporting good store. There were no water bottles on the shelf. The guy said that due to this new thing that came out in Europe, and the owner was French, and she found this stuff called BPA. They weren't really sure what it was, but long story short, nobody was going to fill up the wall with water bottles. And it hit me in the back of the head, Gordon. It came out my mouth, "I will. I will do that." And then I started Hydro Flask.

Gordon Henry:

Wow. So that's quite a story. So lots of people have ideas or observations, many of us all day long, "Oh, that would be a great idea for a company" or "That would be a great idea for a product." But you were really motivated to follow through and create this new thing. Why do you think you were so motivated? Was it your environmental consciousness?

Travis Rosbach:

A little bit, yes. I would say it was a little bit of all of everything. We were living in Wailua, right on the beach. And at first, cleaning up the plastic and the garbage was kind of fun. I felt like, I'm an Oregonian in Hawaii cleaning up the beach, and I felt like in a environmental warrior type thing. But it didn't end. It just kept coming. And we had to fill up these garbage bags and then put them out with the garbage, and they were paying like $15 a bag. And then it got really expensive to clean up the beach, and it just kind of lost its pizzazz. And yet, I grew up scuba diving all over the place, watching the coral bleaching and the lion fish and then the plastic and just all these different hurricanes come through, and the before and the after and the deering process.

So spending so much time under and on top of the water, I was very conscious of that. But when it hit me in the back of the head, it was just like I actually physically saw the future. And I had asked the employee, I said, "Who's going to fill up this wall?" And he said, "Nobody, there's nobody else." And it hit me and it came out, "I will. I will do that." And he laughed at me.

And at that juxtaposition, I hope I pronounced that right, I saw the future. I saw about 10 years in the future, and I was on stage talking about a pretty highly successful international water bottle company. And then as I went back to the sign shop to ask the employees, "Where do I buy a water bottle? Who's making water bottles? Surely somebody's got to be making a good enough water bottle," I found that there were two competitors. One was aluminum and they had BPA, the other one was single wall. And I would drink out of it and it would dribble down my shirt. It just wasn't ergonomically correct. And I'd put it on the beach, go surf, come back, it would be too hot to drink. I'd go hike up Mount Bachelor, get to the top, my water is frozen. I couldn't drink it. Why carry extra weight if you can't use it?

Yeah, those were kind of the big reasons. And with the 2008, 2009 approaching, it was time to really start looking at something else entirely anyway.

Gordon Henry:

Right, right. So the timing was good. And we should mention here, I understand you had a girlfriend at the time, Cindy Morrison. She was kind of part of this with you at the beginning, right?

Travis Rosbach:

She was, yeah.She helped with a lot of the bookkeeping in the early days, helping getting the business registered, things like that, the legal aspects of it.

Gordon Henry:

Okay, understand. So tell us now, let's get into the making of Hydro Flask. So why did you call it Hydro Flask and explain the logo? The logo was kind of a unique thing too.

Travis Rosbach:

Yeah. I had to go to China and it was a tremendous amount of work just to find a factory that would actually agree to this crazy idea of doing a double wall vacuum insulated water bottle. Nothing really existed at that point in the everyday carry market or even in the water bottle market in America. And so once I finally found a factory that would say, yes, we had samples coming and they were going to screen print the logo on. And we didn't have a logo because we didn't have a name. So we had brainstorming sessions with all of our friends, all of our family, all of our Ohana and neighbors, and everybody we knew. And my brother came up with Hydro Flask. I was like, "No, I don't like the word flask. It reminds me of whiskey. I don't drink whiskey. Yuck. No. Burnside Bridge."

And finally the factory was like, "Hey man, we need a logo, we need a name. What do we put on it? All right, how about Hydro Flask? But we're going to change it later." And so we put Hydro Flask on it. We got on Cindy Morrison, we came up with this wave and just real simple Cindy Morrison logo that Cindy and I came up with. Cindy did a lot of the initial original wave pattern. And we did that and got the samples and we took it around to everybody we could get a photograph with, and they loved the name. They loved the bottle, they loved the name. So yeah, that was the name.

Later, it was much later, a couple years later, we were in Bend and we had a big fancy marketing company, stupid, ridiculous, expensive marketing company. And they said, "Nope, we don't like your logo. It's just too homemade. We got to change it." Okay, fine. Granted it is homemade, literally. We'll redo it. And they came with about 25 different options, and at the bottom of the options, it said a website. And I thought, I wonder what that website is? And so I said, "No, I don't like any of these. Go back to the drawing board." I look up the website, and it was a crowdfunded website where... Not crowdfunded, but it was a maker's website where graphic designers, 99designs. And so with that, we fired the marketing company and with the money we saved, brought in our first graphic designer, Alice Drobna. And she and I sat down and started drawing. And after about a week of working back and forth, that was her very first project, was come up with the new logo.

Gordon Henry:

Cool. Got it. So at this point, you've got this young growing company. You didn't have much of a business background from what I understand. How did you go about achieving the growth and how did you as a kind of non-business background person manage the growth?

Travis Rosbach:

Yeah. I'd been reading business books. I inherited a fairly good-sized bookshelf of business books, Brian Tracy, Jim Rohn, and Zig Ziglar negotiation sales marketing books when I was about 12. So I grew up reading all these books. I had worked in my dad's dive shops where it wasn't really Brian Tracy's philosophies, it was the wild west. I mean, we were getting shot at and robbed and it was crazy, but it was still business. And so I kind of got to learn that and I got to learn sort of the yin and yang of business.

And then with the fence company, it was very successful. We did really well at the fence company. A lot of guerilla marketing and things like that. When we got to the sign company, it really turned into a bit of an agency. So we got to work with some of the top brands on Oahu and some in Maui as well, a couple from the big island.

And so I got to really learn what the big companies were doing and what the small companies were doing and seeing why are the small companies small, why are the big companies big, and how do we do guerilla marketing and how do we do brand awareness as cheaply as possible because we have as little money as we had. And so a big part of it, Gordon, was that we had the advantage of being first to market. I mean, that was huge. Being the first double walled vacuum insulated bottle, people had seen. They're going, "Wow, this is like Voodoo. This is like black magic. I don't know what it is, but this is cool. We want this." And so that really helped a lot, but guerilla marketing was definitely a close second.

Gordon Henry:

Cool. So the company grows, and at some point you, well, you eventually sold the company. So take us through that process. How did you decide, "Hey, maybe I've had enough, I'm thinking about selling or I'm ready to sell," and then how did the sale come about?

Travis Rosbach:

Yeah. So my goal was always just to add the best water bottle. I wanted the best and the largest water bottle company. So those were my goals. For me, that was as good as it got. As soon as I knew that we had the largest water bottle company and the best quality and the best value, the best price, and the best brand, I was happy. And it took a lot of years to get to that point till we were finally internationally recognized and being sold in all of the major retailers all across the world really. And it was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed opening up REI and Dick's and Cabela's and Whole Foods and all of these places where I'd kind of grown up looking at these sporting good and outdoor stores and healthy crunchy granola of stores and seeing these products on the shelves and then all of a sudden having Hydro Flask there, it was really, really rewarding.

And I got to the point where my brother had just died. I'd just gotten married. I was traveling a lot. I was either at the factory, living at the factory, working 24/7 around the clock for months on end, in different parts of China, or I was in New York for meetings, or Texas for meetings or in London. And I got to the point where I just got burnt out and it felt like the season had changed and I was just ready for my next adventure. It got, I don't want to say easy, but it got easier, and I found myself spending more time inside my office or inside an airplane or inside a hotel room, and I wasn't able to... The growth had happened, and that's what I really enjoy. I enjoy the growth phase of businesses.

But once it's big, I got kind of bored. And so we had grown so quickly that we needed extra capital. We were doing 40 to 80,000 bottles a month, which is expensive. I mean, you got to pay for those bottles upfront, product up front, really. And so we had brought in an investor, and it was just really serendipitous. We needed money. Investor walked right through the front door, he gave us a check, and boom, we kept running. So after a while working with him, he sort showed me the big corporate playbook of what it's going to take to really go corporate. And I had no interest. I wanted nothing to do with that. So I exited.

Gordon Henry:

Was it an individual investor or was it more like a PE firm?

Travis Rosbach:

No.

Gordon Henry:

It was like an individual.

Travis Rosbach:

It was both. It was an individual who had originally come in, but he was with a firm and then they brought on additional and additional. And then after I sold, they brought in even more.

Gordon Henry:

What did the company sell for? Are you able to tell us that?

Travis Rosbach:

No, no. It was in the newspaper. It sold later for 200 million.

Gordon Henry:

That was the second sale, right? That was after [inaudible 00:17:58].

Travis Rosbach:

Correct.

Gordon Henry:

Okay. So he bought it from you for I guess an undisclosed price. And can you say, what was the company's revenues at the time you sold? Do you remember roughly what you were doing?

Travis Rosbach:

I don't. We had a really great CFO. And I think more in numbers of bottles than I do in-

Gordon Henry:

And that was like 40 to 80,000 you said?

Travis Rosbach:

Yeah. Well, we were bringing in 40,000 just for ourselves. And then we were also shipping 40 foot shipping containers all over the planet. And a 40-foot shipping container is 40,000 bottles. So we were doing 80 to 120,000 a month, bottles.

Gordon Henry:

Right. And at retail, these bottles were selling for what, 10 bucks? 15 bucks?

Travis Rosbach:

No, they were 30, 35.

Gordon Henry:

30 bucks. Okay. So $30.

Travis Rosbach:

And we had multiple sizes. There's everything from the 10 ounce to the, we had the Growler at 64 ounce and working on the one gallon.

Gordon Henry:

Okay. So 40,000 bottles, 30 bucks. So that's 1,200,000 a month, that sounds like at least. And you said 40 to 80?

Travis Rosbach:

That we were bringing in house. And we moved to a third party logistics company, and we just kept blowing the walls out of the 3PL. We just kept growing and growing and growing, taking over additional buildings because the growth, we were 600% a quarter.

Gordon Henry:

Okay. So you exit out, new investor comes in and you said they grew it up to 200 million. That occurred over about another, how long was that roughly a decade or a little less?

Travis Rosbach:

No, no, it was about four years.

Gordon Henry:

What was the year you sold?

Travis Rosbach:

I think it was '13, '12 or '13.

Gordon Henry:

Okay. And four years later, they sold it for 200. Did they do anything new during those four years, other than just a lot more distribution, I guess?

Travis Rosbach:

They injected a lot of capital. That was the big thing. I talked to the investor later, and the biggest thing they did is inject capital, in the form of inventory. They grew their inventory, they flattened the logo, they took the original logo that Alice and I had come up with, and they sort of ran it over with the steamroller, which I completely agree with. I think it's easier to read on a billboard if it's more of a flattened image. And other than changing that, I also had a lot of my playbook that I had left behind. And so they might have come out with a couple of my designs, but I don't even know that they did that. I don't honestly know.

Gordon Henry:

Right. And then the new buyer comes in who I understand, it's a company called Helen of Troy, and they took the company and obviously continued to grow it. In reading about the growth and the success the company has had, some people say that it became sort of this college phenomenon more in the latter years, or I guess... When would you say that really happened, when it become kind of this brand where everybody recognized it? Was it back when you had it or did that happen later on?

Travis Rosbach:

Well, we were in all of the retail stores that you can imagine, when I had it. We were at all the trade shows, we were all over the TV. We had all kinds of celebrities or the early days of influencers and the later days of influencers were drinking out of the bottle. So yeah, I think we'd say one of the big poppy moments was the VSCO girls.

Gordon Henry:

Say that again, VSCO?

Travis Rosbach:

VISCO.

Gordon Henry:

Who are the VSCO girls?

Travis Rosbach:

Yeah. So come to find out, it was an app. It was sort of a early Instagram type app or Snap Chat type app, I believe. And I think it actually got acquired by Instagram, Mark, whoever. And so the VSCO girls had everyday accessories they had to keep on them and bright-colored everything. And so Hydro Flask, sort of a couple of the VSCO girls kind of went viral. Some of the VSCO girls went viral. And so Hydro Flask started making more of the VSCO girl type colors. That had a huge impact, and that really helped. So that was big. The VSCO girls really helped. And then of course, nowadays people are saying, "Oh no, I don't like Hydro Flask because I'm not a VSCO girl." So it's always a catch 22.

Gordon Henry:

Got it. So you've moved on and now you've got something called the The Tumalo Group. I don't know if I'm pronouncing it exactly right.

Travis Rosbach:

Tumalo, or Tumalo.

Gordon Henry:

So what is The Tumalo Group?

Travis Rosbach:

Well, what I do now, I had a lot of people asking me, "How do I grow my business? How do I find factories?" And typically, finding a factory is very critical. You can have a wonderful brand and a great business plan, but until you have a good factory to make your product, it can be very difficult. So I have and had had a very good robust Rolodex of factories, and a lot of them were in China. And that's just kind of where everything has come from, for the last few number of years. And now we're moving into the United States more and more, which is really exciting. I really enjoy working with American factories. It can be very difficult, especially with startups. But again, it just goes back to the Rolodex.

Gordon Henry:

Got it. Cool. And I understand you've got some other things going on besides this consulting or advising of people. Obviously, you mentioned you're a pilot. You're also, I think you do mentoring, some score mentoring for the small business group?

Travis Rosbach:

I did, for a number of years. I stopped doing that. I stopped doing that when I would meet with somebody for coffee and we would order two cups of coffee, and they would look to me to pay. And I'd think, wait a second, you're getting free advice. You're taking up my time and you're not even buying me a coffee. I will work for free coffee, but if I have to pay for the coffee, I'm not going to do that anymore. And unfortunately, with that organization, the clientele, they really wanted to meet the Hydro Flask guy. And sometimes they'd come with these just ridiculously stupid ideas that weren't even really business ideas. They just wanted to drink coffee with me, on my dime. I'm like, no.

Gordon Henry:

No more paying for coffee.

Travis Rosbach:

No. So I still do a lot of talking and speaking at universities and different organizations, but I'm not footing the bill as much as I used to.

Gordon Henry:

Got it. So as you look back on this whole experience, what would you say is your advice to entrepreneurs who relate to your story and see themselves following in your footsteps?

Travis Rosbach:

I think that with all of my businesses and all of the success that we've had in the business, a lot of it comes down to I always, from even day one, thought about ourselves as way bigger and more internationally recognized than we really were. And we always sort of carried ourselves and portrayed ourselves with that, knowing that someday we will be the best fence company in all of Central Oregon, or we will be the number one sign company in the Hawaiian Islands or the biggest water bottle brand in the world. I don't really like the term fake it till you make it, but it's along those lines. And yet, it's have confidence that it can happen, because I really believe that if you act boldly, unseen forces will come to your aid.

And I think another thing that really helped with Hydro Flask was I learned from Coca-Cola, it's kind of a odd thing, but it's called market to the grave. And nowadays, to be politically correct, we're supposed to say market to the gray, but I still prefer grave. If you can get those young kids drinking your sugar water, they're going to be old people when they're still drinking your sugar water. So if you can get them hooked at a young age, by the time they're old, they're still going to be drinking. And so I really wanted to cater to the children and the young families at Hydro Flask. And sure enough, those young kids grew up, they became college kids. Those college kids became VSCO girls. Those VSCO girls are now VSCO moms. And those VSCO moms are still buying the product for their VSCO kids. And they may not have the word VSCO there, but you see what I'm saying with the cradle to the grave.

Gordon Henry:

You seem a little like an unlikely capitalist to me. You're an environmentalist. You're into things like, from what I understand, yoga, meditation. You mentioned all the stuff you do out on the beach, the water. But you have an instinctual bant for capitalism. Do you see any contradiction there, or that seems pretty normal?

Travis Rosbach:

No, I think capitalist is something that I would not ever put in my CV. If I had 100 things to write, who is Travis, I think that capitalist might be 101. Really, if I have a passion for something, I'm going to do it whether I make money or I don't. And if I can help people, if I can help do good and do better, if I can help the environment and the planet, that's what I want to do. And I really enjoy working with people. I really enjoy helping businesses grow, and I'm not making trillions of dollars doing it, but I'm having a great time.

Gordon Henry:

Sounds good. And what's next for Travis? Tumalo Group is obviously a thing now. Where are you going to be spending your time in the next few years?

Travis Rosbach:

Well, I have a fair bit of property, and I really love chainsawing. I have a bunch of Juniper trees that are a non-native species here in Central Oregon. So every time I cut down a Juniper, two Ponderosas grow. And I enjoy chainsawing trees and using multiple sized vehicles to move dirt and boulders and rocks and stuff like that. But I'm not done. I still have something else I really want to be doing. I just haven't quite found what it is. But I know it's going to hit me in the back of the head. It's going to come out my mouth and boom, I'm off and running doing that. So I'm still kind of open. But for now, I really enjoy doing the The Tumalo Group. It's coming easier and easier. We're creating more and more systems to implement a more smooth factory finding experience and growing of brands. And so I don't see myself stopping The Tumalo Group, I just see myself starting something more later.

Gordon Henry:

Terrific. So as we close out here, if somebody out there listening is interested in finding more about you and specifically about The Tumalo Group and how they could become a client, where should they go?

Travis Rosbach:

TumaloGroup.com. T-U-M-A-L-O-G-R-O-U-P. It's not the best website, but I keep it sort of intentionally minimalistic because Travis@TumaloGroup, info@TumaloGroup.com. And I'm on LinkedIn a little bit, and every once in a while I check that as well.

Gordon Henry:

Okay. Awesome. Well, Travis, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show. Great to have you here and listen to your story.

Travis Rosbach:

Thank you, Gordon, for having me. It's been great.

Gordon Henry:

Yeah. I want to thank our producer, Tim Alleman, coordinators Diette Barnett, Daniel Huddleston. And if you enjoyed this podcast, please tell your colleagues, friends and family to subscribe. And please leave us a five star review. We'd really appreciate it. It helps us in the ranking. Small business runs better at Thryv. Get a free demo at Thryv.com. Until next time, make it a great week.

Listener Reviews