Americans have long had a love affair with the reusable water bottle. But this year, our relationship with these vessels has morphed into something more akin to an obsession.
Consider the fixation with the Stanley tumbler. When the brand recently launched $45 limited-edition pink cups for Valentine’s Day, hoards of people stampeded Target and Starbucks to snag one. In middle schools, owning Stanley bottles has become a new form 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 just the latest in a long line of water bottle brands that has come in and out of vogue. We’ve cycled through Nalgene, Camelbak, Klean Kanteen, S’well, Hydro Flask, and Yeti, just to name some of the greatest hits. The reusable water bottle sector is now worth just shy of $9.3 billion and is set to grow to $12.7 billion by 2032. But we don’t need the numbers to tell us the market is booming: Most of us don’t think twice before buying the cool new bottle, even though our cupboards are already overflowing with older versions.
Stanley may be grabbing the headlines, but other brands are currently working to knock it off its pedestal. One contender could be the upstart Owala, which launched in 2020 and was the top-selling bottle on the market last year (though not the top-selling tumbler, which is distinguished by its wide-mouth top), according to the market research firm Circana. Besides being named one of Time‘s best inventions of the year in 2023, writers at New York and Bon Appétit magazines gushed with such superlatives as, “best drinking vessel on planet Earth.” Already, limited-edition Owala colors sell for $400 on secondhand markets.
The super-early-rate deadline for Fast Company's Brands That Matter is this Friday, March 13, at 11:59 p.m. PT. Apply today.