YETI: 2 Brothers, a $300 Cooler, and Nearly $2 Billion a Year

Austin, Texas · 2006

Ryan and Roy Seiders grew up in Driftwood, Texas, with a father who built his own tools when he could not buy the right ones. That habit led them to build a cooler that would not fail, and to charge ten times the going price for it.

Ryan started a fishing rod company, Waterloo Rods, in the mid-1990s, while Roy worked on rigging boats. Both kept running into the same problem: most coolers were not durable enough for fishing and boating.

In January 2006 the brothers traveled to Thailand and found a durable, rotomolded cooler. They began importing it under the name Roughneck.

They then designed a cooler of their own. The first Tundra shipped in April 2008 with a price tag of $300, at a time when a standard cooler cost around $30.

Sales grew from about $5 million in 2009 to about $29 million in 2011. In June 2012, Cortec Group paid $67 million for two-thirds of the company.

In 2014, Yeti launched the Rambler, a vacuum-insulated steel cup that sold for $30. It put the brand within reach of far more customers than a $300 cooler could.

Sales dropped in 2017, a slowdown the video attributes to several causes, including a customer boycott.

Yeti went public on October 25, 2018, at an initial valuation of $1.4 billion. It has since widened its product line and its retail presence, reaching revenue of about $1.87 billion in 2025.

This chapter summarizes the research presented in the video above. A full, itemized source list for Yeti will be added to this page. See our editorial standards for how we work, and if you spot something wrong, please tell us.