The hour of the Quencher is upon us
If being mocked on Saturday Night Live is a gauge for how fully something has become part of the zeitgeist, then the moment of ascension for the Stanley Quencher, a 40 oz. double-insulated tumbler beloved by Millennial and Gen Z women, came in January. A sketch, called “Big Dumb Cups,” satirized three members of the target demographic flaunting their adult sippy cups, an extension of the Big Dumb Hats that captured the same demographic not long before.
If you’ve ventured outdoors in the past two years, you’ve encountered one of these cups, possibly outfitted with accessories like a mini backpack or a rubber straw stopper shaped like a cowboy hat (or, my favorite, a segmented snack bowl that fits over the lid of the cup). The cup that The Wall Street Journal calls, “the new on-the-job status symbol” can be found in yoga studios, board rooms, and center console cup holders everywhere.
That’s thanks, in part, to Stanley president Terence Reilly who joined Stanley in 2020 after transforming Crocs from the ugliest shoe on the planet to a highly sought fashion brand. Reilly told CNBC.com, “My experience at Crocs was fueled by collaboration culture and drop culture, and I knew that once we had our legs under us at Stanley, and once we could see the connection to consumers that we were creating, we were also ready for collaborations.”
For Crocs, Reilly pushed brand partnerships with celebrities like Justin Bieber and Bad Bunny. He used that model again for Stanley, whose first collab, with country artist Lainey Wilson, sold out in just 11 minutes.
By the digits
$750 million: Stanley’s projected annual sales for 2023
275%: Year-over-year increase in Quencher sales for Stanley as of 2023
$20-$50: Retail price range of the Quencher from Stanley.com
$999.99: Peak resale value for a limited edition Galentine’s Day Stanley from Target
Origin story
Listen to women
The story of the Quencher is a parable about listening to women. If not for The Buy Guide, an online shopping blog and Instagram account run by and marketed to women, the then poorly performing Quencher may have faded into tumbler obscurity. Instead, Buy Guide co-founder Ashlee LeSueur gave the cup new life with a new audience.
Enamored with The Quencher, LeSueur posted about the cup back in 2017 (truly a visionary), saying, “Of all the insulated cups… this is the one. Just trust.” With its lackluster sales, the Quencher was becoming harder to find in stores in 2019. That’s when someone from Stanley reached out to Buy Guide co-founders LeSueur, Taylor Cannon, and Linley Hutchinson with a proposition: Buy 10,000 Stanley Quenchers and sell them to their audience.
Without any experience in the wholesale space, LeSueur had to take a huge gamble, maxing out the group’s finances and dipping into personal funds to float the order. The first 5,000 or so sold out in about four days, the next shipment of 5,000 in just an hour. And just like that, the Quencher was reborn, with word-of-mouth marketing that rivaled the Tupperware parties of yore proliferating exponentially on sites like TikTok.
The lesson? Women are everyone’s target market. “Any brand on the planet that isn’t marketing to the 25- to 50-year-old woman is really missing the mark,” LeSueur told Retail Dive. “Even if you are a men’s clothing line — no matter what you are — if you are not finding a way to speak to this 25- to-50-year-old female, you’re missing the mark because those are the buyers of our economy. They buy for their families, they buy for their husbands, they buy for their businesses.” And they buy Stanley Quenchers, millions of them.
Quotable
“Stanley’s current state is a logical escalation of a few other relevant trends. Millennial women’s obsession with expensive water bottles. Their fraught relationship to water itself, having been raised on soda and other sugary drinks and then shouted down for drinking too much of them — how about a glass of water instead? And, of course, thinly veiled diet culture in the form of obsessive hydration. In the unrelenting battle to perform superior “health and wellness,” the Quencher is merely the latest weapon.” — Bon Appetit writer Li Goldstein in a May 2023 article
Pop quiz
Which of these is not a Stanley Quencher colorway?
A. Tigerlily Plum
B. Red Flannel
C. Champagne Ombre
D. Peridot Glow
Quench your curiosity below… a Stanley straw might even be long enough to reach the bottom of this email.
Brief history
1913: William Stanley Jr., a physicist and inventor, founded Stanley in Seattle, Washington.
1920: Stanley invents the “unbreakable” bottle, based on Stanley’s design for a transformer.
1940s: Stanley switches to a stainless steel lining for their bottles, making them food safe.
2016: Stanley launches The Quencher.
2017: Stanley Quenchers are featured on The Buy Guide for the first time.
2020: Stanley hires Terence Reilly, formerly of Crocs, as its new president.
2023: Country artist Lainey Wilson partners with Stanley on their first celebrity collab, a pink and green Watermelon Moonshine Quencher, named after one of Wilson’s songs.
Fun fact!
Fisher Price makes a baby Stanley called the “Laugh & Learn Wake Up & Learn coffee mug” (These babies are laughing and waking up, but more importantly, they are LEARNING), which retails for $9.99. According to the product description, “This interactive learning toy styled like a to-go beverage cup is filled to the brim with engaging play for babies and toddlers.”
Watch this
With over 9 million views on TikTok, this video from user danimarielettering is the kind of publicity that makes PR and marketing folks drool. In response to the video, Stanley president Terence Reilly vowed to send Danielle Lettering more Stanleys and buy her a new car. (Bonus fun fact: Stanley bottles were used by air force pilots in WW2, so, impossible as it may seem, this story checks out.)
Take me down this 🥤 hole!
There’s lead in it! But it’s ok! (Unless the cup is damaged.)
The internet can be a cruel mistress. What was beloved one day, is scorned the next. And with reports that the Stanley Quencher contains small amounts of lead, at least some of the cup’s audience did an about face, taking to TikTok with home lead tests and warning others of the dangers of possible lead contamination.
For its part, Stanley released a statement: “Please rest assured that no lead is present on the surface of any Stanley product that comes in contact with you or the contents of your container. Every Stanley product meets all U.S. regulatory requirements, including California Proposition 65, which requires businesses to provide warnings to Californians about heavy metal and chemical exposure.”
If this news made you want to start drinking everything out of your two cupped hands, you’re not alone. Fortunately, the folks at Wired shared a list of popular water bottles, noting which ones contain lead, a naturally occurring toxic metal for which the World Health Organization says there is no safe level of exposure.
Poll
How many Stanley Quenchers do you own?
- One, because I understand that I can only drink out of one water bottle at a time.
- Seven or more, so that I have one for every day of the week.
- 67+, because I’m a teenager with extremely indulgent parents.
- All I have is my two hands.
We’re thirsty for your answers!
💬 Let’s talk!
In last week’s poll on megachurches, 48% of you said you’d like to see a waterslide for baptisms as a new amenity, 28% of you would be into communion wine tastings, 14% would like a Hallelujah hot tub, and 10% said you wish megachurches had rooftop DJ parties.
🤔 What did you think of today’s email?
💡 What should we obsess over next?
Today’s email was written by Stephanie Ganz (whose beverage container of choice, a 28 oz. matte black Simple Modern tumbler, is affectionately known as Darth Sippy), and edited and produced by Morgan Haefner (whose beverage container of choice definitely came from a thrift store).
The correct answer to the pop quiz is D., Peridot Glow. Of the nearly 90 hues of Stanley cups that have been released, there are approximately 30 available currently on Stanley’s website. Peridot Glow is not among them (yet).