Coolest Cooler

» see coolestcooler.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

coolest cooler was a crowdfunding story before it was a product, and for me it never became more than the story. i followed kickstarter from a distance in 2014, the way an engineer watches other people's launches, and the coolest cooler number was the one everyone quoted. thirteen million dollars for a cooler. it sounded less like a fridge on wheels and more like proof that kickstarter had lost the plot.

the pitch was a cooler that did everything at the party. ryan grepper packed a blender into the lid and a bluetooth speaker into the side, plus smaller extras like a usb charger. his first campaign in late 2013 failed. he relaunched in july 2014 with a better video and better timing, and it raised over $13 million from 62,642 backers, a kickstarter record that stood for years.

then reality arrived. building an electronics-stuffed cooler cost far more than grepper had budgeted, and the money ran out long before all 62,000 units shipped. the company started selling the same cooler on amazon to new customers at full price to fund the backlog, which enraged the backers still waiting. us tariffs on chinese-made goods pushed the math past saving. in december 2019 coolest closed, with more than 20,000 backers who never got a cooler and a $20 refund that did not cover what they had put in.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it proved ~

the coolest cooler became the story people reach for when they explain why crowdfunding a physical product is dangerous. raising money is not the hard part. turning a great video into 62,000 manufactured units at the price you promised is the hard part, and almost nothing in a kickstarter campaign tests whether you can do it. grepper was not a scammer. he was a guy with a good idea and no idea what it cost to make sixty thousand of it.

~ the long tail ~

backers who felt cheated had almost no recourse. kickstarter is not a store, and a pledge is not a purchase, so there was no refund to demand and no product to return. oregon's justice department did settle with the company over the amazon-first sales, forcing it to deliver more units, but plenty of people were still empty-handed when the doors closed. the cooler itself was fine when it shipped. the promise around it was the thing that never survived contact with a factory.

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