YouSaid · the spoken record

Travis Rosbach

lines on the record: 80
first: 2025-11-24
most recent: 2025-11-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, every day was long days. Our printer was broken, and so it would take us hours and hours to fix it and keep running it. And it was just. Was like I was completely overwhelmed with having to do bottles and. We had a client who would go to the Canton Fair in China and he would help his customers find factories to build their products. I really knew that I had to find a factory and it was probably going to be in China. So started doing Google and found a factory that said, yes, we'll do that. Come on over and check it out.”
2025-11-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hydro Flask: Travis Rosbach. How a thirsty surfer changed the water bottle industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. And I wanted metal on the inside. I knew I didn't want plastic. And so I figured, and I knew I didn't want aluminum. So I figured, well, why can't we just make them out of double wall vacuum insulated stainless steel?”
2025-11-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hydro Flask: Travis Rosbach. How a thirsty surfer changed the water bottle industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah, it would provide a vacuum space that no temperature air molecules could transfer between. So anything on the inside, whatever temperature it is, it's going to remain that temperature because it doesn't have outside influences affecting it. And it doesn't release like if you have hot liquids, the hot doesn't release through the vacuum.”
2025-11-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hydro Flask: Travis Rosbach. How a thirsty surfer changed the water bottle industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I was vacuum insulation. They came up. I can't remember the exact year. I almost want to say it was like in the 1900s or even late 1800s. They came up with a vacuum insulation technology.”
2025-11-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hydro Flask: Travis Rosbach. How a thirsty surfer changed the water bottle industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I thought, well, why can't we take that same technology and make it in a normal sized water bottle that we could actually drink water out of?”
2025-11-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hydro Flask: Travis Rosbach. How a thirsty surfer changed the water bottle industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was and it was big enough that I could put ice cubes in it, which was huge, you know, to take to the beach and have cold water on the way there was awesome. And then I'd put it in the sand. I'd go surf and I'd come back and it'd be too hot to drink And And then I came home and I'd hike a mountain and I'd get to the top and it'd be too cold to drink. And so I thought my grandpa had an old school coffee thermos, one of the big old heavy thermoses.”
2025-11-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hydro Flask: Travis Rosbach. How a thirsty surfer changed the water bottle industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Great product. And so he sends me a clean canteen and It just wasn't ergonomically correct for my lip. And every time I'd take a sip, it dribbled down my shirt.”
2025-11-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hydro Flask: Travis Rosbach. How a thirsty surfer changed the water bottle industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And so I said, okay, well, I guess I really am doing water bottles now And I called my brother Jeff, who just started working at REI and Bind. And I said, hey, Jeff, I need a water bottle. And he goes, clean canteen. They just started.”
2025-11-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hydro Flask: Travis Rosbach. How a thirsty surfer changed the water bottle industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really thin, yeah And I thought, well, that's too bad. You know, I just paid a lot of money for it. Now it doesn't look great. A couple days later, I'm filling it up and I look inside and some of that gold had flaked off. There was a gold liner.”
2025-11-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hydro Flask: Travis Rosbach. How a thirsty surfer changed the water bottle industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I was walking up the stairs and it fell off some books and it dinted almost like catastrophically. It just looked terrible.”
2025-11-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hydro Flask: Travis Rosbach. How a thirsty surfer changed the water bottle industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and it had real nice powder coating on it. It was really gritty, and I really enjoyed it for about a week. And I realized I couldn't put Ice Cubes in it. I couldn't put it in the freezer.”
2025-11-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hydro Flask: Travis Rosbach. How a thirsty surfer changed the water bottle industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I was like, oh, this is great. I don't have to do bottles. I can just stick with signs. This is fantastic. And so I went to Patagonia and I bought one and it was expensive. It was like 20 bucks, you know, for a water bottle. That was a lot of money.”
2025-11-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hydro Flask: Travis Rosbach. How a thirsty surfer changed the water bottle industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, yeah. So I get back to the sign company and I ask one of the employees. I said, what do you know about water bottles? And she said, oh, it's SIG. You got to go at this company called SIG. And I thought, oh, They were aluminum, yes”
2025-11-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hydro Flask: Travis Rosbach. How a thirsty surfer changed the water bottle industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I said, Well, who's going to refill this shelf? And he said, nobody, there's nobody else doing water bottles. And it hit me right in the back of my head and it came right out my mouth. And I said, I will. I will do that. And decided I was doing water bottles.”
2025-11-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hydro Flask: Travis Rosbach. How a thirsty surfer changed the water bottle industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he said, Well, the owner's French, and she just got back from France, and her dad is a doctor. And he says there's this stuff called BPA. And we don't know what it is. It's probably not going to be anything. But as a precautionary measure, she decided that she wanted us to take all these bottles off the shelf.”
2025-11-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hydro Flask: Travis Rosbach. How a thirsty surfer changed the water bottle industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, one day I was out and I was running errands and I was thirsty. I'm tired of seeing the plastic wash up on the beaches. I want to get a non single use bottle to drink water. And so I thought, well, I'll just get a nalgene and then I can reuse it. So I go into the sporting goods store thinking that's pretty simple, 20 bucks. I got a bottle and I'm back to work. tomorrow is another day. And there was some employees up front and I said, hey, where are the water bottles? And the guy takes me back and he shows me this wall that was completely empty. There were only two bottles left on it. And I said, what happened here?”
2025-11-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hydro Flask: Travis Rosbach. How a thirsty surfer changed the water bottle industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, we were breaking even and slightly pulling ahead. So we were bringing in a couple hundred thousand a year, I'd say, yes.”
2025-11-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hydro Flask: Travis Rosbach. How a thirsty surfer changed the water bottle industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We did. Yeah, we just got the biggest lease that we could find and afford, which was right downtown, right by the Blazedale Center, right by the big Coliseum. And we did screen printing and embroidery and hats and tablecloths and table throws. We ended up doing big outdoor signs. And we did a lot of business development, branding, marketing”
2025-11-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hydro Flask: Travis Rosbach. How a thirsty surfer changed the water bottle industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She was down. She thought that, yeah, that's a wild idea, but why not? And sure enough, there's a sign show in Orlando. And it's like it was in a couple weeks. And so we bought tickets to fly to Florida. And at this big convention, I saw this one booth called Fellers. And there was one guy, Frank, who's the owner. And so I went up and said, hey, Frank, I want to start a sign company. He goes, well, what do you need? I said, I don't know. Could you tell me? And he thought I was crazy, but they told us what we needed and what we should buy and shipped it out to Oahu. And the guy showed up and installed the printer. And it was a 64-inch printer. So we could print banners as opposed to just putting vinyl on top of them. We could do full color photographic image banners.”
2025-11-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hydro Flask: Travis Rosbach. How a thirsty surfer changed the water bottle industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I thought, well, if the best you can do is cut blue and black vinyl and put it on a white banner, I bet we could figure out a way to do it different and or better than what you're doing.”
2025-11-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hydro Flask: Travis Rosbach. How a thirsty surfer changed the water bottle industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, technically, what I would see were signs advertising for signs. And so there were very few actual brick and mortar sign shops. It was that a lot of people owned a plotter and so they would make banners and call themselves a sign company.”
2025-11-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hydro Flask: Travis Rosbach. How a thirsty surfer changed the water bottle industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Did yeah. So there was sign shops in Oahu and there was a lot of them every couple blocks you'd see a sign on the corner that said sign company or banners or something like that. And there was a huge amount of competition for it. But I wanted to try that. I had a fascination with embellishing a substrate and making it different and beautiful. So I thought, well, let's just buy a plotter and start a sign company.”
2025-11-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hydro Flask: Travis Rosbach. How a thirsty surfer changed the water bottle industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And she says, all right, come home and grab your bag. And I took off to a Wahoo. And I remember landing in a Wahoo. And as soon as the door opened, I could just feel the aloha. And I called her and I said, you can keep the company or you can sell it. But either way, I live here now. Wow. She said, where are you? Are you at the bar? Are you drunk? I said, no, I'm still on the airplane. I haven't even got off yet, but I live here. And I spent about nine days on vacation in Oahu and went back to bend and said, I'm done. I'm completely out of this. And we put it on Craigslist and sold a couple weeks later.”
2025-11-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hydro Flask: Travis Rosbach. How a thirsty surfer changed the water bottle industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It exactly was. Yeah, I try to take off a couple hours on Sunday, but typically that wouldn't work. And I did. I got burnt out and I called the office and I told her, I said, look, I'm going to kill myself or kill somebody else. I have to get out of here. And it was cold and I was in pain. I said either Mexico or Hawaii, but I need to go somewhere warm and I need to go quick. And she called back and said, all right, come on.”
2025-11-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hydro Flask: Travis Rosbach. How a thirsty surfer changed the water bottle industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we called it binned fencing, which actually went quite a ways. A lot of our customers just thought we had been around. And hired a lot of good people who taught me a lot. And it's a high turnover rate. And so I had to learn pretty quick how to build a fence myself and drill holes in the rock and get through the ice and stuff.”
2025-11-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hydro Flask: Travis Rosbach. How a thirsty surfer changed the water bottle industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, a lot of the fence companies were still using wood and they would say, oh, pressurized wood lasts forever and it's going to be here forever. Well, no, actually not. It rots and it breaks. So we were using stainless steel pipes and then building wooden boxes around it. And then we're also doing clear cedar, which had no knots. And it just looks beautiful. It's a very high-end looking fence. And so we were going in to a lot of the high-end subdivisions.”
2025-11-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hydro Flask: Travis Rosbach. How a thirsty surfer changed the water bottle industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not at all. I had no clue. I didn't know a postal digger from a pry bar. So I got on Craig's list and found a guy who worked at the number one fence company in town Mike's Fence Center. And he was ready to leave there. And I said, well, come on. Come work with me and I'll make you the head guy. And he said, okay. And so we went out and bought a truck and bought all the tools that the supply company told us that we would need. And the day before our first project, he got arrested. And so we were supposed to show up in Sun River and put in the first fence. And instead, I ended up going to the homeless shelter and found a couple guys that said they knew how to defenses and went down and learned how to build a fence on site.”
2025-11-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hydro Flask: Travis Rosbach. How a thirsty surfer changed the water bottle industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do that? And he said, I don't care what you do. I said, Well, I'm going to do that. So I went back in the house and I told my girlfriend, I said, I want to start a fence company. So we started bend fencing.”
2025-11-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hydro Flask: Travis Rosbach. How a thirsty surfer changed the water bottle industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had a girlfriend at that time, and we rented a place, and one of the first nights we were there we were sitting watching a movie and drinking a bottle of wine and a guy walked into the backyard. And so I jumped up and ran out back. And he was building a fence at the rental house. And I thought, well, that's an idea. I'd never even thought about people building fences before. How do you do this? And he showed me, he's using metal pipes and clear cedar. There's no knots. And Bind was really starting to grow about 2005 or so. And so the fences and the houses were going in everywhere. And I asked him, I said, well, are you doing the subdivisions? And he said, no, I just like to do one house at a time. I said, well, why don't you do the subdivisions? Because that's 200 houses in one go. And he said, no, I'm not interested. And I said, well, do you mind if I?”
2025-11-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hydro Flask: Travis Rosbach. How a thirsty surfer changed the water bottle industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ran out of money. I had about 10 employees at that point. And so I write this letter that says, you know, dear employees, I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to close down the business And Friday morning I call everybody into the office to tell them that we're closing down. And the phone rings and the lady at the front desk says, there's this guy here who wants to see you. And he says, Travis, I'm here to talk to you. And I said, I'm sorry, I'm not hiring and I'm not even interested. Thank you. And he says, well. Might want to invest.”
2025-11-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hydro Flask: Travis Rosbach. How a thirsty surfer changed the water bottle industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT