Client
Gatorade
Category
Drinkware, hydration
Year
2025
Scope
Industrial design, product strategy, form development, CMF
Channel
Retail & DTC
Constraint
The tumbler category is built for casual life. The car, the house, errands. Gatorade needed to enter it with a fitness-first point of view, which meant answering questions the category doesn't ask. Where the bottle lives on your body or in your bag mid-workout. How fast it refills. How a straw stays leakproof without becoming bulky to store. And how something built to survive the field still feels friendly in the hand.
Decision
Most of it came down to refilling. A tumbler with a straw makes you unscrew the whole lid to fill it, which means the straw is now in your other hand, wet, in a gym. The fix is a locking fill port, a door in the lid that opens for water and closes for everything else, so the straw never has to leave the bottle. That single decision set the architecture, because a separate port means the lid is doing two jobs and the sealing has to work twice.
The straw sits centered rather than offset so the bottle works from either hand, and it flips down when it isn't in use, which keeps it off the bench and out of the bag lining. The handle is cut into the body rather than added to it, so there's nothing to snap off when the bottle gets dropped or thrown, and the soft outer shell takes the impact instead of the vessel.
Everything above is a decision about a bottle in motion. A desk tumbler doesn't need any of it.
Finish
18/8 stainless inner vessel, TPU outer shell, molded lid, straw cap and fill port. Five colors.
More work
