Why Are Stanley Tumblers So Popular?

It seems like everywhere you look these days, you’ll see an iconic Stanley tumbler. Whether you’re at the gym or in the office or even strolling the aisles of a grocery store, you’re likely to spot someone clutching one of these colorful, oversized water bottles. Maybe you’re even sipping from one right now as you read this. And no judgment here if you are – I’m sipping from one, too.  

The Stanley brand got its start back in 1913, when founder William Stanley introduced the world to the innovation of vacuum seal technology combined with a stainless steel bottle. With his invention, consumers could now keep their beverages hot or cold for hours at a time. This game-changing invention is how Stanley first made a name for itself as a premiere drinkware brand. 

Stanley’s range of products was initially marketed toward outdoorsmen and adventure-seekers. Pre-social media fame, you were more likely to see Stanley drinkware on a camping trip or at a construction site than in a yoga class. But all of that changed around 2017 when online influencers got their hands on them. 

The Viral Rise of the Stanley Tumbler 

Like most things that become popular nowadays, the Stanley tumbler phenomenon began on social media when Instagram influencers started posting about how obsessed they were with the oversized bottles. But that social media campaign wasn’t completely organic – it was actually engineered by a trio of savvy businesswomen.  

In 2017, The Buy Guide, an e-commerce site run by sisters Ashlee LeSueur and Taylor Cannon, along with their cousin Linley Hutchinson, began featuring the Stanley tumbler on their website. They noticed that whenever they promoted it, the drinkware would sell out fast. Ms. LeSueur told The New York Times, “Every time we linked it, it would sell out so quickly. We got so many pictures from teachers who all have them in their classrooms and from nurses’ stations with cups overflowing in different colors, and we knew we were onto something.”

This led them to a meeting with Bob Keller, the CEO of PMI Worldwide, Stanley’s parent company, as well as other members of PMI’s leadership team. According to LeSueur, the executives were not very excited to be meeting with “blogger girls,” but they eventually struck up a deal. Stanley would stock more colors of the tumbler on its website, and The Buy Guide would use affiliate marketing links to bring the Stanley brand to an entirely different market of consumers. LeSueur told Keller, “We promise you, it will sell. We will introduce this cup to an army of other influencers on Instagram, and it will blow your mind what women selling to women looks like.” 

She was right. From 2020 to 2021, tumbler sales increased by a whopping 275%. Stanley tumblers would consistently sell out fast, and every time that happened, thousands (sometimes hundreds of thousands!) of people signed up to be notified about when there was a restock. Influencers everywhere snapped up the colorful bottles and preached to their wide audiences about how great they were. 

Influencers are called influencers for a reason: They influence their followers to do something. In this case, they influenced hundreds of thousands of people (if not more) to buy an expensive water bottle. That power of influencer marketing only works due to an unconscious phenomenon that we all experience on a daily basis: mimetic desire. 

The Power of Mimetic Desire

When you decide to do or buy something new, you probably tell yourself that it’s for a very good reason. You sign up for a spinning class because you need the exercise. You splurge on Lululemon yoga pants because they’re high quality. You purchase an expensive pastel water bottle because you need a new water bottle and want to drink more water. That might be true on some level, but if you’re honest with yourself, the real reason you do these things has little to do with what you want and more to do with the behavior modeled by other people. 

We perceive things as having a higher value when we see that other people have them. You’re far less likely to buy something that no one else wants because then you’ll question its worth. If no one else wants it, then why should you? But if everyone wants something, then clearly it must be valuable in some way. This is the theory of mimetic desire, initially coined by French social theorist René Girard around 1959. 

We perceive something as having a higher value when we see that other people have it.

Girard believed that “We would like our desires to come from our deepest selves, our personal depths. But if it did, it would not be desire. Desire is always for something we feel we lack…Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind.”

The term mimetic comes from the Greek verb mimeisthai – to imitate – which is the root of the English word mimic. Our natural impulse to mirror the actions of those we perceive as high-status lies at the root of our desires. This theory explains the power that those colorful Stanley water bottles have over us. It’s not the tumblers themselves that we desire, per se, it’s the perceived value that the tumblers have, which has been imbued by other high-status people. Social media is the perfect medium to spread a contagion of mimetic desire, as it has done for far more brands than just Stanley. 

Are Stanley Tumblers Worth the Hefty Price Tag?

For a long time, I refused to buy a Stanley because I have enough water bottles as it is, and I thought it was ludicrous to spend $50 on yet another one. But then I decided to write this article and told myself that, for research purposes, I should purchase one. I was lying to myself, though. In reality, I simply caved. Even when you’re consciously aware of the power of mimetic desire, you can still fall prey to it. 

So I bought the damn tumbler, and you know what? I actually really like it. It holds a lot of water (I got the 40 oz. one), keeps it cold for a long time, fits in my car cup holder, and motivates me to drink more water. It’s also pretty, and I’m a girl and we like pretty things. Sometimes that alone is all the justification we need to spend $50 on a stupid water bottle. 

If you’ve been on the fence about buying one and have the $50 lying around, I say just do it. It’ll help you drink more water, it’ll make you happy, and it has a lifetime warranty so it’s a smart purchase. If your boyfriend or husband gives you a hard time, just tell him it’s an investment in your well-being. Who knows? Through the power of mimetic desire, you might just influence him to get one as well. 

Closing Thoughts

At the end of the day, a Stanley tumbler is just a water bottle. It’s a nice water bottle for sure, but there’s nothing super special about it apart from the fact that it holds a lot of water and keeps it cold for a long time, which many other water bottles can also do. The real power of Stanley lies not in the water bottles themselves, but in our perception of them in relation to our peers. 

Don’t miss anything! Sign up for our weekly newsletter and get curated content weekly!