Lifestylist Advisory

Coolest Cooler - the coolest thing to ever hit the tailgating scene, especially since it was being crowd funded by Kickstarter. Trend follower and Lifestylist I am I thought I'd give it a try.
In 2014 on the eve of my birthday I was online and read about the

Here we are almost 2 years later and this doesn't seem like such a great idea any more. No cooler, the company is out of money, and promises aren't being kept.

So what is a Coolest Cooler? According to their website "It's the Coolest." We beg to differ with them, but they go on to say that It's a cooler that also features a usb charger, Bluetooth speaker, LED Light Lid, bottle opener, and of course a blender. Sounds too good to be true doesn't it?



We kept getting promises, excuses, manufacturing problems, then it became clear that they pretty much just ran out of money. To make matters worse word got out that they were selling the cooler on Amazon (see above) and you could get one immediately even though over 2/3 of the 56,000 backers on Kickstarter (including us!) still had no end in sight as to when we would be receiving ours.

When I contacted the company with my concerns they said it would be possible to get a refund but when I said that was the recourse I wanted to take I was told that was no longer an option, then I got the news that until they got new investors, no more of the Coolest were being produced.

And then they made another huge mistake - I got an email that stated for $97.00 I could pretty much jump the line and get "expedited shipping" of my cooler. If they ever ship. Now the company is saying they need approximately $15 million to complete the existing orders, this is over and above the original $13 million they collected.

So what very expensive marketing lessons have we learned from this?

1. Do your homework. Sadly it's sounding like they took a cool idea and sold it, but didn't do the research to understand how much this was really going to cost.
2. Honesty is Everything. They have come back to backers numerous times asking for additional money for TShirts, extra batteries, etc now just to even get a cooler. Learning what I now have I have a feeling this money was going to overhead and they knew how much trouble the company was in. Don't tell me a can get a refund when in reality I can't. Would love to see where all of the original $13 million really went. If they have shipped 20,000 coolers using the original $13 million and they are out of money that means each of those 20,000 would have cost them at least $650 to manufacture.
3. Promises, Promises, Promises. As the saying goes, under promise, over deliver. We have had so many promises that haven't been kept it's hard to believe we will ever see what we paid for. If we were given realistic expectations from the beginning I would probably be cheering them on.

Would I participate in crowd funding again? At this point, sadly no. This had so much promise, but after going through the process with The Cooler I think I'd rather save my money and bet on a sure thing.