BottleKeeper: Here's What Happened After Shark Tank

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When  Adam Callinan went into business with fellow entrepreneur and cousin Matt Campbell, he wasn't interested in 100-hour work weeks. Instead, he sought enough flexibility to travel for months at a time and to spend three hours a day taking advantage of his local California beaches by going surfing. So it's probably no surprise that the two men focused on solving a problem associated with a more leisurely lifestyle: how to keep beer from getting warm while lounging on the beach on a sunny day. The solution was Bottlekeeper, a neoprene-insulated, stainless steel container that a single bottle of beer could slip into and remain cold for several hours.

That product suited Callinan well. "I built the company around a lifestyle, instead of building a lifestyle around a company," he told Money. The product, luckily for Callinan, proved to be a pretty easy sale. The company, which launched in 2013, sold $8 million worth of product in its third year. By 2018, after focusing solely on direct-to-consumer sales, Callinan and Campbell were looking to expand into retail and to improve their profitability. With a $20 million valuation, the cousins appeared on "Shark Tank" on the show's 10th season, seeking a $1 million investment in exchange for 5% of the company.

Bottlekeeper wasn't the first or only product to appear on "Shark Tank" with a way to keep beer cold. Others included Kanga's Kase Mate, which could keep beverages cold up to seven hours without ice, and Beer Blizzard, a small, round ice pack that fit into the concave bottom of a beer can. Perhaps that's why the Sharks seemed a little apprehensive when Adam Callinan started his pitch explaining that he and cousin Matt Campbell had come with a solution to an "epidemic that has plagued the world for centuries, maybe even for decades." (via YouTube). The epidemic, he said, "is, of course, warm beer."

But the Sharks started to come around when the cousins and best friends demonstrated that the patented Bottlekeeper not only kept the beer cold but also prevented the bottle from breaking. They showcased the latter feature by asking guest Shark and baseball All-Star Alex Rodriguez to throw a ball at a line of bottles in BottleKeepers. They came up with the idea after watching and rewatching old episodes of the show and realized that fun pitches often turned into winning pitches. The panel of investors was even more impressed when the co-founders shared their sales figures: $1 million in the 10 days before the taping, $2 million in the 30 days before taping, and over $30 million in previous last five years. The product was marketed primarily through Facebook.

Although Kevin O'Leary found the $20 million valuation aggressive, and Mark Cuban said, "This is what I call a schmutz deal," both made offers in partnership with other Sharks — Alex Rodriguez and Lori Greiner, respectively. The offers involved some cash investment and royalties on each unit sold. After some negotiation, the cousins agreed to a partnership with Cuban and Greiner, including $1 million investment for 5% of the company and $1.50 royalty per unit until they recovered $2 million.

If sales at BottleKeeper weren't already high enough, they spiked even further after the episode aired — by 300%. Although Adam Callinan would later say that Bottlekeeper purposely declined retailers' requests to sell the product. "We couldn't figure out how to automate the process," he wrote in Inc. The episode's reruns on CNBC continued to drive sales, Callinan wrote in a LinkedIn post: "It's like the free customer acquisition gift that keeps on givin', the whole year round."

Unfortunately, the deal with Mark Cuban and Lori Greiner fell through after six months of due diligence. Greiner "only wanted to put us on QVC, which didn't match our brand," Callinan wrote (per LinkedIn). He also claimed that he and Campbell never interacted with Cuban after the taping and only dealt with his team, which, he hinted, was not easy to work with. While they did try to work out a consulting agreement with the former Mavericks owner in exchange for 2% of the company over two years, structuring the deal ultimately became complicated. 

In the following years, the company introduced several new products, including the CanKeeper, which fit 12- to 16-ounce cans, as well as slims; the Chill Keeper, a nylon cooler that came in 16- and 32-can sizes; PintKeeper, a 20-ounce container with a wide-mouth lid designed to keep beverages cold or hot. BottleKeeper also made the Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing companies in 2019. Another "Shark Tank" company, Like Air, would go on to join Inc.'s Female Founders 500 list in 2024.

In 2021, BottleKeeper was sold to Wind Point Partners and RTIC Outdoors as an "eight-figure business," according to Matt Campbell (per LinkedIn). Wind Point is a Chicago-based private equity company. RTIC launched in 2014, selling coolers, and has now expanded into outdoor gear and drinkwear. Although RTIC originally said it would sell Bottlekeeper and CanKeeper products on its website, there are currently no products listed under those specific names. It does, however, have a pint tumbler, bottle chiller, and can chillers in a variety of sizes — all of which are quite similar to the Bottlekeeper products. Bottlekeeper is not listed as one of WindPoint's portfolio companies.

If you're still interested in the original versions, you can still purchase the PintKeeper and CanKeeper from Amazon, but the BottleKeeper itself does not appear to be available. There are also several copycats, unsurprising given that one of the issues raised during the cousins' "Shark Tank" appearance was the preponderance of copycat products readily available. The BottleKeeper founders explained that one of their large expenditures was the $500,000 they spent fighting intellectual property infringement.

Adam Callinan and Matt Campbell are now trying to share the lessons they learned as entrepreneurs and from their "Shark Tank" appearance with others. In 2023, Callinan founded Pentane, a company offering the type of profitability system and efficiency software he wished he had during his tenure at BottleKeeper. He shares the insights he gleaned from his time at BottleKeeper and at a medical tech company he also founded and sold by writing columns for Inc.

Campbell, who describes himself as a serial entrepreneur, is now chief operating officer of Lukrom, a real estate lending company. Based in Phoenix, he now says he is grateful for the experience he had building BottleKeeper. Sharing a favorite quote from hockey star Wayne Gretzky –-  "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take" –- with Authority magazine, Campbell added, "If we didn't take our chance, we would've missed out on a great opportunity."