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Behind the Scenes of Yeti's Top Secret Innovation Center

It seems impossible that something as mundane as a cooler could become a status symbol among fishermen, rodeo cowboys and tailgating college students. But since 2006, Yeti has been creating products that are so singular in their durability, they manage to transcend their intended purpose.

Yeti's flagship cooler, the Tundra, wraps two inches of pressure-injected polyurethane insulation inside a virtually indestructible, certified-bear-proof rotomolded plastic body. For the launch of the product, Yeti created a series of YouTube videos pitting the Tundra against a 500-pound strongman, a grizzly bear, fireworks and a supersized slingshot. In all instances, the hard-sided cooler was little more than lightly scuffed - and still wholly functional.

The Tundra's much-lauded ice retention was, in many ways, a secondary priority. Yeti founders Roy and Ryan Seiders were most concerned with creating a more durable casting platform for their fishing skiff - an alternative to the breakage-prone mass-market coolers they had long been using. Yeti spent two years iterating and improving upon its original hard cooler before arriving at the Tundra in 2008. A decade after Yeti's founding, the company was valued at $5 billion. The Tundra remains its most recognizable product, and durability continues to form the backbone of everything it creates.

But for Yeti to grow, it couldn't spend two years perfecting every new product. Prototyping services and destruction testing were outsourced; the back-and-forth communication and sample development took time. Bringing both product development and testing in-house would not only streamline Yeti's operations, but accelerate them. It would allow the brand greater control over its products, and open doors for what Yeti could create.

And so in August 2016, after more than two years of planning, Yeti opened its Innovation Center, a dedicated prototyping and product-development facility. The unmarked building sits in a corporate office park shared with an engineering lab, a few miles down the road from Yeti's headquarters in Austin, Texas. The building's one-way windows conceal a dedicated 10-person product-development team and millions of dollars of equipment - high-powered, complex machinery that most consumer-products companies would only dream of owning.

Yeti's Rambler drinkware is marketed as 'virtually indestructible.' But under 14,000 pounds of force, the insulated stainless steel tumbler crimps down into condensed ridges until it resembles the body of a soup can. Such power is hard to generate short of using a hydraulic press; the only way to see a Yeti product - any of its products - in such a state is to visit the Innovation Center. And even then, Yeti is notoriously protective, to the point of being secretive, of the circumstances in which the remains of destructive testing are seen, and by whom. It's not just consumers that Yeti is cautious around; only a handful of Yeti employees are aware of the Innovation Center's existence, and even fewer have access to it.

As Yeti has gained prominence, copycat brands have emerged. The company has sued both retailers and competitors for patent infringement - Walmart and The Home Depot for selling imitations of its Rambler drinkware, and Bayou Ice Boxes, Mammoth Coolers, and RTIC, among others, for too closely mirroring the Tundra. 'We vigorously and actively defend our intellectual property,' Reintjes says. 'But we believe that the offensive strategy is to continue to be the innovation leader and to stay ahead.' The Innovation Center has become Yeti's secret weapon. New designs and materials are contained under one roof until just before launch, allowing Yeti unprecedented control over its products.