🧠 Takeaways:
YETI is the best Outdoor biz and it’s barely above water. Here’s how we keep its generational run going.
Become the official drinkware sponsorship for every major sports league.
Co-brand an off-grid power dock w/ Jackery instead of building a battery biz YETI has no right to win ($33-81M EV)
Put real money behind the "24 hours" ice claims.
+ My new credit card stack
LBAB Community: My new Credit Card stack
For those who have been following for a while, you all know I love to have a good credit card stack. We haven't covered mine recently. We just had a lot of updates. I've completely gotten rid of the Bilt card, which no longer, and the Chase credit card, both just became too expensive. Instead, I replaced them with the Robin Hood Gold and Amazon Prime card.
The real key value of Robin Hood Gold is 3% cash back if you invest in Robin Hood, which I have some money there. Prime is 5% cash back on everything bought through Amazon. Those are by far the biggest value cards I've been able to find. Basically, everything other than my rent payment goes on one of those two credit cards. The tonnage of money that you just save and make back.
The other reason I really like Robin Hood Gold is that you can stack on 8% average returns on top of that 3% of money. It's much more valuable than just a basic points card.
Let’s Examine This Biz
Note: As always, none of what follows is legal, tax, investing, financial, or any other sort of advice. And I was never here 😉.
YETI (the cooler biz that now sells more cups than Coolers is a great business trapped in a mediocre stock.
Today we're figuring out why an operator's dream business has been a decade-long stock underperformer, and what actually closes that gap.
Financial Summary
Stock price: $51
Market Cap: $3.8B
L5 Performance: -41%
P/E Ratio: 52x
FY 2025 Financial Statements (YoY Comparison)
Rev: $1.9B (+2.1%) 😐
Gross Profits: $1.1B (+0.9%) 😐
OPEX: $859M (+5.0%) 😬
Net Income: $165M (-5.9%) 😬
FCF: $212M (-3.4%) 😐
Competitive Benchmarking (GAAP Only)
Metric | YETI | Traeger (COOK) | Newell O&R (NWL) | Helen of Troy H&O (HELE) |
Rev YoY | +2.1% | -7.4% | -6.7% | -6.4% |
GAAP Net Income | $165m | -$115.2M | Segment op loss, ~breakeven* | Segment op income, positive* |
Gross Margin | 57.4% | 39.2% | Not disclosed* | Not disclosed* |
*Newell and Helen of Troy Segment-level net income and gross margin aren't broken out in their 10-Ks,
TLDR Analysis: Great Operator, Mediocre Stock
Rev +2.1% while every named peer shrank. Traeger (COOK, -7.4%). Newell O&R (NWL, -6.7%). Helen of Troy H&O (HELE, -6.4%). YETI's the only one growing, and the only one with positive GAAP net income.
Gross margin still 57.4%. OPEX grew 5.0% against 2.1% rev growth. Costs are outrunning sales.
$297.8M in buybacks against net income down 5.9%. Share count did the work EPS should have done.
Great operator. Mediocre stock.
Let’s TLDR This Biz
Founded:
2006 by Roy and Ryan Seiders (Driftwood, Texas).
Two hunting/fishing brothers built a cooler that wouldn't crack under their own gear, because nothing on the market survived what they actually did with it.
Aha Moment:
2011, the grizzly bear video. Stuffed a Tundra with peanut butter and kippers, dropped it two stories, put it in a bear enclosure. The bear never got in.
Insight: nobody remembers a spec sheet. Everybody remembers a bear failing to open a cooler.
Growth:
DTC-led premiumization. Rambler drinkware took the cooler brand mainstream, DTC now 60.4% of revenue vs 8% in 2015.
International the current growth engine, +16.2% FY25, now 21.1% of sales, up from 16% three years ago.
Tailwind: category cachet plus a genuinely credible durability story competitors can't just copy.
Model:
Premium hardgoods, DTC-heavy, high gross margin (57.4%, 12-24 points above every named peer).
Two real categories: Drinkware (58.1% of rev) and Coolers & Equipment (40.1%).
Moat is brand trust built on actual engineering (IGBC-certified bear-resistant coolers), not just marketing spend.
Where We Are Now:
IPO'd back in 2018.
Stock near a fresh 52-week high, +45% over the last year, still up only 121% since IPO vs the S&P 500's 223%.
Market's excited about the recent beat-and-raise. Still hasn't closed a decade-long gap.
Let’s Fix This Biz
Here are the 3 ways we're turning YETI's brand equity into stock returns the market isn't pricing in yet.
1) Own the Cup
YETI already licenses NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, MLS, Collegiate merchandise.
Nobody owns "official drinkware partner" at any of them. More importantly no one is The official cup of any of the leagues.
Start with a pilot at 2-3 SEC football programs (Texas, Texas A&M, Georgia) and 3-4 MLB clubs in year one.
Fan buys a YETI stadium cup For better deals on refills throughout the season. Bring it back, every game It comes in their favorite team logo, and they can release different versions for different parts of the season and/or events.
Yeti turns the cost into a revenue opportunity. The fans get a high usage souvenir.
Reusable programs already cut disposable-cup and waste-hauling costs 30-40%. YETI can becomes the reusable program treating concession stands like another sales channel.
Cost:
$250K-$1.5M/yr per college program,
$1-3M/yr per MLB club.
Revenue: $1-2M/venue/yr once the habit sticks. Scale to 40-50 venues over 3 years: $50-80M/yr.
At 3x revenue multiple, that's $150-240M in EV. Sponsorship cost is a rounding error against that.
Takeaway:
2) Own Off the Grid
Yeti owns the outdoor camping brand to their customers. But they have no foothold in one of the largest + fastest growing Outdoor categories.
A $1,500 Jackery power station rattling around loose in a truck bed is exactly the unsolved problem YETI owns.
YETI has no business building a battery.
They can co-brand solar panel mounts and additions into their core cooler products to re-accelerate growth and Reignite growth from the energy part of the category. Attach a Jackery product to your cooler.
Accessories in adjacent categories typically run 8-12% of the core product's revenue. Apply that to the ~$4.5B global portable power market: $360-540M in accessory TAM.
Capture 3-5% off one co-branded partnership: $11-27M in revenue. At 3x, $33-81M in EV. Smaller than the cup play. Lower risk too. YETI isn't betting on tech it doesn't own.
Takeaway: Partner to win categories you need to win, but can’t produce in.
3) Launch the “Beat the Claim” competition
Customers on Social media claim their drinkware products insulate their beverages for "24 hours”.
While YETI doesn’t claim that they should lean into their customer lore to start a massive viral challenge where Yeti loyalists sell the product for them.
Launch a competition where the winner gets an incredible prize ($1m+) if they have the coolest/most unique example of how their Yeti drinkware is kept insulated for 24hrs+. The wilder the attempt, the better your odds.
Really channeling their OG marketing of the bear trying to break into their cooler which launched the biz.
Drinkware is Yeti at this point, but it’s a saturated market. They need to continue to find a way to differentiate themselves, not on price.
Takeaway: Motivate customers to use your product to the limit. Then tell their friends.
Final Thought
YETI is an ex of incredible biz, but a bad stock to own.
If you are a biz owner you have to study and follow this biz. But as an investor this stock is a dog.
About a decade ago I was a fan. Loved the brand. Knew it was going to be a killer brand and thought it was going to be a great investment.
Luckily I traded out quickly for other opportunities.
It wasn't. Since the October 2018 IPO, YETI's up 121%. Over the same time period the S&P 500's up 223%.
That’s a core challenge with most consumer brands. It takes them so long to become massive (typically 20-30 years) that you’re better off Voo and chilling.
If you own this business outright and you're the one pulling profit out of it, build it. YETI is the ultimate goals. This is a top 5 Consumer brand of the past 2 decades. But it won’t be reflected in the stock price until the 2040s.
