Everybody loves a Yogi!

This began as an irritation, not a business plan.

Whatever I drank out of a stainless steel tumbler tasted like the tumbler. Coffee had a metallic edge. Water tasted faintly like a spoon. Once I noticed it, I couldn't stop noticing it.

Everyone had just accepted this — insulated drinkware means stainless steel, and stainless steel means your drink sits against bare metal for hours. I thought that was solvable.

About the name

Yogi is our family dog, a Lhasa Apso — a breed that's supposed to top out around fifteen pounds. Yogi is forty. His sister Lola is thirty-three. Nobody has explained this to us.

He has an uncanny resemblance to a grizzly bear cub. Strangers stop us to ask what he is, and the giveaway is always the tail — bears don't have a curled tail like that. Lhasa Apsos do.

Resilience, ruggedness, strength, and undeniable charm. That's Yogi, and it's what we wanted the company to stand for. Our tumblers are built the same way — sturdier than they strictly need to be, made to take a knock, still going years later.

We live on Liberty Lake and put nearly a hundred laps around this little lake every season. Yogi and Lola are on every one of them, and so are our tumblers. Whatever we're drinking, no metal taste. Much better ride than it used to be.

That's Yogi on our logo.

What we made

Every Yogi is ceramic-lined. Not one premium model with a ceramic option — all of them, every size, every color.

We build these from the inside out. Most drinkware starts with the shell and treats the interior as whatever the manufacturing process leaves behind. We started with the surface your drink touches and worked outward from there.

Underneath the lining is double-wall vacuum-insulated stainless steel, doing what stainless does best: ice up to 48 hours, hot drinks through the morning, and a shell that survives real life. Ceramic is non-reactive and non-porous, so coffee tastes like coffee and nothing lingers from yesterday.

Lining a tumbler to the rim is harder to manufacture than stopping short of it, and I was advised more than once to leave the top edge bare like most brands do. I said no every time. If your lips touch bare metal every time you drink, the lining isn't doing its job.

We've gone further since. No exposed metal anywhere on the current generation — right down to the threads. There's no point on a Yogi where metal meets your drink or your mouth.

What we found along the way

I set out to fix a taste problem. Then the emails started arriving, and they weren't about taste.

Millions of people have a metal allergy — nickel is one of the most common contact allergens there is. Many of them can't drink from stainless steel at all. Others drank from it for years, found out why they'd been reacting, and stopped.

They'd given up on insulated drinkware entirely. Glass at home, plastic bottles in the car, nothing that kept a drink cold. One customer wrote that she'd spent years looking for a cup that would keep water cold without nickel in it, because a medical condition meant she needed to drink far more than most people.

I hadn't built it for them. They found us, and then explained what we'd made.

That's the honest version of this story, and it's the part that means the most.

How we do things

Choosing a Yogi means supporting a small American business in Liberty Lake, Washington. That's not a slogan — it changes what happens after you order. Every order is handled with care, packed properly, and out the door quickly, and it arrives with a personal touch you won't get from a warehouse the size of a town.

Nothing disappears into a queue, either. I see a summary of every customer conversation, every day, and I get involved when it matters.

We also price these deliberately. A Yogi is built to a super premium standard and priced below what the multinationals charge for less. We'd rather sell more of them at a price people can live with than fewer at a number that only works for a marketing budget.

Every Yogi is covered by a lifetime warranty. If something goes wrong, we fix it. And parts are sold individually, because a broken $5 spout shouldn't mean a $40 tumbler in the bin.

That's the whole of our credo, really: treat people the way we'd expect to be treated. Make a great product, stand behind it, and sort out problems when they come up instead of explaining why they're not our fault.

We also answer the hard questions plainly — including when the answer is "we don't know yet."

Where we're going

We're growing fast, and nowhere near finished.

• Evolution — the everyday tumbler, 24, 30 and 40oz
• Elements — 16oz, made for coffee
• VoyagerOne — 12oz tumbler, can and bottle insulator in one
• Yogi Go! — carry it hands-free

There's more on the drawing board — new products, new categories, and a roadmap I'm genuinely excited about. The principle stays the same: nothing metal touches your drink.

More than 15,000 people have made the switch so far. New colors and new products land regularly, and our newsletter is where they show up first — usually before anyone else hears about them.

Come along for the ride. Yogi and Lola will be on the boat.

Shop the range →

Questions about the ceramic, the materials, or whether a Yogi suits your situation? Email us. We read everything that comes in, and you'll get a proper answer.

Jeff O'Shea

Founder, Yogi — Liberty Lake, WA