Let’s talk about a surprisingly low-key product: the Ringo water bottle. No electronics, no app—just a magnetic ring holder at the top. It’s priced at nearly twice the cost of big names like Stanley or Hydro Flask. Yet in its very first month on Kickstarter, the campaign pulled in $330K in funding. And today, the brand is bringing in an estimated $1M+ in annual revenue.
Endless Scenes, One Bottle
Ringo essentially took Apple’s magnetic tech idea and turned it into a water bottle that doubles as a MagSafe phone stand. For non-MagSafe phones, they offer a matching magnetic ring that works the same way. People are always drinking water and checking their phones. Ringo simply merges those two habits.
At the gym, users prop it up to track workouts or follow along with a trainer. Outdoors, it doubles as a sturdy stand for filming content or FaceTiming with friends. On flights, it holds the screen at just the right angle for binge-watching shows. And in everyday life, from makeup tutorials to campus study sessions to family calls, it just fits right in.
Priced 2X Higher Than Stanley
Ringo’s 24oz bottle typically sells for $49. Compared to mainstream brands like Hydro Flask, Yeti, or Stanley, that’s roughly 50% more expensive. And the latest Pro with a straw? Nearly double the price of a regular Stanley bottle. Yet somehow, this brand is pulling in an estimated around $1.5M a year. All that from a single clever twist—the magnetic ring holder. Can just that really create such a massive premium?
To figure it out, we dug into how they actually sell. Ringo has all the standard channels covered: its own website, Amazon, Facebook & Instagram shops, TikTok Shop. On Amazon, sales around 500 units a month, and their site gets about 1.2k visits monthly. Not exactly the traffic you’d expect behind a million-dollar brand.
So the real question is: what’s powering those numbers?
What's The Real Engine of Revenue?
We can already sense the play when we look at Ringo’s social media footprint. Unlike most consumer brands that blast Instagram or TikTok with lifestyle posts, Ringo uses LinkedIn to spotlight one thing: their wholesale and corporate partners. That’s where the real engine is. Because at the end of the day, their focus isn’t just selling bottles one by one. It’s pitching business clients who want products that merge hydration with phone use, wrapped in a sleek, tech-forward, premium lifestyle vibe.
Here are a few standout examples:
- Apple ft. Snoopy: this collab positioned Ringo almost like an accessory alongside AirPods.
- Equinox: luxury gyms where influencers and fitness pros hang out, the perfect fit for the “hydration + phone stand” use case.
- Bala: the trendy home fitness brand with its own guided workout content, where Ringo fits seamlessly into Bala users’ routines.
- Ladder: a fitness training app, aligning Ringo with functional fitness gear that users actually use.
- Naturium: a skincare brand,where Ringo bottle doubles as a phone stand in everyday beauty routine (following a makeup tutorial or filming your own.)
Most of these editions sell online. But Ringo is also smart about picking offline partners that reinforce its premium positioning. From LIV Golf (a modern, high-profile sports event) to luxury hotels like St. Regis New York, each partnership works as a co-branded campaign. What looks like B2B partnerships actually builds Ringo’s consumer image—a cooler, tech-forward, premium lifestyle brand.
Behind the Supply Chain
The product’s core hook is its 90° rotating magnetic ring. According to Amazon’s listing, the bottle is made in China, which suggests both the stainless-steel body and the key components are manufactured there. Though Ringo hasn’t revealed its suppliers, a noteworthy detail came during the early Kickstarter phase: they partnered with a laptop hinge manufacturer to engineer the magnetic lid. A clever way to borrow proven hardware expertise.
That wasn’t by accident. Founder Chris Place wasn’t new to launching products. Before Ringo, he had already run a few projects via Kickstarter, including a smart lunchbox and a lightweight cast-iron pan. Those experiences gave him a full playbook from raising capital, to prototyping, tooling, and eventually scaling into mass production.
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