Meet Tamara Mekler | Co-Founder of Nutshell Coolers

We had the good fortune of connecting with Tamara Mekler and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Tamara, what is the most important factor behind your success?
Partnerships—they’ve been key to building an awesome product, and a passionate community. We started out as a graduate student design project working in partnership with the NGO Rare to improve the livelihood of food producers in the Philippines. From the very beginning we worked closely with fisherfolk and farmers, assessing new opportunities, exploring new materials, and testing new ideas.
Our strategy as designers has always been to test our coolers early and often, so we invited our users to be our co-designers from Day 1. We built dozens of prototypes and tested then in a wide range of settings. We had dairy distributors using our coolers at trade fairs, fishermen taking them out at sea, and friends strapping them down to their bike filled with picnic essentials. From each of those users we learned something new: from the folding design (now one of our most distinguishing features), to the materials and colors that would meet the performance and aesthetic needs of our customers.
We take a similar approach to our relationship with our industrial designers, manufacturers, and material suppliers. We share our vision with all of our partners and seek out their input, getting them involved in the development process, and excited about and invested in the success of our company. It’s been thanks to this approach that we’ve been able to build such a supportive group of advocates, advisors, and early-adopters that make up the Nutshell community.

What should our readers know about your business?
In a nutshell, we make coolers from coconuts.

Coconut husks are the leftover waste of the massive coconut industry. Billions are burned as waste every year in the Philippines alone, releasing tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. Yet the coconut husk was designed to keep coconuts cool and protected, and evolution has been perfecting this natural insulation for centuries. Instead of wasting this amazing resource, we upcycle it into insulation for the Nutshell Cooler: the modern, collapsible cooler for lovers of the outdoors. In doing so, we provide small-scale coconut farmers with an additional source of income, and we replace polluting plastic foam insulation too.

Our unique natural insulation material is the hero, and we’re also creating a better cooler from a design, and user experience perspective. Most coolers out there are bulky, heavy, and you hardly know what to do with it when not in use. Soft cooler bags try to address this but compromise on insulation performance. We don’t. Nutshell Coolers can be folded flat for easy storage, and can be carried over-the shoulder for convenience, all while keeping ice frozen for more than 48h, which is longer than the likes of Coleman and Yeti coolers like the Hopper.

Nutshell Coolers are thoughtfully-designed, and built to last decades, not millennia.

–
We started working on coolers nearly four years ago in the Philippines to help artisanal fisherfolk keep their catch fresh. While commercial boats have blast freezers and sport fishermen have swanky plastic ice chests, everyone else uses half-broken Styrofoam or damp towels. We set out to make a durable and affordable alternative with our partners at the conservation NGO Rare and classmates from Stanford University’s d.school.

What we didn’t anticipate as our products improved was the demand from outside the fishing world. Our coolers stand out, and we can’t walk a block without someone stopping to ask us what it’s made from and where to buy it. We designed our first cooler for small-scale fishermen in the Sulu Sea. Now, we have a chance to amplify our impact in the consumer market.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
Dr. Justino “Bo” Arboleda and Juboken Enterprises. We met Bo two years ago when we were looking for natural fiber suppliers in the Philippines. We had an inkling that coconut husks would be the key, but it felt like a wide gulf between the academic papers we’d read and the manufacturing capacity we needed. We traded emails with Bo and headed down to his coconut fiber factory a couple days later for what we thought was an introductory conversation. Bo and his team greeted us with a full working prototype.This can-do attitude is Bo’s defining feature, and we are privileged to partner with him and provide consistent revenue for his factory and his network of coconut farmers with the Nutshell Cooler.

Website: www.nutshellcoolers.com

Instagram: @nutshellcoolers

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/fortuna-cools

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nutshellcoolers/