The first Yeti coolers arrived in America in the spring of 2008. They had spent weeks at sea, traveling from a factory in the Philippines to a leased warehouse in the hills south of Austin, Texas. Molded from a single piece of plastic, the coolers were porcelain white, with two black latches that gave them the rugged, field-ready look of an old Willys Jeep.
The 65-quart model of the cooler, the Yeti Tundra, was three times sturdier than lesser brands, and retailed for around $300. If you put a block of ice in one on a Monday, the payload would still be cold that Friday. Stout enough to withstand the prying jaws of a grizzly bear, the Tundra also looked right at home in your backyard on game day, a couple dozen Lone Star beers up to their necks in slush. It was perhaps the greatest ice box in the history of humankind.
Demand for the Tundra quickly exceeded expectations. Before long, a shipping container's worth of the coolers was arriving from the Philippines every week.
Two years had passed since Roy and Ryan Seiders (pronounced SEE-ders) launched Yeti out of their father's backyard, just a few miles down the road from the warehouse. Roy, 31 and fresh out of business school, was the company's pioneer with a passion for product development. Ryan, three years older, was the outdoorsman of the family. Scruffy and charming, he made the rounds at hunting and fishing shows, and lent Yeti its backwoods authenticity.
But the Seiders brothers didn't create the Tundra alone. They borrowed design tricks and styling from the best coolers on the market. And they brought it all together with the help of a collaborator who seldom makes an appearance in the company's legend — Ivan Royal Brown, a gifted Australian designer who produced the Yetis at his Outback Five Star factory in the Philippines. During those early months of 2008, Roy and Ivan spoke daily, working out the kinks in the new cooler and fine-tuning its manufacture on the fly.
One day that September, Roy emailed Ivan a question. When he didn't receive an immediate response, he grew concerned. "It wasn't like him," Roy recalls. He eventually managed to get in touch with Ivan's new wife, Gloria, who broke the shocking news: Ivan had been murdered, she said, shot four times while driving home from the factory.
Roy put down the phone and felt sick to his stomach. Not only had he lost his friend and mentor, but the future of his new company was now in jeopardy. "We didn't have a whole lot of confidence that we could move forward without him," he recalls.
As the brothers grappled with the fallout from the tragedy, things grew even more dire. Ivan had died without a will, and it wasn't clear who was in charge at the factory, putting the entire production line in jeopardy. Six months after Yeti's launch, it looked as though the cooler would vanish from store shelves just as suddenly as it had arrived.
Today, Yeti is worth $3.5 billion. This is the untold chapter of one of the great success stories in American business, and how it was very nearly stopped in its tracks.
Cold things don't stay cold for long in the Texas Hill Country. Summer here begins in April, when porch thermometers hit the 90s. For the next six months, you could fry a tortilla on your dashboard and dip it in the hot queso in your cup holder. If you're out working in that heat, all you can think about is your next ice-cold drink.
At the Seiders' home in Driftwood, 20 miles southwest of Austin, Roger — the family's 79-year-old patriarch — keeps a refrigerator out back stocked with cold drinks for the UPS drivers when they stop by with a delivery. "They can have anything they want, except for beer," Roger tells me one afternoon as we rock in a swinging chair, watching a parched driver make his way to the fridge. That's Texas hospitality for you. It's something Roger always tried to instill in his four kids, including Ryan and Roy.
The brothers were Texans before the state of Texas existed. Eight generations later, their name still means something to old-timers. "When they decide to build something, it's top shelf, the best you can get," says Jay McBride, who runs the fishing department at McBride's Guns, an Austin institution since 1960.
Back in 1977, when Roger was working as a high school shop instructor, his search for a flexible epoxy finish that wouldn't crack on his fishing rods led him to start his own business. Today, Flex Coat sells up to $1 million of product each year. "I never dreamed it would be so big," he says.
Just like their old man, Ryan and Roy loved to brainstorm ways to improve the products they depended upon. After Ryan graduated from Texas A&M in 1996 with a degree in wildlife management, he started a specialty fishing rod company, Waterloo Rods, in Roger's backyard shop. The 10-foot Launcher could fling a line over 100 yards, while the Scrape Rod was tough enough for fishing in thick grass. Fishing celebrities like Flip Pallot, host of "The Walker's Cay Chronicles" on ESPN, would phone Ryan up for gear advice and invite him out turkey hunting.
After Roy completed his degree in management information systems at Texas Tech, he, too, returned to the Austin area determined to follow in his father's footsteps. "I had this passion for wanting to do something on my own like my dad," he tells me. "I knew I wanted to start my own business." He loved being out on his boat, and he became preoccupied with designing a cooler that could double as a casting platform — one durable enough to withstand his adrenaline-charged style of fishing.
The best coolers on the market came from Australia, where packing up the Land Rover and "going bush" was a national pastime. While American coolers were typically manufactured by injecting melted plastic into a static mold, high-end Australian coolers — "eskies" in Aussi slang — deployed a technique called rotational molding, which produced stronger coolers with more complex designs and fewer material flaws.
The closest approximation to an eskie you could find in American stores was the Icey-Tek. Roy tracked down the man who was importing them from Thailand and suggested they team up. But he wound up being more impressed with the cooler than with his new business partner. So he decided to partner with Ryan and strike his own import deal with the producers of Icey-Tek. Ryan invested $130,000, and the brothers shared an email address and a single desk. To brand their cooler, they looked for a name that would evoke a harsh terrain — and that would look good on a hat or a T-shirt.
Yeti, they would call it — as in the Himalayan ice monster. "We may not have found the Yeti," they wrote on their website, "but we make a really great ice-chest."
And it was a great ice chest. But it was a far cry from perfect. The original Yeti, which the brothers called the Roughneck, was boxy and utilitarian. The sharp corners were no fun to bang a knee on. Some of the coolers had a puzzling red stain on the bottom.
That's when Ivan Brown entered the picture.
In 2006, the Seiders brothers traveled to Thailand to see the production of their coolers up close. The disappointing results suddenly made sense. Production was sloppy and haphazard. Workers at the factory were plopping fresh coolers onto the red dirt floor, which explained the stains.
As the brothers tried to figure out how to fix the problem, the name they kept coming back to was Ivan, an Aussie designer whose work was a cut above everyone else they knew. From his factory in the Philippines, he could manufacture a cooler or a kayak or a truck camper shell at a fraction of what it would cost in America. So Roy and Ryan set up a meeting and hopped on a flight from Bangkok to Manilla. Within hours they were in a car with Ivan, driving south toward his factory in Angeles City.
Ivan "was a terrific designer, but hopeless in business," his brother Malcolm recalls. "Every dollar Ivan earned, he spent two."
After the factory tour in Thailand, Ivan's production line was a welcome sight. Cement floors meant no more red stains. Like the Roughneck, Ivan's Downunder coolers were constructed from a single piece of plastic, for strength. But they also had rounded-off corners and other thoughtful features, such as rubber feet to prevent them from sliding on a boat deck and a removable basket to keep food from getting wet.
What's more, Roy and Ryan recognized a kindred spirit. Ivan was the kind of guy who enjoyed being outdoors, and he wanted to make stuff that worked, stuff you could pass on to your kids. And, like Yeti, his was a family business.
Ivan had been in his 50s when he decamped for the Philippines, seeking a new start. Back in Australia, he had launched a business manufacturing auto accessories, including fiberglass tops for trucks. "He was a risk-taker," recalls his first wife, Suzanne Handley. His self-confidence only grew when he obtained a patent for a flip-up sunroof he had created, which would go on to receive a prestigious Australian design award.
The problem was, Ivan had a habit of living beyond his means. He had a thing for flashy watches and nice restaurants. "The more you earn, the more you need," he liked to tell his eldest daughter, Clare. He ran up so many debts that tax collectors and creditors spent years pursuing him in Queensland courts. "He was a terrific designer, but hopeless in business," says Malcolm, Ivan's younger brother.
Like Roy and Ryan, Ivan and Malcolm were tight. Malcolm, who made a small fortune in trucking, supported Ivan through the lean times. The two brothers bought homes facing each other at a marina on the outskirts of Brisbane. "I could look into his kitchen," Malcolm says.
Amid his financial troubles, Ivan's marriage to Suzanne disintegrated, and the separation left a wedge between him and his daughters. The Philippines, which had a thriving Australian expat community and generous tax benefits for foreign entrepreneurs, offered a chance to start over.
But it was also a dangerous place to do business. The murder rate was four times greater than in Australia, and it was said that a killer could be hired for as little as $500. Filipino police and prosecutors tended to favor the well-connected, and many expats opted to live in gated communities under 24-hour security.
Ivan convinced Malcolm to join him. Divorced and bored with life in Queensland, Malcolm jumped at the chance for an adventure — and, perhaps, to make another fortune. In 1999, the brothers signed the papers establishing Outback Five Star. The company's articles of incorporation listed Ivan as president and Malcolm as vice president. Each received an equal share in the venture, splitting 99.2% of the stock.
Malcolm signed the lease on Outback's factory, a long metal building with a peaked roof. It was located at the Clark Freeport, a former US military base in Angeles City that had been transformed into a tax-free zone.
Angeles City, the vice capital of the Philippines, was a dizzying wonderland where you always had to be looking over your shoulder.
But the company struggled to survive. From 2004 to 2006, according to financial records, it lost nearly $150,000. "Every dollar Ivan earned, he spent two," Malcolm recalls. "It got so tight that we were making cello cases to survive." Since Ivan was essentially bankrupt, Malcolm had to tap his personal funds to cover payroll and buy equipment.
By the time the two brothers from Texas showed up on Outback's factory floor, the two brothers from Australia were barely scraping by.
On that initial visit, the straight-laced Seiders brothers weren't exactly taken with Angeles City. As much as Roy enjoyed Ivan's company, he was grateful Ryan was with him. "I was not about to go to the Philippines by myself," he recalls. Angeles City was the Wild East, the vice capital of the Philippines, a dizzying wonderland where you always had to be looking over your shoulder.
Malcolm could see how uncomfortable Roy and Ryan were one humid evening when Ivan took them out to the Tom Cat, a seedy nightclub Malcolm owned on a neon-lit street known as "Blow Row." Like many expat hangouts, the Tom Cat swarmed with bikini-clad girls and white-haired men. Foreigners looking for sex would pay $20 to escort girls to a more intimate setting, where further transactions might ensue.
Malcolm isn't shy about admitting that profits from the sex trade helped keep Outback afloat. He insists that the girls at his bars were of age and there of their own free will, but stories of sex trafficking are common in the Philippines. "Everybody portrays it as a sleazy business," Malcolm says. "But I looked at it as the matchmaking business."
According to Malcolm and other family members, it was under such circumstances that Ivan met his future wife, Gloria. In October 1998, Malcolm was celebrating his 48th birthday at the Firehouse, a bar in Manila's red-light district. Gloria, then a single mother, was there that night. Ivan bought Gloria a drink and, by Malcolm's telling, took her to Swagman's, an Australian-themed hotel nearby, where they spent the night.
To those who witnessed their courtship, there was no doubt that Ivan was enamored of Gloria. "She was the only girl I ever saw him with," says Bryan Hammer, an American businessman who assisted Ivan and Malcolm in establishing Outback. But Hammer wondered if the feeling was mutual. "She was mean to him, even in public."
As Ivan and Gloria's relationship developed, she became increasingly entwined in his business. Under Philippine law, the role of corporate secretary at a foreign company must be filled by a Filipino. By the time Roy and Ryan Seiders showed up, Gloria had taken on that role at Outback, giving her the power to review and sign off on the company's financial records. Her influence expanded further when Ivan decided to buy a home. Since foreigners couldn't buy property, it would need to be in Gloria's name. So Ivan asked Malcolm to temporarily transfer his half of the company to Gloria, effectively padding her assets so she could qualify for a mortgage.
The details of what happened next are murky. Over the next six months, a confusing game of musical chairs ensued. In addition to Gloria's recently acquired shares, three members of her family — her daughter, her future son-in-law, and her half-sister — were awarded positions as dummy shareholders in the company. In the process, Gloria went from owning less than 1% of Outback's stock to controlling a majority of the company.
In 2008, in the midst of all the stock reshuffling, Ivan and Gloria surprised their friends when an ordinary party was revealed to be their nuptials. After nine years together, they were at last husband and wife.
But a few weeks after the wedding, Outback's fortunes took another turn. Ivan evidently hadn't known about the stock transfers until his accountant brought them to his attention — and he wasn't happy about it. On May 2, 2008, he wrote the Philippines Securities and Exchange Commission: "This is to inform you that GLORIA F. BROWN has resigned as Corporate Secretary." Malcolm reclaimed his shares in the company and his title as vice president. The remaining dummy shares were transferred to three members of Malcolm's extended family. Gloria was left with nothing in her own name, apart from her joint assets through marriage.
In late 2007, a few months before Ivan and Gloria's wedding, the Seiders brothers had returned to Angeles City, where they spent 10 days at Outback's headquarters. As monsoon rains pounded on the factory roof, Ivan and Roy hustled back and forth between the office and the production floor where the workers would fabricate prototypes out of Bondo putty and fiberglass. "These guys are artists," Roy says. "It was a ton of fun."
Ivan showed them how he had improved the design of his Downunder cooler. He had bulked up the foam insulation, given it a leak-proof drain plug, integrated the hinge to make it more robust, and added a freezer-style gasket for a better seal. Roy and Ryan incorporated those same ideas into the Tundra. They also borrowed the contours from Ivan's line of fiberglass coolers and extended the hinge to stretch the full length of the back of the cooler. "For whatever reason, I just liked that look," Roy says.
Some of the old Icey-Tek features, including the rope handles and tie-down slots on the base of the cooler, also made it into the new design. "That was a big deal," Roy says. "Being able to strap your cooler down and still open and close the lid." All the tinkering reminded him of the projects he had worked on in his father's workshop, but on a much larger scale. "After four years being in the cooler business, I had all these ideas built up in my head about what makes a perfect cooler," Roy recalls. "I saw this opportunity to build a cooler from the ground up."
The collaboration also worked out well for Ivan. By the time the Tundras started popping out of their molds in April 2008, he was on the path to financial success. Outback, which employed some 150 workers, soon hit $1.5 million in sales, with another half million in assets. "He was turning a corner and starting to make money," Malcolm says.
On the afternoon of September 23, 2008, Ivan left work and climbed into his forest green Toyota Land Cruiser. The sky was hazy and rain droplets flecked against the windshield as Ivan crossed the two-lane Friendship Bridge and neared his turn-off to his home. Suddenly, a Honda motorbike zipped up along his left side, as if to pass. There were two men on the bike, their faces hidden by helmets.
The rider in back raised a 45-caliber handgun and fired at least four shots through the window of Ivan's Land Cruiser. The car veered off the road and rear-ended another motorcycle, sending its driver tumbling onto the ground, before slamming into the wall of the Serra Monte Lodge, an establishment that rents rooms by the hour. Ivan slumped in his seat. Blood pooled in his mouth and soaked into the fabric of his plaid shirt.
Malcolm, who lived in the same gated community as Ivan and Gloria, was at home when a friend called to say that a green Land Cruiser had been in an accident on the main road. Malcolm rushed over to his brother's house, but no one answered the door. He was getting ready to drive to the scene of the accident when Gloria appeared. Ivan had already been taken to the mortuary, she told him. Together, they drove off to see Ivan's body.
The next morning, Malcolm got to the factory at around seven. As vice president, he felt he had to assume the reins at Outback. He told the employees to go home until Ivan's affairs were sorted, and left.
But within the hour, Gloria arrived and announced that she was in charge. She countermanded Malcolm's decision: The factory, she said, would stay open. "I asked Gloria what gave her the right to say this," Malcolm said in a statement prepared for legal filings. Gloria responded that she was now the president and major shareholder.
That afternoon, after meeting with his lawyer, Malcolm returned to the factory with his son and placed a padlock on the factory's gate. But the next time they came back, the lock had been cut. An armed guard pointed a gun at Malcolm and his son and ordered them to leave.
As Gloria and Malcolm battled for control of the company, production ground to a halt. Outback's accounts were frozen, and employees could not be paid.
Gloria appealed to the bank to grant her full access to the company's funds. "My husband, Ivan Brown, had long speculated on his fate (he was brutally murdered by still unknown assailants)," she wrote. "He indeed made sure that the corporation's papers are in order and that I can easily take charge of its operations. Unfortunately, greed and opportunity prevailed over the mind of Mr. Malcolm Brown and his cohorts." (Gloria and Outback did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
Eight thousand miles away in Texas, the Seiders brothers had begun a frantic search for alternative suppliers, hopping on planes and visiting other factories. Their business had just gotten off the ground, and suddenly its entire future was at risk. But given their relationship with Ivan, they were still hoping they could stick with Outback.
"If the factory cannot supply soon, Yeti will lose US market share and it will be almost impossible to recover," they emailed Malcolm. "If this fight continues it will inevitably get tied up in Philippine courts for many more weeks if not months and therefore everybody loses. Could you help us by temporarily allowing the factory to resume production while resolving ownership?"
Malcolm was incensed. "Ivan was murdered for greed," he replied. "I will continue to fight for what he would have wanted me to do… You guys are more than welcome to find alternative suppliers for your market if you wish to do so."
"We too have a strong feeling for finding justice for Ivan," the brothers wrote back. "But also, continuing the successful manufacturing business that he has started."
"As tragic as Ivan's death was," Roy Seiders said, "all of a sudden we are a much stronger company."
From the start, police considered Ivan's killing a textbook murder-for-hire. But without a murder weapon or any forensic evidence, they had little to go on. The most promising lead came after Malcolm offered a $20,000 reward for information leading to an arrest.
A cigarette vendor came forward, claiming to have seen the trigger man before he put his helmet on. According to police, when the vendor was shown a book of criminals known as the "Rogue's Gallery," he picked out a Maoist guerrilla named Alvin Salas, suspected to be a member of a "gun-for-hire" gang. That October, the Northern Philippine Times reported that police had filed murder charges against Salas — and Gloria.
"We have circumstantial evidence against somebody whom we suspect to be the mastermind," announced Pierre Bucsit, the local police chief. "The capture of the suspected gunman will complete our investigation toward arresting the author of the crime."
But the case quickly fell apart. When a police investigator named Romeo Amarillo had first showed up at the factory, he found Gloria to be defensive and uncooperative. But any link to her was purely circumstantial. Prosecutors ultimately dismissed the charges against Gloria due to insufficient evidence. Until the police found Salas, whose connection to the crime was limited to the single eyewitness, they had nothing else to go on. That hope vanished in October 2014, when Salas was killed in a police shootout.
Whoever murdered Ivan, it's clear who benefited the most from his death. Ivan didn't have a will, which under Philippine law meant his estate would likely be shared by Gloria and his two daughters from his first marriage. In a court filing, Gloria wrote that Ivan's shares were being "settled among his heirs." But Ivan's daughter Clare told me that neither she nor her sister received anything from their father's estate. "I got nothing," she says.
Gloria also moved quickly to take control of Ivan's company. A week after he was killed, she submitted a document to the securities commission claiming that an unscheduled meeting of Outback's officers and shareholders had taken place in mid-August, a little over a month before Ivan's murder. Malcolm, who was still listed as a board member, was not notified of the meeting. According to the document, Ivan had given himself control of 80.8% of Outback's stock, and Gloria now owned 18%. That left Malcolm with just 2,000 shares — a fraction of a percent of the company. The new board, composed largely of Gloria's relatives, unanimously named her as president, and her daughter as vice president.
Malcolm filed a complaint against Gloria with the prosecutor's office, claiming she had forged the document. Nathaniel Colobong, Ivan's longtime accountant, is listed in the papers as the company's external auditor. But he tells me that he was unaware of Ivan making any of the stock transfers Gloria claims he made. In fact, he told investigators that Gloria had "started to get angry with her husband" after she had been stripped of her shares earlier that year. But Colobong was unwilling to testify. "I was also afraid for my life," he says.
Regulators accepted Gloria's version of events, and the lead prosecutor in the forgery case ultimately declined to bring the charges against her. The relevant documents, he tells me, were destroyed during a typhoon. According to Outback's subsequent filings, Gloria now controls 99.6% of the company's stock.
For the first year after Ivan's death, Malcolm remained in the Philippines, protected around the clock by armed guards. Eventually he gave up the fight and returned to Australia. His biggest mistake, he tells me, was putting his faith in the Philippine justice system. "You and I come from countries where you get justice," he says. "If I had to do it over again, I would have had her shot. I'd do the same thing to her that she did to my brother."
After Ivan's murder, some of Outback's clients sided with Malcolm and refused to do business with the company. "We decided not to place any further orders due to the rumors and uncertainty of dealing with Gloria," recalls Terry Tate, a former buyer for Ray's Outdoors, who had visited both Ivan and Gloria in the Philippines.
But the Seiders brothers continued to contract with Outback. Whatever they felt about Ivan's murder, they were focused on doing what it took to keep their company alive. To get the Outback's employees back to work, the brothers even prepaid Gloria for their orders. Soon, brand new Yeti Tundras were once again being unloaded in Texas. "Never for a second did we think Gloria was involved in Ivan's death," Roy tells me.
Other business decisions they made may have been born of crisis, but proved equally shrewd. To make the most of their dwindling inventory, Roy and Ryan bumped up the price on their coolers. Remarkably, none of their buyers balked. Roy came up with a pricing strategy he called "10x" — as in, charging 10 times what their competitors were asking. Like Balenciaga sneakers and Sub-Zero fridges, the eye-popping prices of Yeti's products wound up making them more — not less — desirable.
The brothers also found a US-based supplier to ensure that their supply chain could never be held hostage again. "As tragic as Ivan's death was, all of a sudden we are a much stronger company," Roy explained on a hunting podcast.
The success of the Tundra, along with Yeti's viral marketing, helped turn the company into a kind of redneck Patagonia. Yeti Coolers went public in October 2018, and Roy and Ryan earned hundreds of millions of dollars after selling most of their shares.
Yeti's success has been good for Outback. The year that Ivan was murdered, according to the company's financial statement, it had $1.9 million in sales. Ten years later, thanks in large part to Yeti, its sales were $9 million.
At Yeti's headquarters, a conference room is named for Ivan Brown, to honor his contribution to the company. Every few years, Gloria or her representatives from Outback travel to Texas to meet with Yeti's management. But, in the past, when Gloria has invited the Seiderses to return to the Philippines for a visit, they've politely declined. "They make their employees go," their father Roger tells me. "But they don't go."
Brendan Borrell is a freelance journalist based in Los Angeles.