Via Instgram
Bison Coolers was founded in 2011 by Jeremy and Dennis Denson.
Jeremy Denson’s small-but-mighty Bison Coolers stepped onto the world’s ultimate marketing stage on Sunday evening: the Super Bowl.
The Fort Worth-based company is getting the 15 minutes — and then some — that come with a 30-second ad during perhaps America’s most celebrated cultural event. Bison Coolers was introduced to the captive viewers, numbering in the hundreds of millions, who watched the Philadelphia Eagles torment the Kansas City Chiefs and the always dependable QB Patrick Mahomes, who was turned into a bit of a madcap as he ran for his health and well-being.
“We had about six times as much traffic to the website [on Sunday] with obviously all of it coming in the evening and it's still up about four times so far and it's only 3:30 in the afternoon, so we're definitely seeing some really good traffic,” said Denson on Monday.
The Super Bowl ad came at a great price point: free. It was an opportunity presented by Google, which used the Super Bowl stage as a bullhorn to direct attention to its AI services that small businesses, such as Bison, are utilizing.
Bison Coolers’ inventory includes hard and soft coolers, drinkware, accessories, and a lot more in SKUs numbering in the hundreds.
Denson and his father Dennis started the company in 2011 with the pending arrival of his and his wife’s first child. His wife, a school teacher, wanted to stay home with the new baby. “I was just looking for something to offset that lost income,” he said.
Denson, who has a bachelor’s from Texas A&M University in business and management with an emphasis in entrepreneurship, observed a niche emerging in premium coolers. He saw an opportunity in a high-end product at a more affordable price point, believing “we could get people to buy down from our biggest competitor, which is now a billion-dollar company, or buy up from the traditional Igloo and Coleman coolers that have been a staple item for the previous three decades.”
At the time, Denson was working in Southwest Airlines’ revenue management and pricing department. Both his day and side jobs were demanding of his resources. He estimated he was working 50 hours a week at Southwest and 30 to 40 hours in the cooler business.
Bison Coolers is American-made, something that resonates well with its customer base, Denson said.
“There's a sense of pride in knowing that we created jobs here domestically. We have two plants, one in Colorado and one in Tennessee, that produce our hard and soft coolers and both of them were on the brink of closure before we shifted production there.”
Bison stands out in the marketplace, Denson said, through another critical distinguishing factor: quality.
“Our hard coolers have a lifetime warranty,” he said. “But we don't aim to ever be the cheapest product on the market. There are plenty of people that can white label products from Asian and just say, ‘Hey, this is our cooler.’ We design them from the ground up. We focus on the little things.”
About half of the company’s employees are family. “We put the ‘family’ in family business,” he says.
In August, the company moved from its location in North Richland Hills to the River Bend Business Park on Trinity Boulevard at Loop 820 and Texas 121. The new location doubled the company’s footprint, Denson said.
“It’s a lot more space for personnel both in the office and then obviously storage in the warehouse,” Denson said. “That was in August and we just kind of left it as this blank canvas and said, ‘Let's get through the holiday season, our busy season, and then we can focus on decorating the office.’
“Well, late October, early November, this Google opportunity came up.”
Denson said he was at a trade show in Phoenix when a Google query came into his email inbox. He essentially ignored it. “I just marked as read because I was in between meetings, and I was a little bit stressed. I just thought it was a typical Google account rep reaching out to introduce themselves.”
He received another email about a week later asking if he was sure he wasn’t interested. The email talked of this really good opportunity and it was free.
“That’s my favorite kind of marketing,” he said. “I scrolled down and I was like, ‘A Super Bowl ad!’”
Certainly, he was interested in that. Google selected a company from each of the 50 states.
“I said, ‘Yeah, we'd love to throw our hat in the ring’ for being the nominee from Texas. Then one Sunday morning I got a notification.”
Google had chosen Bison Coolers. His first thought: “This is too good to be true. There's no way.”
“We had about three weeks to get camera ready here,” he said. The film crew, consisting of eight people filmed the commercial over two days.
Denson rented out space in Grapevine for about 150 people to watch the Super Bowl and the ad, which ran shortly after halftime.
Over the two or three months between finding out about being selected, filming, and the actual airing, Denson’s team worked nonstop to create a holistic plan and otherwise identify ways to capitalize on the ad because “the day after the Super Bow is when the real work starts,” he said.
Three main competitors — ORCA, Otterbox, and Kong — have recently exited the cooler space. So, this could be a game-changer for a small, family-owned company.
“It was just one of those moments you feel you’re living in a dream,” Denson said. “How are we so blessed to get this exposure from this opportunity? This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and the last thing we ever want to do is look back and wonder what we could have done differently.”