Plunge: a $100 broken bathtub became an $80M a year cold plunge company with no investors
When COVID shut his spa, Michael Garrett wanted to sell cold plunges, but every one on the market cost over $10,000. With no money for a real product, he turned a $100 damaged bathtub and an aquarium pump into a prototype. Less than four years later, Plunge was shipping over 2,000 units a month and expecting $80 to $90 million in sales for the year, with no outside investors. Below: the three moves that got them there, and how to copy each one for your own product.
Overview
Plunge sells home cold plunges, tubs that chill water to near freezing, and saunas, directly to customers through its own website. It was founded by two friends who each ran a float spa: Michael Garrett in San Francisco and Ryan Duey in Sacramento. The company launched in September 2020.
By 2023, less than four years in, it was shipping over 2,000 units a month from a 150,000 square foot facility in Lincoln, California, and expected $80 to $90 million in sales that year. It never raised outside money.
The $100 bathtub
COVID closed Michael's spa for months. He wanted a project that would add value to the business, and he had been using saunas and cold plunges himself for years. When he looked for a cold plunge to offer at his spa, he found that most cost over $10,000 and looked rough. He saw a gap: something that looked good at a price people could afford.
His first plan was a custom, fully integrated product, with CAD drawings and calls to engineering firms. It was too expensive with no funding. He considered Kickstarter and decided it was too much hassle.
So he went for the simplest version that could work. He found a damaged freestanding acrylic bathtub on a local listing, drove about 30 minutes, and bought it for $100. He attached a water chiller, an aquarium pump and a water filter, and mounted the electrical parts in a box on the back of the tub. He built early prototypes in his garage, with his father's help.
He added the plunge to his spa and emailed his customers. Two sold quickly.
His friend Ryan said no the first time, because the beta units were rough. A month later Michael had improved the design a lot, and Ryan joined. They launched a limited run of 20 units, which Ryan compared to running their own Kickstarter, and sent launch emails to the customer lists of float centers. One sold immediately.
They changed the product often in the early days. That strained customer service, but every change made the product better, and they committed to making things right whenever a unit had a problem.
$10 to Google page 1
Michael bought the domain thecoldplunge.com on GoDaddy for $10. Within about two months the site was on the first page of Google's organic results.
The key decision was the name of the category. They chose "cold plunge" over "ice bath" as the term they would use everywhere. Ryan called that a major early win: they bet on the words people would come to search for, and owned them early.
Michael built the first website himself on Shopify and ran it for over a year. Shopify handled payments, hosting and analytics, and later lent the company hundreds of thousands of dollars in one click.
One Instagram comment
Michael was watching podcaster Aubrey Marcus on an Instagram live and left a comment offering him a plunge. Aubrey said yes. They built one, shipped it, and flew to Austin to set it up in person. Aubrey posted about it.
That became the playbook. They gifted plunges to other well-known people, including Andrew Huberman and Tony Hawk.
Ryan added his own version: he rented a U-Haul, delivered plunges around Los Angeles himself, and posted the "Plunge Tours" on Instagram.
Customers paid first
They priced the plunge around $5,000, where they saw no competitors. Michael credits early success to that open price point and real product-market fit.
Selling direct meant they kept the full margin and got paid upfront. Delivery took about 8 weeks, so customer orders funded the next batch of plunges. That is how they grew without investors.
Paid ads worked from the start: Google and Facebook ads returned over 10 times their cost at first. A freelancer they found on Upwork, based in Portugal, ran their Google ads. They later reported about 7 times return on paid media and 9 times overall.
Later they shortened lead times. Ryan says that helped customers, cut cancellations and eased pressure on staff, but strained cash flow.
Close calls
The employee who walked out. Early on they had four employees in a 3,000 square foot space and no manager. One person handled sales and customer service and gave out his personal phone number. Units were failing. He broke down and walked out.
The silent retreat. Michael left for a 10 day silent meditation retreat. Ryan couldn't get into the customer service email, cash was running low, and a Shopify loan was blocked because Michael was the account admin. Ryan called a friend, Jon, and hired him that day to answer phones. Jon later built the inside sales team and now leads business development.
The numbers
| Figure | Number |
|---|---|
| Cheapest cold plunges on the market then | Over $10,000 |
| First prototype tub | $100, damaged, from a local listing |
| First run | 20 units |
| Domain | thecoldplunge.com, $10 |
| Time to Google page 1 | About 2 months |
| Price point | Around $5,000 |
| Lead time (customer pays upfront) | About 8 weeks |
| Early ad return | Over 10x |
| Units shipped (2023) | 2,000+ a month |
| Sales expected (2023) | $80 to $90 million |
| Later | About $100M a year (Entrepreneur); $200M+ in total sales and 30,000+ plunges sold (company, via Athletech News) |
| Outside investment before 2025 | None |
Do what they did: step by step
1. Build the $100 version first.
Do this: before any design firm, factory or Kickstarter, put together a working version from parts that already exist. Look on Facebook Marketplace, Craigslist and hardware stores for something you can modify. It only has to work and be good enough that one person pays.
2. Sell it to the people who already trust you.
Do this: email your existing customers, friends, or anyone in your industry with a list. Plunge sold its first 20 units this way. Make a small batch, say how many there are, and ask people to pay now for delivery later.
3. Find a search term nobody owns yet.
Do this: list every phrase people might type to find your product. Put them into Google Trends (free) and compare them. You want a phrase that is rising, not huge yet. Then search each one on Google: if the first page is weak (forums, old articles, no real company), the term is open. Plunge picked "cold plunge" while most people still said "ice bath."
4. Buy the matching domain for a few dollars.
Do this: check whether the exact phrase is free as a .com on GoDaddy or Namecheap. If it is, buy it today for about $10. Put a real product page on it and use the phrase in your page title, headings and text. Write a few honest pages answering what buyers ask: how it works, how much it costs, how to use it.
5. Get one big name to try it for free.
Do this: list 20 people your buyers follow. Watch for their lives, posts and podcast calls for listener questions. Offer the product for free, publicly and simply, then make it effortless: ship it, set it up, follow up. Never ask them to post. Plunge flew to Austin to set one up.
The comment or DM, word for word:
"Hi [name], I make [product] and I think you'd actually use it, given [the specific thing they talk about]. I'd love to send you one for free, no strings. If you say yes, I'll handle shipping and setup myself."
6. Let customers fund the next batch.
Do this: sell with a clear delivery date and take full payment upfront. On Shopify you can sell items that aren't in stock yet by turning on "continue selling when out of stock" and stating the shipping date on the product page. Build the next batch with that money. Never promise a date you can't keep.
7. Turn on ads only when one sale pays for them.
Do this: at a $5,000 price, a few hundred dollars of ads per sale still leaves money. Start small, track what each sale costs you, and only increase what returns several times its cost.
8. Don't be the only person who can open the doors.
Do this: give a partner access to email, payments and loans before you go away. Hire someone for the phones before the person doing it burns out.
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Sources
- Hampton, Ethan Brooks, "Bootstrapping an $80 Million DTC Cold Plunge Company" (October 19, 2023), interview with Michael Garrett and Ryan Duey
- Entrepreneur, interview with the Plunge founders
- Athletech News, "CEO Corner: Ryan Duey on How Plunge Grew From the Garage to the Mainstream"
