Mike Beckham did not start Simple Modern with a new idea. He started it with an old one that nobody was selling the way he wanted to sell it.

In 2015 he and two co-founders, Bryan Porter and Micah Ames, set out to build a consumer products company. On his own blog Beckham is blunt about how the category choice looked from the outside: insulated stainless steel drinkware, in a market already owned by Yeti and Hydro Flask. "It seemed insane to others at the time," he wrote. The three of them had $200,000 between them, money he later described as his life savings. Their competitors had hundreds of millions.

The dates come from Beckham himself. In a LinkedIn post published on 23 September 2025 he wrote "Ten years ago today I co-founded Simple Modern", which puts the start of the company in late September 2015. On 5 April 2023 he wrote "Seven years ago, we sold our first Simple Modern water bottle", which puts the first sale in roughly early April 2016. His blog account matches. He remembers taking his son to Disney World in the spring of 2016 and notes that the company "had just started selling water bottles the week before we left". That is about six months, roughly 195 days, from founding to the first bottle sold. Everything below is anchored on those two founder-stated dates.

What happened in those six months was mostly research, not building. Beckham has described the four questions he used to pick the category: find a product with real demand, study what the existing companies are good at, find the space they are not covering, and ask where your own skills line up with that space. His answer to the demand question was that competition is a feature, not a bug. If nothing else is being sold in a market, he argues, that usually means there is no market.

The gap he found was structural rather than clever. The brands leading insulated drinkware had grown up in specialty retail, in shops like REI, and that had shaped their retail prices and their margins. They designed for shelves, not for online listings, and they were not doing much on Amazon. Beckham and his co-founders had spent years selling online, so that was where they went. They launched on Amazon with far more colours and sizes than the incumbents offered, and they priced under them.

The early years were as thin as the funding suggests. The founding team drew no salary until the company was almost a year old. The office was an upstairs room in Beckham's house, or the local Panera Bread. When they bought their first laser engraving machine they put it in a team member's living room, and made custom engraved products out of that house for a year. During their first year of trading, two of their competitors were sold to large corporations for sums approaching half a billion dollars each. When Simple Modern finally paid to exhibit at the International Home and Housewares show, they set up shelving bought at IKEA next to six-figure competitor booths, and Beckham watched employees from a rival walk past their stand pointing and laughing.

The constraint that shaped the business most was margin. Simple Modern sold a good product at a low price, which meant there was never enough room to buy customers with ads. Beckham has said this directly: the margins were not big enough to grow through paid acquisition, so instead the team became specialists in getting into mass retailers. Profits went straight back into inventory and online growth. A little after the company's second birthday, Target offered them nationwide distribution. Walmart and Sam's Club followed.

There is a small detail in Beckham's writing that says more about early traction than any revenue figure. He set up a Slack channel called #inthewild so the team could post photos when they spotted somebody using a Simple Modern product in public. For a long time it was almost empty. "It turns out that you need to sell a LOT of products before you start to see them organically." By the summer of 2019 he was spotting several a day on a family trip.

The numbers he has published since then, all in his own posts, run like this. On 5 April 2023, seven years after the first bottle, he counted 24,184,408 sold after it. In February 2023 his blog said the company was selling over $100 million a year and moving more drinkware units on Amazon than anyone in the world. In December 2023, announcing that every employee would become an owner through a $5 million first-year stock allocation, he wrote that annual revenues were approaching $200 million. In September 2025 he said the company had passed a billion dollars in cumulative sales and 60 million orders. They never raised outside money, and Beckham says the reason he is glad about that is not ownership percentage but freedom: an internally held company can commit to giving away 10% of profits without asking an investor for permission.

The useful part of this story for anyone building now is the order of operations. Beckham picked a market with obvious demand, accepted that he could not beat the incumbents at what they were already good at, and looked instead for the thing their existing success made them slow to do. Then he spent six months on the boring work of sourcing and listing before a single bottle sold.