What does it take to rethink a product category that has worked essentially the same way for decades?

For the team behind Coleman Snap ’N Go, it started by looking closely at how consumers’ relationship with the outdoors was changing.

Outdoor recreation is increasingly extending beyond traditional camping trips into more casual occasions, from sideline sports and tailgating to backyard gatherings and days at the beach. At the same time, younger and more urban consumers often have less room to store the gear that makes those experiences possible.

That created an interesting challenge for the Coleman team. Hard coolers deliver the durability and cold retention consumers value, but they can also be among the bulkiest products to store at home.

The question became: Could Coleman preserve the performance of a hard cooler while fundamentally changing how much space it takes up?

Turning Consumer Insight Into a Design Challenge

To better understand the opportunity, the team explored how consumers balanced performance, portability and storage, using a combination of research approaches that included AI consumer personas.

The insight pointed toward an unmet need: consumers wanted the benefits of a traditional hard cooler without permanently giving up the space required to store one.

Solving that problem was more complicated than simply making a cooler fold.

Early concepts using snap-together panels created new challenges, including potential leakage, insulation gaps and cumbersome assembly. Teams across design, engineering, innovation and manufacturing continued experimenting, testing each approach against the things consumers could not compromise on: usability, durability and performance.

Rather than designing around those trade-offs, the team kept iterating until it could resolve them.

Solving for More Than Storage

That process ultimately led to the patented design behind Coleman Snap ’N Go, the world’s first fully insulated hard-shell cooler designed to collapse.

The cooler expands to full size in seconds and collapses to approximately one-third of its volume when not in use, making it easier to store at home, fit into a vehicle and take along for everyday outdoor occasions. The 55-quart version also delivers up to 64 hours of cold retention.

But the same design decision that solved a consumer problem created another benefit.

Traditional hard coolers take up the same amount of space whether they are full or empty. That means much of the space used when shipping and storing them is simply air. By collapsing, Snap ’N Go can move through the supply chain using significantly less space, helping improve freight and warehouse efficiency while making the design particularly well suited for e-commerce.

One innovation addressed two very different challenges.

A Look Inside the Innovation

Snap ’N Go reflects an approach to innovation at Newell Brands that starts with understanding what is changing for consumers and turns those insights into problems worth solving.

Getting from an unmet need to a category-defining product required curiosity, repeated experimentation and shared ownership across teams. It also required a willingness to keep working through the moments when an early solution created a new problem.

The result is a cooler designed around how people spend time outdoors today, while rethinking some of the assumptions that have long defined the category.

Watch the video to hear more about the thinking, collaboration and innovation behind Coleman Snap ’N Go.