Cold plunging isn’t exactly a new concept. In fact, it’s quite an old one: Cold water immersion has been practiced in various cultures for thousands of years, and professional athletes have long braved icy tubs after competitions. But recently, it’s been making bigger waves than ever — rippling out to people beyond the big leagues, like Ryan Duey and Michael Garrett.
“Mike and I, we both have health and wellness backgrounds,” says Duey. “We played sports, but are we the highest-level athletes? No. Our interest has been on holistic health — mind and body.” They’ve now turned that interest into a groundbreaking and market-leading home cold plunge company, Plunge.
Before starting Plunge, Duey and Garrett were in similar boats. Each ran his own float spa therapy center — Garrett in San Francisco, Duey in Sacramento. They connected through the industry, launched a successful fundraiser together and became fast friends. So when, in early 2020, the pandemic forced them to shutter their businesses and drain their pools, it made sense that they would potentially pivot together.
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Ryan Duey and Michael Garrett
Image Credit: Courtesy of Plunge
Duey and Garrett had become fascinated with the ice-bath trend, led by charismatic figures like Dutch motivational speaker Wim Hof, and touted for its benefits by podcasters Tim Ferriss and Joe Rogan. And with their wellness experience, Duey and Garrett were better prepared than most to dive right in.
With time — and tubs — on his hands, Garrett got to work building out an initial prototype. The design needed work, but the concept was too strong for Duey to pass up. He jumped in alongside Garrett, and began building out a brand that could bring strength to their groundbreaking new concept. The first question he wanted to answer: What were they going to call this thing?
“At the time, the term was ‘ice baths’,” says Duey. “We did our research on Google Trends. Sure enough, ‘ice bath’ was searched about ten times more than ‘cold plunge.’ We decided we were going to bet the house on ‘cold plunge.’ We bought the domain coldplunge.com, and immediately were on the first page of Google search results with no spend in the first eight weeks. We didn’t have to put any dollars toward marketing.”
But there was another reason for the move. “The goal was always to have a company called Plunge,” Duey adds. “Because, sure, it ties to our product. But it has all these meanings. It’s a noun, it’s a verb, it’s a motto — ‘taking the plunge,’ ‘plunging into life.’ And that could be for all things you do, whether it’s a workout or doing something hard. So after some tense negotiations with a jazz band out of New Orleans, we were able to get plunge.com. And then, suddenly, people knew us as Plunge.”
Not long after, the company made its first splash nationally with a memorable appearance on Shark Tank, during which shark Robert Herjavec immersed himself into Plunge’s icy waters. Later, Duey and Garrett would find themselves in skating legend Tony Hawk’s backyard, setting him up for a Plunge. Between Plunge’s high visibility, rapidly growing segment and the premium design and quality of their products, in 2024, the company hit $100 million in revenue. All of this made Duey and Garrett finalists on our Entrepreneur of 2024 list of innovative leaders.
Tell us about Plunge’s recent growth.
Two and a half years ago, if we got out 80 units a month, we were like, “Hell yeah, we crushed it.” Now we’re looking to do those numbers in a day. And so the most important thing we’ve done in the past year is to put the infrastructure in place to sustain that growth. For us, that comes down to team culture and product innovation.
Let’s start with innovation.
Sure. We do our own research and development, which is a huge advantage for us. With all of our new products that have come out, we get feedback from tens of thousands of people saying, “Hey, it would be great if we could change the filter from this angle” or “Could it be a little more quiet?” or “Is there an eco-friendly button?” We just take that feedback down the hall to our in-house engineering team, and we can start developing that and actually have the roadmap. We don’t have to go to a third party to design this, develop that. We can take feedback from consumers and put it into play.
It’s our goal to make cold plunging as easy as possible, whether that’s by controlling it through our app on your phone, or getting notifications on when to change your filter, or what the flow rate looks like. We want to make it so that you can just go get into the cold water — which is already super hard. Do your hard thing, and take all the stress away outside of that. I think that’s one of our key advantages. And I think, being an early mover, we’ve been able to develop a lot of relationships in this space. And so now, there’s a whole new category we’re getting into: the sauna. So going from essentially two SKUs that we had in the market to where we are now has been mind-blowing.
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Let’s talk about those early days. Obviously the domain name win was huge — and free. Were you scrappy with marketing in other ways?
Our first six months, [Garrett and I] had this plan. We asked, “How do we get to these highly influential people that we’re aligned with from a philosophical standpoint, from an interest standpoint and from a character standpoint?” We made a list of all the people that were impactful to Mike and I. We had our whiteboard, and we put down forty names — people having an impact on culture, health and wellness: [endurance athlete] Rich Roll, [neuroscientist and podcaster] Dr. Andrew Huberman, [biologist and health educator] Dr. Rhonda Patrick. And what’s crazy is we were at all of their homes within three to four months. Eventually, we end up in Tony Hawk’s backyard, and we’re setting him up for a Plunge.
We went with a gifting mindset. It wasn’t about a contract or, “Hey, we’re going to set you up with this product and you have to do X, Y, and Z.” It was, “Hey, if you love it, share it. That could be going to social — but that could also be telling your mom about it.” We just knew there would be a big return if they fell in love with the product and changed their life.
What are your future growth plans?
We understand there is an exponentially higher rate that someone will purchase a Plunge if they have gotten into cold water and actually experienced it. There are very few things in this world that help you feel this good. So we’re about to sign a very large national deal with a retail facility that is promoting cold plunging at a super large scale. We predict that over the next two years about 10 million people are going to be cold plunging at these facilities. If we can go get those people into a cold plunge, over time, it just makes sense that they would go buy one for their home.
We’re also nearing a partnership with Swimply, the Airbnb of pools. We could tell our customers, “Hey, put your Plunge online, make money, get people in the neighborhood who don’t have one to try it.” And so it becomes a communal activity. So that’s the kind of snowball effect that, especially over this next year, could be exponential. Because being able to try a Plunge, actually experiencing it for yourself, makes the decision that much easier.
You mentioned company culture. Where does that factor in?
Work is how we spend a lot of our time. It better be well spent. We want people to be genuinely happy, to feel valued. There’s never an end state to that. Sometimes we’re doing way better at it. Other times we’re not. It’s a collective system. If people aren’t happy here, we find transitions and help them move on. That helps our morale, and I think it helps the bottom line as well.
Early on, Mike and I created a set of company values, then brought in an executive coach. We wrote the values we had come up with on the wall, and he looks at them and he’s like, “These are bullshit.” So we spent six months as a leadership team, dissecting down to what really matters at our company, and came up with our five main core values. They’re on our website, and they’re the guardrails for everything we do. When we interview, we ask questions around them. When we onboard, and when we do reviews, they’re guided by them. They help us execute better, and they help us perform better as a company. One of them is “Go all in.” That’s about fully committing, and giving everything you’ve got, which ties to our name and to our culture.
It’s definitely not lost on me, walking out, seeing our team, seeing the scope of the operation, and the challenges that the team gets to tackle, how far and wide we can go right now. I just get fired up.
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