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Frequently Asked Questions

Should I buy the hard one or the soft one?

Ask how far you are carrying it. Rigid walls hold ice for substantially longer and shrug off being loaded on top of, which suits a car boot and a whole weekend. Soft sides weigh less, sling over a shoulder and fold away to nothing, which suits everything else.

Stanley 1913 Coolers: Cool Boxes and Cool Bags

A cooler is judged on one thing: how long the ice lasts. Everything else is convenience.

Ours are built around that number first, then around actually being carried. Two formats, and the choice between them is more straightforward than the market makes it look.

Cool Box or Cool Bag

A cool box is hard-sided

Thick insulated walls, a sealing lid, and enough structure to sit on, stack or strap into a boot. It holds ice longest by a wide margin, nothing inside it gets squashed, and it is the format to choose for a weekend rather than an afternoon.

A cool bag is soft-sided

Lighter, easier to carry over a shoulder, and it packs flat when it is empty. It will not match a hard box for ice retention, but for a picnic, a beach day or a supermarket run it is the one you will actually take with you.

The honest rule: if you are carrying it more than a few hundred metres, go soft. If it is going in a car and staying put, go hard.

Ice Coolers, and What "Holds Ice" Actually Means

Ice retention figures come with conditions attached, and the conditions matter more than the number.

A cooler holds ice longest when it starts cold, when it is full rather than half empty, when it is packed with more ice than you think you need, and when it is opened rarely and kept out of direct sun. The same box that manages days in the shade will manage a fraction of that open on a beach in August.

So the practical advice is unglamorous. Chill it the night before if you can. Fill the space. Keep it shut.

Mini and Small Coolers

Not every job needs a box that does a weekend. A small cooler covers a packed lunch for two, a few drinks for an afternoon, or a day's food on site, and it fits in places a full-size one does not: a footwell, a bike pannier, a train luggage rack.

If what you actually want is one cold drink for a whole day rather than a container for several, that is a different product. A vacuum insulated water bottle or tumbler does that job better than any cooler, because vacuum insulation holds temperature rather than merely slowing its loss.

Picnics, Camping and the Back of the Car

Picnics, festivals, campsites, fishing, long drives, and the boot that ends up carrying everything. A cooler earns its keep whenever there is no fridge and the day is longer than a few hours.

For food that needs to stay hot rather than cold, the same principle runs in the other direction: our food jars and insulated food containers hold a hot meal for hours without power. And ice packs sit with the rest of the small parts.

Built for Life, Built to Last

The parts that fail on a cheap cooler are the hinge, the latch and the seal, and all three fail in the same way: the lid stops closing properly and the insulation stops mattering.

That is where the money goes on ours, and it is why the argument is the same one we make about the steel. Something built to be repaired and used for years is a different object from something replaced every second summer.

Complete Your Collection

Cool boxes and cool bags cover the cold. Bags covers carrying everything else, and the full range sits under the whole collection.