Water Bottle Stickers

Four designs, printed on waterproof vinyl, drawn from the same Colorado high country as everything else we make.

A sticker on a water bottle has a harder life than most people expect. It gets submerged, scrubbed, left in a hot car, rattled around a pack pocket against a set of keys, and put through a dishwasher by someone who was not thinking. Paper stickers do not survive that. Thin vinyl fades by the second summer. So we print on heavy-duty vinyl with a clear back, die-cut to the shape of the artwork, rated water-, UV- and scratch-resistant.

The designs

Three of them are variations on the same knitted mountain artwork – a nod to the wool sweaters and knitted beanies that come out when the air turns sharp in October. There is a standard version, a dark dusk edition for the twenty minutes when the tree line goes to silhouette, and a multi-sticker set. The fourth is our logo badge: two ridgelines and the canyon pines that mark where we feel most at home.

Where they stick

Smooth stainless is the easy case – insulated bottles, Nalgenes, camp mugs. They also go on hard-sided coolers, rooftop cargo boxes, camper van windows and laptop lids. Powder-coated and matte bottles are the harder surface: the finish has a fine texture, so give it a longer wipe with rubbing alcohol and press the edges down firmly.

Making them last

Most stickers fail at the edges, not the middle, and almost always because of one of three things: oil left on the surface, the sticker crossing a curve it cannot lie flat against, or the bottle getting washed before the adhesive finished bonding. Clean with alcohol, let it dry, squeegee from the centre outward, and give it a day before it gets wet.

After that, hand-wash. It is genuinely the whole answer – the dishwasher’s heat is what breaks adhesive down, and no sticker wins that fight forever.

We wrote the long version of this, including a comparison of the sealants people use and how to get a sticker off cleanly when you are done with it: How to Keep Stickers on a Water Bottle.