In 2008, two college roommates were frustrated by fake copper mugs they’d bought online. Instead of accepting defeat, they dug into their dad’s scrap pile and crafted their own.
What started as a weekend project to make genuine Moscow Mule mugs has transformed into Handlebend, a thriving premium drinkware brand breathing new life into their small Nebraska hometown.
Their story proves that sometimes the best business ideas come not from market research or focus groups but from simply trying to solve a problem.
Key Lessons for Entrepreneurs
Before diving into Michael and Matt’s story, let’s examine the core lessons from their entrepreneurial journey. These insights can serve as a guide for aspiring business owners.
1. Value of Customer Feedback
Michael and Matt spent years collecting feedback before launching their business. This organic validation process helped them de-risk their venture and understand their market before making significant investments. For new entrepreneurs, gathering feedback from potential customers before launching can provide invaluable insights and confidence in your business concept.
2. Product Excellence as a Foundation
Handlebend’s success stems from its unwavering commitment to product quality, a commitment that has translated into a key learning: exceptional products market themselves. When developing your business, focus on creating something so good that customers naturally want to share it with others.
3. Strategic Market Positioning
From the start, Michael and Matt positioned their products as premium items, charging $100 per mug. They understood their target market and didn’t compromise their vision by trying to serve everyone. This teaches us the importance of identifying your niche and maintaining your position, even if it means saying no to potential customers outside your target market.
Handlebend: The Interview
Who are you and what business did you start?
I’m Michael Stepp. While I wasn’t born in the community, I claim O’Neill, Nebraska, as my hometown. I first moved to O’Neill in 6th grade, where I continued to grow up and co-found my company, Handlebend.
We build copper mugs by hand and sell them all over the world.
What was your background? How did you come up with the idea?
I’m a small-town Nebraska boy.
I went to college at the University of Nebraska, and like many students, I was just trying to figure out what I wanted to do.
My dad ran his own HVAC and commercial refrigeration company his whole life and raised us in a small town. Even though I didn’t know what I wanted in a career, I recognized I wanted a certain lifestyle. Wherever I landed and in whatever I did, I wanted a life similar to how I grew up: a small-town, rural-America lifestyle.
I appreciated so much of what my small town had given me, and that’s what I was seeking.
The simple answer was to work alongside my dad in his company, so I graduated from the University of Nebraska with a business degree and enrolled in trade school to become an HVAC technician.
Our idea to create copper mugs was pretty haphazard. Before graduating in 2008, I was living with five college buddies. One of my roommates was my eventual co-founder, Matt Dennis. Matt and I go way back, having attended grade school and high school together.
During those college years, Moscow Mules and copper mugs resurfaced in popularity and became trendy. Many local bars were starting to carry copper mugs.
Most of the time, if you wanted a mule, you had to leave your ID because so many people were stealing the copper mugs.
My roommates and I decided having a set of mugs for our house would be neat, so we ordered some off eBay. They were around $45 each, which was a lot of money for college students. When we received them, we felt cheated. The mugs weren’t copper – they were stainless steel with faux-copper plating on the outside. We thought they were a ripoff and sent them back.
We still wanted mugs, so I went looking elsewhere. Since my dad was an HVAC tech, we always had a scrap pile of copper around. One weekend when I was back home, I started tinkering and chopping some of it up, crafting a very rudimentary mug.
It took several tries and most of the weekend to get it not to leak, but I built one. It certainly wasn’t pretty, but I was proud of it. It was handbuilt and unique, something I knew no one else had.
What were your first steps to starting the business and coming up with your product?
A few years after college, we were at the stage of life where all our friends were getting married. We decided to relent on hoarding mugs and would go back home to make custom sets as wedding gifts. It was perfect – something unique that they had been asking for for years.
Over the next few years, we slowly started sending our mugs all over the country. We’d make a set for a friend in Omaha, then Houston, and then Denver.
The requests kept coming in. Our friends would display them at parties and get inundated with questions about what they were and where to get them. I remember a call from a friend saying their brother-in-law loved these and would pay whatever we wanted.
We kept hearing that everyone loved these mugs and we needed to start building them.
I wasn’t initially interested in starting a business for two main reasons:
1) I didn’t think we could charge enough money. Making a mug like this from raw copper was super labor-intensive. Making one mug took nearly a day, and copper isn’t cheap.
2) I loved how exclusive and unique they were – if we started selling them, would that go away?
This went on for a couple of years until finally, Matt convinced me to start. The first thing I did was take about a year to refine our processes. If we were going to attempt this, we needed to build efficiency. We had to turn this from a long, drawn-out crafting process into more of an assembly line operation.
We knew they would always be handbuilt, but we customized tools and reworked processes to speed up production. When we had that worked out, we spent $1,500 on building a functional website – which was a lot of money for us.
At this point, it was time to dig in – and it felt a bit crazy. We had no idea if it would work when we launched the website in fall 2017.
We never dreamed that it would grow to where it is today.
How did you go about validating the business idea? How did you know there was a need?
It was definitely a leap of faith when we started. But what helped was that Matt and I had said no to so many requests while we were building. For years we had been making these for family and friends who expressed interest in the product.
We figured there had to be at least some demand, simply from the amount and type of feedback we had gotten for years.
When we started, we had zero confidence in our pricing. I knew we had to price our mugs very high, not only because of the labor required but also because I had no interest in creating a commodity product. I wanted this to be something cool and unique.
Even though I had good reasons for it, the price was an internal barrier. It was one of the hardest things to get over. Everyone thought these mugs were cool. People would approach me in the local grocery store, comment on how cool the mug was and how great what we were doing was – and then they would ask the price. I would duck my chin and feel partially embarrassed to tell them it was $100 per mug.
I knew it had to be at this price to make the business viable, but it took quite a bit of training and reflection not to feel bad about it. Our mugs were worth that price. I had done the calculations, and if we were ever going to have a chance at this, we needed to be at that level.
We didn’t have plans for much more than a side hustle when we were starting. We decided that this could be a cool side gig that we could use to buy some things we wanted. If we could cash flow a cheap website, pay for our cost of goods, and make a little side money, that’s all it needed to be.
After we launched and started growing, it became something we never dreamed it would be.
Today, we find ourselves in a 14,000-square-foot building that we purchased and renovated, with eight full-time employees, shipping products worldwide. It’s a lottery scenario for us.
What does your business do uniquely in the market? How did you grow?
That’s the million-dollar question for us, and we spend a lot of time looking backward at what has worked. We’ve tried many approaches and have done our best not to be ‘salesy.’
We were in business for about eight or nine months when the Omaha World-Herald reached out to do a story on us. It was part of a series on Nebraska small businesses, and they wanted to feature us. We didn’t contact them – someone local must have told them.
After the article was published, we had a huge jump in sales. We sold more mugs in three days than we had in the previous nine months, which got our mugs ‘out in the wild,’ as we like to say.
From there, our best sales approach has been the mug itself. People are paying a lot of money when they buy a Handlebend Mug – so when they open it, it has to be instantly seen as worth it. We focus a lot on that experience and providing support for the product.
We always want our mugs to exceed expectations. If they do that, people want to use them, show them off, and bring them out at parties. Then the mug sells itself – people are wowed by it, they Google our company, and we grow.
So getting mugs ‘out there in the wild’ and impressing with our product is the best strategy we’ve found. I describe it as a slow burn. It’s tough to plan much of a marketing strategy around that, but it’s worked for us. I can’t name a certain social media push or marketing campaign that’s been a silver bullet.
We’ve focused on creating a really, really good product and being true to ourselves. The way we think is that we aren’t selling copper mugs – we’re selling a lifestyle. We sell the notion of good times, being with your friends, sitting down, and being intentional; our mug is an investment in being with loved ones, telling old stories, and creating new memories.
We are a Midwest company, with Midwest adventures and a Midwest lifestyle. The world keeps getting busier and busier; we want to represent being intentional about being with each other. That’s the story we’ve tried to tell.
As far as strategy, we film ourselves doing just that and then making it as visible as possible. And we’ve had lots of good luck along the way.
Thankfully we’ve been able to take advantage of the luck, and it’s worked out great for us so far!
What were some of the biggest lessons you’ve learned along the pathway of building? What would you tell new business builders?
The best thing that’s worked for us is having a product of value. That’s number one. If you have a quality product – something you put your heart and soul into – everything else falls into place.
We’ve spent lots of money on marketing companies and trying to do what a ‘normal’ online business would do. But it hasn’t worked for us.
The number one lesson we’ve learned is to double down on the quality of your product and have a vision for that product. If you do that, the product will sell itself.
Did you ever have any, Oh Crap, Moments? Maybe you thought the business wasn’t going to make it?
Yeah, we’ve had a few of those. The biggest one was when we purchased our building. We had been operating for about three years and desperately needed more space. We were still building and shipping everything from a makeshift workshop in the corner of my dad’s shop.
We found a deal on a building in downtown O’Neill. The only thing was, the building was falling apart.
But we got some local funding to remodel it, and by doing some of it ourselves, we started to bring it back to life. The building is about 14,000 square feet, and we only really needed about a quarter for mug-making.
What would we do with the rest of it? We wanted to be a bigger part of our hometown, so we put together a business model that would use the rest of the space for our community. We devised a plan to put in a taproom and partnered with a brewery from a nearby town to operate it.
We spent about a year working on this, remodeling the old building – doing some of it ourselves, working with local contractors, and building the space. We were about three months from the grand opening when, late one night, Matt and I were working on the building, and the owner of the partner brewery walked in.
He told us that he could no longer join in on the deal and effectively bailed. It was a gut punch. We were only a couple of months from opening. We had just lost our rental income (which was a significant part of the business model for the building) and, even more so, we were disappointed that the community was losing this.
Our building sits right on Main Street, with a big open window. We were very excited about opening a community space, and now on opening day, it was going to be empty.
It was 11 at night, and Matt and I decided to go home and regroup in the morning. I was driving home in the dark, thinking about our huge predicament. I live about five miles into the country, so the sky is very dark as I cruise into the country. Suddenly I saw this huge shooting star beam across the sky in front of me – it was the biggest I had ever seen.
And I remember in that moment, I felt very calm. I thought to myself, this is okay. I don’t know how it will be okay, but it will be.
The next morning I went to talk to Matt. He shared a similar feeling. He said when he left last night he felt very calm about our situation, like all the freakout was gone.
So we sat down and made a plan: We were going to start our own bar.
We decided just to run the thing.
We had never run a bar. We had no interest in running a bar. But over the next couple of months, we decided to go for it and make a plan.
Looking back, it was a huge blessing. Our bar is an absolute asset to our brand and story. Our bar doesn’t offer something for everyone – we only have a few drinks, but we do those drinks really, really well.
We’ve created a gathering space for our community, and it’s allowed us to lean into everything behind the brand of our copper mugs. We are part of the community and the community is us. Instead of a different brewery’s name on the building, the whole building is Handlebend.
That was a good lesson for me – looking back, it would have been this huge loss if I had hit the big red panic button and quit.
If we remain calm, we can find a solution. Just roll up your sleeves, dig in, and get to work!
When you reflect on building your enterprise, how has it changed your life? Positive or negative?
The biggest change for me has been going from working with my friend to having a company of people. Knowing now that I need to take care of a team is something that I take seriously.
We are in a small town, and five or six of our people have left other jobs to come here, to jump on board this new thing and believe in what we are doing.
You know, we have these cool mugs and a cool space in town – but none of that matters when I compare it to our team.
Nothing the business does matters unless our team’s well-being is secured. I take a lot of responsibility here.
And it’s been a learning process; taking care of a team is hard. Building and selling mugs is easy compared to learning how to manage and care for human beings.
If one of us is not performing well, we all need to help. I like to say that we are a team of horses – we’ve got to be pulling in the same direction for this whole thing to work.
I care deeply about each one of our employees on a personal level. I’m extremely proud of our team and being a part of it.
If I had never built Handlebend, I probably would have taken over my dad’s business by now and mostly worked alone. Working with a team has been a great blessing for me.
What are some of your favorite books, classes, or resources that have helped you?
The best thing for us has been collaboration. When we collaborate with other unique businesses, those people turn into a network of friends and peers all over the country who are doing really cool things.
I learn a lot from those people, and that network has not only made this work enjoyable but has paid off in learning for our businesses.
Work on the skill of meeting other human beings – it makes a huge difference.
Where can we learn more about your business?
