Sawn Journal

001 The First Drawing

2026-10-06T00:00:00Z

You’re either compensating for a night you’re not proud of, or you’re actually locked in. Either way you’ve dragged yourself to a sauna at 9:15am on a Saturday. Respect. The staff hands you a paper cup to write your name on. You look over at the person next to you who is juggling two cups in one hand, and a towel in the other. At least I’m not that guy, you think. You bring the cup into the sauna with you.

Breathe in, breathe out…

Four minutes later the water is warm, and you’re holding a flimsy and structureless cup.

Sound familiar?

It was my first time there, and we were trying Othership. I was in New York visiting Jack, and we’d gone to a 9:15am class on a Saturday. In Toronto I’m in the sauna every day. 10 minutes before work to set the tone for the day… dialled.

There is no better feeling than leaving a sauna. We experienced that the whole way home. Truthfully, I had stayed out a couple hours later than Jack did the night prior. But both of us looked at each other and genuinely said “this is the feeling that I want to remember.” It’s this feeling of micro-accomplishment, clarity, starting the day off right. We asked ourselves: how do we play a part in sharing this feeling, or making it more accessible.

Is it a coffee shop – or third space – next to a sauna-house? Is it a non-alcoholic beverage designed for post-sauna consumption?

Back at Jack’s, we talked about bathrobes, and about starting a sauna hat company. Then I asked: what if we just made a water bottle meant for the sauna? There’s no good way to drink there. The water gets warm, or the bottle gets too hot to touch.

I looked over at Jack who just started to grin. He had already been working around it. He’d been wrapping a silicone wrist band around his bottle for months and pinching it there just to hold it. Pretty lame. That’s the kind of thing you do when you’ve already accepted that the right product doesn’t exist. How Jack didn’t think of this idea before me still baffles me.

We spent about six hours in his room with pen, paper and claude. A few things were settled that afternoon: no plastic anywhere, and something that felt intentionally built – not an afterthought. Jack thought of a cork shell, because a steel bottle you grip in there gets far too hot. Low thermal conductivity, natural feeling, and nice to the touch. Did we just come up with successive great ideas? This flow-like feeling rivaled that which we felt leaving the sauna that morning.

A couple sketches later, various AI-renderings, we thought we were ready for shark tank.

First sketch. May 23, 2026, NoHo, NYC. Still on the wall.

Naturally, we were excited to share this idea with our buddies. One friend, Eli, laughed at our idea and said every bottle he owns is fine in the sauna. Needless to say we don’t talk to Eli anymore… but in all seriousness, he was right! This is exactly the problem that needs solving - everyone’s already accepted something that doesn’t actually work. Like Jack’s lame silicone band solution. We didn’t need to reinvent the wheel, we just needed to give the wheel better rubber – or in our case, give the bottle some cork.

Jack and I have been friends since second grade, and for the last three years we’ve called each other with ideas. Lots of, lets just say, “abstract” ideas, but this is the one we’re pursuing.

One of our more profitable ideas to date, circa 2012.

Welcome to Sawn. You already know the feeling. We’re just building what belongs there.

002 Wrapping It Ourselves

2026-10-12T00:00:00Z

Neither of us had ever held a sheet of cork.

Sure, back in elementary school we’d poke thumbtacks into cork boards to make funny shapes – but now we had a business to run, so we needed to think about this more seriously. Probably.

We didn’t know if it would feel like a wine cork stopper or a yoga mat or something in between. How thick should this be to stay cool in a sauna?

We wanted to know three things: whether the cork would last, whether it would stick, and whether it was too brittle. We both wanted to consult with people more familiar with the water-bottle industry, or cork-experts, but figured we could do a little discovery on our own first. Turns out, we’ve been doing that since fourth grade.

Some things don’t change, April 2011.

The plan was four bottles: two with 3 mm cork (one on scratched steel, one smooth), two with 4 mm. An hour in the oven every day, then a “pull test”. We’d draw a marker line at the top edge of the cork to see if it started to sag. It was meticulous. It was scientific. We wrote it in a notebook.

Fortunately, I had to fly home to Vancouver, which meant I could take advantage of two things: my dad, and my dad’s workshop. It felt like the good old days. Joe, who had been following the project from a respectable distance, took one look at what needed to happen and quietly took over. I became his assistant. My main job was answering Jack’s FaceTime and pointing the camera at whatever Joe was doing.

Highly technical applying of epoxy, using plastic spoon and chopped credit card.

What we actually built was 3 mm and 4 mm cork, glued onto plain stainless bottles ordered off Amazon. We measured and cut it by hand, which left a seam, and the seam filled with epoxy. The epoxy got on the bottle, the seam, my hands, and probably the floor. Just a finance guy and his dad cutting cork with kitchen scissors and calling it R&D.

We looked at the finished prototype, felt pretty good about ourselves, and decided it was ready to test.

So we put it in the oven.

The first prototype.

003 The Sauna Test

2026-10-18T00:00:00Z

FAIL!

We put a prototype in the oven. My sauna tops out at 195°F, so we cranked it to 220°F. If it could survive that, it could survive anything.

We eagerly looked through the glass of the oven, counting down the minutes until we could test it.

We’re in the sauna business, not the oven-cleaning business.

Ding ding, it’s time to retrieve our masterpiece. I reach in with my bare hand and instantly pull it back. Did I grab the rack instead of the bottle?

The bottle was hot – seriously hot… to the point where even the most trained mother’s hand couldn’t withstand the heat. We weren’t sure we had a product anymore.

Someone was going to have to tell Joe.

Then we realized an oven was a terrible stand-in for a sauna. Dry radiant heat from all sides is nothing like sitting in a cedar box where the heat rises and the air moves. We’d been testing the wrong thing. Phew!

We are so back.

So I took the 3 mm bottle into my building’s sauna for weeks. Empty, top bench, every session. No water inside on purpose – cold water would insulate it from the inside and we wanted the hardest version of the test. Just me and a hand-wrapped prototype sitting where nobody’s water bottle goes.

Everyone at my building’s sauna brings their bottle into the sauna and leaves it on the floor, or just outside the door. Me? I bring that thing with me to the top bench.

It was doing too well on the top bench, so we gave it more elevation.

After a session it’s slightly warm. You can grip it with your whole hand, no problem. Is it cold? No. And we stopped wanting that. It’s meant to be touchable – warm the way a wooden handle is warm, not hot the way everything else in there is hot.

The glue held. The cork didn’t move, and the hand-cut seam didn’t come apart at all.

We are close.

Our ugly prototype worked? Are we on to something?

The cork can’t stay ugly forever, though.

004 Choosing a Partner

2026-10-25T00:00:00Z

Fifteen factories said no.

I messaged every factory on Alibaba that looked like it might be able to put cork on a bottle. “We don’t do this.” “We can’t do this.” “So sorry.” The one that finally said yes wanted to be paid before it would show us a thing.

Off to a great start.

Meanwhile, our ugly prototypes were taking daily trips to Solly’s sauna. We needed help. I just didn’t love admitting it. So I turned to my business advisor (Mr. Claude) and was pointed to a sourcing partner.

My weekend work setup. Three screens = 3x productivity.

Solly and I eagerly explained our vision, awaiting validation. Instead, we were told, “Oh, so you guys don’t have a tech pack, no design backgrounds, just an idea?”

“We can take you from 1 to 100, but you’ve got to get from 0 to 1.”

“How do we do that?” I naively asked.

“Give these guys a call,” they said, and shot us an email intro to a company called Loveit out of Grand Rapids, Michigan.

A week later, on our first Zoom call, I blurted the quiet part out loud. “The entrepreneur in me, the reason these calls are interesting is how much of it can I do without needing you guys.” Translation: can we just bootstrap this thing?

Then the honest part. We both have full-time jobs. What we actually needed was a crutch for everything we didn’t have the experience, or the hours, to do ourselves.

Loveit <> Sawn Intro Call, June 5, 2026.

But there’s also that old saying: never swing at the first pitch. So we fielded several other calls, some in the US, some in Canada, and narrowed it down to two final proposals. One studio would hand us a tech pack and a list of factories and wish us luck. The other wanted to come along for the whole ride.

Naturally, we said “buckle up” and chose Loveit.

We wrote them an email. Solly drafted it. It opened with: “Our thesis remains intact that this is a missing product in a trending market.”

I read it back to him. “Our thesis remains intact?!” What kind of corporate jargon is this? We are a startup. And, importantly, a water bottle startup. Just be like, “We still believe in the product.”

Deleted. He works in finance and can’t help it.

Then Solly made the best point of the day. Choosing a partner that wants to build a relationship and come along for the journey aligns our incentives. If they win when we win, they’ll care about it the way we do.

But there was one question from that very first call we still hadn’t answered. They’d asked it like it was easy.

“Beyond the bottle, beyond the product, what are you trying to build?”