Thermal cup brand YETI has come under fire on social media for refusing to fulfill an order for a young women’s nonprofit leadership organization.
In emails obtained exclusively by FOX Business, the brand had previously fulfilled an order for the Clare Boothe Luce Center (CBL) worth $3,797.84 in May of last year with the same exact logo customization.
The Clare Boothe Luce Center for Conservative Women in northern Virginia, a nonprofit, describes itself as “an all-women organization that specializes in the conservative outreach, education, and mentorship of young women.”
The center is named after Clare Boothe Luce, herself a celebrated playwright, congresswoman and ambassador to Italy.
“[Luce] actually has an amazing quote that we use all the time, ‘Courage is the ladder upon which all the other virtues mount.’ And she was courageous,” said Clare Boothe Luce Center President Kimberly Begg in an interview with FOX Business. “We think that that is the one quality above all else that young women need, to be courageous.”
In emails obtained by FOX Business, YETI responded to inquiries from the Clare Boothe Luce Center regarding their canceled March 20, 2025, order citing item no. 15 or “Custom Products” in their terms and conditions.
According to the brand, “YETI values respect, tolerance and open dialogue, and we serve a diverse and varied customer base. YETI has the sole discretion to reject any order that we deem inappropriate for production… Starting with our first customized Ramblers in 2015, we’ve used our best efforts to avoid creating custom products with political affiliations or associations. Because the process we use to identify political affiliations and associations involves human judgment, we may inadvertently accept an order and mark a YETI product with a candidate’s name or campaign slogan simply because we weren’t familiar with it when the order was placed.”
Begg claimed in an interview with FOX Business that the YETI brand accepted their order worth $1,608.00 this week before canceling it abruptly.
According to Begg, the Center was originally confused about what changed between their May 2024 order and their attempted March 2025 order, which resulted in cancelation.
Begg said that there were no hiccups in their order from the brand last year, and that the customized tumblers made excellent gifts for speakers and mentors who gave their time to the Clare Boothe Luce Center.
“[YETI] produced these beautiful mugs for us, and we always gave them to our speakers,” said Begg to FOX Business. So anybody who comes to speak, we end every single presentation very ceremoniously, you know, handing off these mugs to our speakers. And our speakers love it! It’s been this really fun thing that we’ve done over the last year and get all of our speakers to receive YETI mugs, so we’re starting to run out. We contacted the company just for a reorder and did not expect there to be any problems whatsoever.”‘
According to Begg, that’s when the trouble started.
“What’s really funny about it, when a young woman in our office contacted [YETI], she didn’t tape [the conversation],” recalled Begg.
“She told me about it, and then she went back and she asked to talk to [a YETI] supervisor. And she tried, she went back so many times and eventually she said, ‘There’s nobody else to talk to you. It’s just a solid no.”
The Clare Boothe Luce Center social media pages have since been updated with news of the order cancelation, with an Instagram post saying, “Soooo… @yeti cancelled us.”
“We ordered the EXACT same product from Yeti last year with no problems,” the nonprofit wrote in their post. “Nothing is different–their terms haven’t changed in the last 10 years. We submitted payment and got all the confirmation emails. This is ridiculous. Yeti, do better.”
Using data from the website StockAnalysis, the YETI brand (YETI) is down 17.38% since this time last year, with a market cap of $2.8 billion.
A standard 10-oz YETI Rambler mug currently sells for $25 a unit per their online shop.
A spokesperson for YETI provided this comment to FOX Business: “YETI serves a wide-ranging customer base by designing and developing outdoor products for passionate people to use in the wild.
“Starting with our first customized Rambler® Drinkware in 2015, we’ve used our best efforts to create and adhere to a policy that prevents customizing products aligned with any political affiliations or organizations in addition to content that could be considered obscene, vulgar, profane, discriminatory, defamatory, or hateful. We regret that due to a mistake, this policy was not followed with the previous online order from the Clare Boothe Luce Center.”
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