I thought I would take a moment out of my nonproductive Sunday afternoon to offer up my thoughts about one of your products, the Element 5 Vacuum Insulated Travel Tumbler.

Like an appreciable number of First-World denizens with little better to do with their lives, I have devoted considerable time and money in the pursuit of the ultimate coffee mug for travelers. My list of criteria is fairly straightforward. The vessel must hold as much coffee as is practical to consume while on the go (16 to 20 fluid ounces seems to be the sweet spot). It must be insulated using materials with real insulative properties (vacuum, for instance). It must be durable (stainless steel, preferably, with no glass vacuum bottle). It must be easy to drink from while driving (the spout must be accessible without having to use both hands to open it). Lastly, it must fit comfortably in the standard beverage holder on the average car….or at least, in the standard beverage holder in my car.

By these standards, the Element 5 is very nearly the perfect commuter’s coffee mug, but it misses the mark in a couple of significant ways.

First, the good stuff: The Element 5 keeps coffee hot for several hours even without an initial “priming” of hot water, easily as long as any other vacuum bottle I have ever owned, including my half-gallon Stanley. Additionally, this thing has the most ingenious spout design I have ever seen on a travel mug. The seal on the lid is, as far as I can tell, completely leakproof: I regularly clip this thing to my backback and throw it in my car for long journeys without a single thought about my car upholstery.

The 360° drink lid is, hands-down, a stroke of genius. The mug goes from absolutely leakproof to easily drinkable in the space of a quarter-turn of the lid. Even when the lid is set for drinking, an overturned mug will dribble coffee much more slowly than many other designs. If that system was designed in-house, I hope the person who came up with the idea was given a bonus large enough to allow him/her to purchase their own small Tahitian island.

Overall the look and feel of the mug is great; I imagine that you were trying for a precision-machined, ready-for-anything look, sort of like a high-tech snowshoe or something. Mission accomplished! With a capacity of 16 fluid ounces it is within my limits for acceptable capacity as well. The overall circumference of the mug might be a little large for those with smaller hands, in which case they can avail themselves of the model with the handle.

Now for the bad: firstly, despite your obvious need to give the mug a “sturdy” look, I wish with all of my heart that you had elected to make it taller and narrower. The large, clunky hard rubber base will simply not fit into a (read: my) car’s cup holder. That base is one of the mug’s more foolish affectations. Your description of a “Rubberized shock absorbing base with wide stance for stable footing” is, to be charitable, a bit of poetic license. I can’t speak for others, but personally, even if I believed your claims of shock absorbency (which I don’t), I don’t particularly need a “shock absorbing base” for my coffee mug. I may be worried about spilling my coffee, but I’m rarely concerned with the possibility of bruising it. As for its “extra-wide stance”: I think you may have misinterpreted the primary functions which this unit will fulfill with your customer base. I think it is safe to say that very few of your customers will be sipping lattes from their new travel mug while plowing through the chop of the Pacific ocean on a Zodiac, on a mission to harass Russian whaling vessels. If they are carrying the mug during periods of instability at all, they no doubt will be leaving it sealed. Most if not all of your potential customers will be using this product in their cars (where the stability would be greatly enhanced by the ability to fit in a car’s cup holder) or in the home or at the office (where people have survived the imbibing of hot beverages without the intervention of an extra-wide rubberized shock-absorbing base since time immemorial).

The second and most important problem with the Element 5 is the size of the internal opening. Ideally, the diameter of the inner opening should be as close to the diameter of the rest of the vessel as is possible to allow the unobstructed flow of the contents. The comparatively tiny diameter of the Element 5’s opening makes it almost impossible to retrieve the last three or four ounces of liquid from the mug without upending the thing over your head. In a stationary environment like a home or office setting this is an annoying inconvenience; in a moving vehicle this could conceivably be quite dangerous. This design oversight keeps me from using the Element 5 during my regular commute, which is a shame, given all of the unit’s other redeeming qualities.

All in all, the Element 5 is an excellent product with a couple of serious design oversights that keep it from being the ultimate insulated travel mug it was destined to be. As it is, it is merely penultimate, suitable for a number of special-purpose situations but less than ideal for everyday use. It is my fervent hope that you will attend to these design problems and re-engineer the product to overcome them. If you do, I hereby promise that I will buy the new and improved Element 5 for everyone on my gift list. And possibly a few extra for complete strangers.