19-Year-Old's 3D-Printed Can Coolers Brought In $808K in 2025 Sales

Mike Satterlee was a high school freshman when he first learned to run a 3D printer, in a class called design and drawing for production. Now 19, he runs CruiseCup, a business in Clifton Park, New York, that sells 3D-printed and stainless steel can coolers. According to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It, it brought in $808,000 in gross revenue in 2025.¹²

That number is sales, not profit. CNBC reported that the business is profitable, but Satterlee declined to share profit figures and pays himself only $500 to $1,500 a month.¹ His path from one cheap machine to a warehouse full of them shows how a small idea can be tested, grown and paid for out of its own sales.

From Crocs charms to can coolers

Satterlee says he bought his first 3D printer, which cost about $500, in September 2022. In June 2023 he launched Solefully, which sold charms for Crocs shoes.² By his estimate, Solefully brought in roughly $250,000 in 2024 sales. That let him start renting a $3,600-a-month warehouse in November 2024.¹

CruiseCup came next. In an earlier first-person piece for Entrepreneur, Satterlee said the business was entirely self-funded from revenue.³ He shut down Solefully in June 2025 once CruiseCup outpaced it.²

One viral post, six weeks of orders

In August 2025, an Instagram post about a CruiseCup product called the tactical reloader went viral. It holds two 12-ounce cans and reloads from the top or the bottom, which may be the most engineering ever applied to keeping a drink cold. The post brought in hundreds of orders in a single day.¹

CruiseCup took in $100,000 that month, about 60% more than Satterlee had ever earned in a month from earlier ventures, he says.² At the time he had 60 printers in a 3,000-square-foot warehouse, and he figured the backlog would take about six weeks to fill.¹

Sales have swung since. He told Entrepreneur the business did about $55,000 in September 2025, $100,000 in October and $315,000 in November.³

Today he runs CruiseCup full-time with one other employee and 160 printers for the plastic products. Stainless steel models come from a manufacturer in China, and documents show two patents pending on CruiseCup designs.² Most sales come through the company website and TikTok Shop, with a small share from Amazon.² BGR, citing the CruiseCup website, reported more than 72,372 units sold as of October 2026.⁴

He skipped college to build the company. “Every day I wake up, I’m excited to go to work,” he told CNBC Make It.¹

Lessons from CruiseCup’s path

• Start small and test. Satterlee began with one roughly $500 printer and a Crocs charm business before landing on the product that took off.²
• Find the bottleneck and fix it. He told Entrepreneur he prints on Bambu Lab A1 printers that cost under $300, and a build plate of three cups takes about 15 hours. That is why he needs so many printers, and why he planned to have the product made in metal to avoid backlogs.³
• Revenue is not a paycheck. Satterlee keeps his own pay low because he lives with his parents and pays no rent. The warehouse pays rent; he doesn’t. The rest goes to more printers, social media ads or new products.¹
• Viral success brings its own problems. One post created weeks of backlog, and monthly sales have risen and fallen sharply since.¹³

What comes next

Satterlee plans to add UV printing, expand into more kinds of drinkware and build a larger marketing team to pursue space on retail shelves.² He has company in the 3D-printing business: a Shopify spokesperson cited by CNBC said the number of 3D-printed products sold on Shopify rose 112% from October 2025 through September 2026.¹

“I love what I do, I love building stuff and it makes it not even feel like work,” Satterlee told CNBC Make It.¹