You know the Yeti cooler. Of course you do. Those rugged, brightly coloured boxes Americans love to keep beers in. They take them on camping trips, to family barbecues, to watch the big game. It’s a company worth $3.5 billion today so if you don’t own one, you’ve definitely seen them.

Well, for something pretty innocuous, they have an unexpected backstory that would put any true crime podcast to shame.

Brothers Roy and Ryan Seiders launched the company in their dad’s backyard in 2006. By 2008 they were shifting coolers by the container load, with the popular Yeti Tundra model going for $300. They had come up with the design with the help of Australian designer Ivan Royal Brown who made the actual things at his factory in the Philippines.

All was well, the company was flourishing, until it turned out that Brown had been shot four times while driving home from his factory and was now dead. This was 2008 and as Roy Seiders learned the news from Brown’s wife on the other side of the world, he began to worry that the whole enterprise might be about to come crashing down around them.

"We didn't have a whole lot of confidence that we could move forward without him," he told Brendan Borrell for 

To complicate matters further, just as the business was taking off, their partner had died without a will, leaving the future of the factory up in the air, and calling Yeti’s continued existence into question.

According to Borrel, the Seiders met a “kindred spirit” in Brown, the “the kind of guy who enjoyed being outdoors” and who “wanted to make stuff that worked, stuff you could pass on to your kids.”

Brown had moved to the Philippines in his 50s, after making auto accessories in Australia. He had a reputation as a risk taker in business, but also for living beyond his means. Watches and restaurants were his weakness. Tax collectors spent years pursuing him in court. According to his eldest daughter his motto was “The more you earn, the more you need.”

The Philippines was a fresh start for Brown and his wife. But it was also a place with a murder rate four times greater than Australia, where it was whispered contract killers could be hired for just $500.

Between 2004 and 2006, Brown’s factory was losing money, with his partner Malcolm needing to dig into personal funds to cover equipment to save them from bankruptcy.

Things were complicated by the presence of Ivan’s new wife, Gloria, a Filipino native. According to Filipino law, the role of corporate secretary at a foreign company must be filled by a Filipino, so Gloria got the job. Ditto, a native was the only person who could own property in the country, so Brown’s home was in her name. Brown asked his partner to temporarily transfer his half of the company to Gloria to help her qualify for a mortgage.

The timeline of what happened next isn’t quite clear, but somehow Gloria quickly became a majority shareholder in the company, with multiple members of her family holding positions as dummy shareholders.

But it was only after Brown and Gloria’s marriage in early 2008 that Brown discovered the stock transfers. Gloria resigned her position, and Brown’s original partner regained his power. It was roughly at this time that the Seiders brothers and Yeti entered the picture.

By April 2008, Brown’s business was back on track and the company soon hit $1.5 million in sales, with another half million in assets.

Then, on the afternoon of September 23, 2008, Brown left the factory and climbed into his Toyota Land Cruiser. That’s when a motorbike came alongside on the left and the rider on the back fired four shots through the Land Cruiser window, killing Brown.

Following Brown’s death, Malcolm found himself ordered to leave the factory by armed guards. Gloria was in charge. The two battled for control of the company, and production ground to a halt. With accounts frozen, employees went without pay. In the US, the Seiders realised they were on the verge of losing the US market entirely, a loss that would tank the company.

"Ivan was murdered for greed," Malcolm told them. "I will continue to fight for what he would have wanted me to do…”

It turned out Malcolm wasn’t being paranoid: the police considered Brown’s killing a textbook murder-for-hire. But with no evidence, they had little to go on.

Malcolm stepped up, offering $20,000 for information. A Maoist guerrilla named Alvin Salas was identified, and that October he and Gloria were wanted for murder. But still there was a lack of evidence and the case fell apart. To make matters worse, Gloria claimed Malcolm had signed a large portion of the company over to her, and the courts believed it. According to Borrell, Gloria now controls 99.6% of the company's stock.

For a year, Malcolm tried to fight the case, protected by armed guards. Then, he gave up and went home to Australia. Some of Brown’s former customers decided to take their business elsewhere. Yeti continued to work with the company.

"Never for a second did we think Gloria was involved in Ivan's death," Roy Seiders told Borrell.

Brown aside, it’s been a success story for all involved. Yeti went public in October 2018, and Roy and Ryan cashed out with hundreds of millions of dollars. By 2018, a decade after his murder, Brown – or Gloria’s – company was raking in $9 million a year.

It just goes to show, you can’t let a little thing like a drive-by shooting murder-for-hire plot get in the way of good business.

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