Lille Allen
The accessorizing must stop
Okay, I admit it — I understand the appeal of the 40-ounce Stanley Quencher. It is, objectively, a good cup that holds a ton of water and keeps it cold for hours. What I do not understand, though, is the consumerist compulsion to embellish these hulking drinking vessels with an increasingly deranged array of cup accessories.
You’ve probably seen the videos. They usually go a little something like this: “Pack my Stanley with me,” reads the text overlaying a TikTok video in which a young woman straps a tiny little backpack onto her cup. She fills the backpack with lip balm and individually wrapped hygiene wipes, then affixes a teddy-bear-shaped cap over the opening of the cup’s straw. From her freezer, she pulls out a three-part ice mold designed specifically for the Stanley tumbler and dumps the frozen cylinders into the cup. She then drops two vitamin tablets into a tiny plastic pill case that snaps directly onto the handle. Maybe she snaps a snack tray designed to fit around the cup’s exterior on top. Only then is she ready to go on her “hot girl walk.”
This moment feels like an inflection point in the Stanley accessorizing craze. A search for “Stanley cup accessories” on Amazon returns around 8,000 results, including decorative silicone “boots” to protect the bottom of the cup, countless straw cover designs, slings and backpacks designed specifically to accommodate the cup, and decorative carrying straps. All told, it’s easy to spend around $100 — or more than double the original price of the cup — decorating your Stanley.
Cups, and before them, water bottles, have long been a way for us to express ourselves. That’s what you were doing when you decorated your college-era Nalgene with stickers, and it’s what you’re doing now when you buy a Hydro Flask or Yeti that matches your bag. What’s different about Stanley cups, though, is that they’ve spawned an entire cottage industry of accessories that don’t really seem to make the cup more functional. Those straw covers aren’t water-tight, uncovered snack trays spill, and ice works the same no matter what shape it’s in.
Yet, on Instagram, it doesn’t really matter if these accessories work — or work well — as long as they contribute to the desired look.
Presumably, there are some people watching these videos who are interested in actually buying this stuff. The “accessorize my Stanley” trend is accessible to the aspiring influencer, or even just the person who wants everything they own to be “aesthetic” (it’s a lot easier to buy a couple of Stanley accessories for $30 on Amazon than it is to buy an expensive handbag). But it wouldn’t surprise me if the backlash to this genre of video was fueling their popularity just as much. The vast majority of comments are disapproving, many noting the brazen glorification of consumerism on display. On some level, the “pack my Stanley” creators are leaning into the hate-watch, refusing to acknowledge their critics while piling more and more garbage onto their cups. “Rage-baiting” is a decidedly effective way to drive engagement on social media platforms, after all.
But consumerism and waste aside, the Stanley cup accessories trend is depressing because it’s visually uninteresting. These aren’t designer sneakers or a bag — both of which could be considered a type of wearable art — they’re just mass-produced garbage that you attach to the side of a cup. At least when you were spackling your water bottle with stickers, you could choose designs made by local artists that were beautiful or expressed a point of view. Now, it’s just a never-ending array of very similar looking silicone and plastic accessories sold via Amazon and Temu that will eventually end up in a landfill when the Owala Free Sip or some other cup comes along to depose Stanley from the tumbler throne.
