This genius, wheel-shaped cooler needs to be made ASAP

Despite their premise, coolers are not exactly portable. Many models require two people to move them. Some have wheels, but they often get stuck on a beach’s sand or on rugged terrain. Others, you can carry like a backpack, but they are a literal pain in the back. And then there are coolers that float and can be towed, but their use is limited to those with kayaks and small boats.

The Ondago is none of those things. This rolling cooler is shaped like a giant wheel that can be effortlessly pulled by its self-folding arm. It looks like a device created by NASA so its astronauts can go on a picnic on the moon. It’s so clever, useful, and, in retrospect, obvious that it makes you wonder why nobody had thought of it before. But it’s also one of those thingamajigs that make you instantly sad because you just can’t buy it—yet.

Kelly Custer tells me over email that the Ondago is just a concept “for now.” Custer is the founder of Knoxville, Tennessee-based Knack Design Studio and created the Ondago in collaboration with 3D visualization company Derrk. She came up with the idea this summer after a day of drinking with friends at a lake. While toting her cooler from the parking lot to a camp a quarter mile away, she realized that cooler design is fundamentally flawed.

Knowing the user’s pain points and aspirations, she started a concept sketch phase that would address two main objectives: The cooler needed to be very easy to move across any terrain with little effort, and it had to float, too. The self-imposed limits were that the cooler had to be “compact enough to lift and stow.” 

Custer and her team started with the wheels. “We took inspiration from balloon tires, which use their large contact patch to almost effortlessly roll a large amount of weight across sand,” she says. The bigger the tires, the easier it would be to move it across any terrain imaginable. After many sketches, they came to a conclusion: The only way to have the biggest tires and the most compact cooler was to put the cooler inside the tire. “In other words, the tire became the entire circumference of the cooler body,” she says.

With that in mind, Custer thought of a simple mechanism in which a ring holds a heavy duty recycled plastic cylinder that rolls inside. The ring also has a long arm attached to it. The arm circles the ring when stowed, unfolding and twisting into an ergonomic shape that allows a single user to tow it. The central cooler wheel is lined by a recycled rubber surface that acts like a tire.

When I saw the design in motion, my only concern was the stability of the drinks inside. I suggested that having a central axis where the cooler container is always leveled in relation to the ground using ball bearings could be a more stable design. One that will provide stability to the drinks inside so no soda or beer explodes when you open it. Of course, Custer had thought about it already: “While there are many different ways this concept could be executed,” she says, “we envisioned that the container center is spherical and the ice acts as lubricant that allows the ice/drinks to self-level while the cooler rolls.” She even made a quick demo on how this could work:

Of course, this clever idea is just a concept and no prototypes have been made, so we don’t know if it would work. It’s a real shame because this is screaming to be turned into the most successful Kickstarter in history. I know between five and two billion people who need this thing right now.