We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Austin Maxwell. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Austin below.

Austin, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Let’s kick things off with a hypothetical question – if it were up to you, what would you change about the school or education system to better prepare students for a more fulfilling life and career?

There is a lot I would change about the education system. The first thing that comes to mind is the unbelievable amount of life skills needed in your 20s that are not taught in college or high school. How to buy a car, how to start an LLC, how to differentiate your resume from others, how to get a mortgage on a house, how to save for retirement, the importance of a strong support system from family/friends/spouse, the process of getting married … and finally (my favorite) … TAXES. How they work and how to best navigate them through the different stages of income and life.

I would also change the amount of pressure put on students to choose a major freshman year with the expectation that the major chosen is the career path they must follow. I was better at math/science in High School than I was in English/Reading … so naturally I was pushing to pursue Engineering by counselors and adults. I went to Clemson University and enrolled in Industrial Engineering. By my Sophomore year I realized that this was not my calling or passion. However, I was already a year deep and I would have had to start completely over if I switched majors. I would encourage Colleges and Universities to have a more broad Freshman year curriculum that forces students to try a taste of everything to find out what they like and more importantly, what they don’t like! Additionally, by Senior year I would want at LEAST the basic skills of communication and finance to be taught to all majors, as I believe these are two of the most impactful post-grad competencies.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

My classmates and I invented and patented the world’s first ICELESS cooler as part of a college class project. I have a passion for people, problem solving and seeing something super tiny become a wild success. Growing up I learned a lot of important skills that helped me be more prepared when the opportunity to start this business appeared. When I was in elementary school I had a blue crab business where I would catch crabs in the Magothy River in Arnold, MD and then go door to door selling the live crabs. I learned about cold calling and hustle in those moments. In High School I worked at a high end car wash greeting over 200 different people every single day and offering them our upgrade services. I learned communication skills and solution selling aka making sure the customer gets what they truly need and they are happier because of it!

Building Kanga Coolers since the Spring Semester of 2017 has been the best 6 years of my life! I’ve met the most incredible people, learned hundreds of new skills, and felt the lowest lows and the highest highs. It hasn’t been easy but the key wins make it all worth it. We’ve walked in the tank (Shark Tank) with some of the most successful entrepreneurs in the world, sold over 500,000 coolers across the US, and even became a Forbes 30 Under 30 winner!

The thing that I am most proud of along this journey has been our opportunity to inspire young entrepreneurs. We frequently speak to young adults about our story and nothing feels better than someone DMing us a few hours after the event saying that we inspired them to finally pursue their business idea that they’ve been holding onto for months/years. We recently spoke to a 2nd grade class that is learning about Entrepreneurship as part of their curriculum. I needed autocorrect just to spell Entrepreneurship correctly and these young kids are over here learning about it in 2nd grade – absolutely amazing! We just want the world to know that if you put in the hard work and get a little better each day, great things WILL come.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

We once had a customer that ordered custom coolers for an event and they had to have them by a specific date! Our container was late and got held up in the port of Charleston. We rented a Uhaul and drove 8 hours roundtrip, broke into our own container, got the boxes for the customer and drove them directly to him with hours to spare before the event!

Sometimes the things you want to do the least end up making for the best stories and memories. The key lesson is as a business owner you WILL have to do things that you don’t want to. It’s necessary and critical for the businesses success. My partner Logan has always said “whatever it takes’

How did you build your audience on social media?

Frequency, volume, testing, improving, repeating!

We have over 350,000 followers across all platforms right now. We post A LOT. We love testing different styles of posting. Still product images, short videos, long videos, memes, lifestyle images, team updates, the list goes on!

Our biggest piece of advice for growing on social media is to just START posting. We post anywhere from 70-100 times per week. 1 video on TikTok can be repurposed 5 times on IG Reels, FB Reels, Youtube Shorts, LinkedIn and Twitter! Work smarter not harder and understand that 1 video can have success in multiple places.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.kangacoolers.com
• Instagram: @kangacoolers
• Facebook: @kangacoolers
• Linkedin: @kangacoolers
• Twitter: @kangacoolers
• Youtube: @kangacoolers
• TikTok: @kangacoolers

Image Credits
I took all of these photos!