Vessel Athletics Founder Jasmine Sanchez Shares How She Developed a Hydration Solution for Runners

Jasmine Sanchez grew up around entrepreneurs. As a child, she watched her dad operate his own Mexican restaurant and her mom run two retail furniture stores. Her aunt and uncle had a coffee catering business, and working as a barista for the company was Jasmine’s first job.

“I’ve always really been into entrepreneurship,” Jasmine explains. “I always had the idea to start something, and I particularly wanted to invent something that had some kind of an impact on a community.”

In fact, she was voted “most likely to invent something” by her peers in high school, and it didn’t take long to prove that prediction right.

When Jasmine began running longer distances and training for races during college, she says she found issues with the running hydration gear on the market. They didn’t fit right and felt bulky. Waistbands shifted and water bottles bounced.

It was a problem that needed solving, so Jasmine dove in to develop a product.

After more than five years of working with designers and manufacturers, Jasmine and her partner Jalen Brown launched Vessel Athletics, a functional performance-wear brand.

“The whole idea is we want to redefine how people hydrate on the go with the product that we designed and invented called the Hydroshirt,” Jasmine explains.

What separates the Hydroshirt from other hydration gear on the market?

• It’s a lightweight shirt with a removable bladder.
• A magnetic component holds the straw in place.
• The shirt is made in men’s and women’s sizing and includes adjustable straps.

Jasmine hopes the Hydroshirt positively impacts the running community, specifically runners looking for a hydration option that fits their body type and is easy to use.

This past year, she and Jalen ran a successful Kickstarter campaign to get the product into consumers’ hands and worked with run clubs in the Bay Area to promote the brand. Now, they’re busy managing the product’s online sales and fulfillment.

Below, Jasmine shares more about her inspiration to develop the Hydroshirt, how she connected with the running community for her market research, and insights into her journey as a runner.

How did you get into running, and what role does it play in your life today?

Jasmine Sanchez: I [grew] up playing sports all my life. My sport of choice was basketball, so I was always very active …. I started college, and there was this period where I no longer had that sport, that team, that community that I grew up having for many, many years.

At the time, my form of physical activity was just going to the gym …. I came across this 8K…in San Jose called the 408k. It’s an annual run…by this group called Run Local. They put on a lot of different running events in the Bay Area.

I worked my way up to that race and completed it. It kind of opened my eyes to what the running culture and the running community was all about …. [Seeing] everything you’ve trained for the last couple months coming together, and people are excited, people are positive. There’s cheering going on. There are bands playing …. There’s fulfillment, there’s positivity, there’s a community there.

I started to sign up for more runs and training for longer distances. I’ve now run several different marathons. I’m registered for my next marathon [this] year, so I’ll be starting my training cycle again.

Running in all aspects has changed my life. My relationship with running has changed a lot, too, over the years. I’m a lot more at peace with having years where…I’m not signed up for all these races. Maybe I’m just running to stay active, running to bring my dog alongside me, or running to meet new people. Or, some years, I’m running for that PR.

Running is so integrated into my life now — through my relationships, through my own physical health. It’s something I’m really grateful for all around.

How did you come across the idea for Vessel Athletics?

Jasmine Sanchez: As I started to sign up for more runs and training for longer distances, I eventually got to the point where I was like, ‘I need to start carrying water with me on my runs.’

I started using a lot of the hydration products that are on the market, like the handheld bottles, the hydration vests and packs, the water belts. I found issues with a lot of them. For starters, I didn’t want to be carrying a water bottle in my hand, having to go between having the gels or switching to another song on [my] phone and now also holding a bottle.

I also found a lot of the packs and vests were either really bulky — they were constantly moving around so they weren’t really fitted to your body — or they added some extra weight depending on the type of pack or vest that you had …. Then the water belts…they were very flimsy, always moving to the side if there were two little bottles sitting alongside your waist.

[I wondered] ‘What if I could somehow find a way to put the water bladder reservoir inside of an actual running shirt?’ I didn’t really see anything like that on the market.

What steps did you take to bring your idea to market?

Jasmine Sanchez: I was still a student at San Jose State. I studied business, and I was taking on a lot of entrepreneurship classes, specifically.

The first thing that they always say when you have an idea is, you want to go out and actually validate that this idea you have is solving a problem. That’s the number one core thing. You have to solve a problem…and you have to get validation from people that they’ll actually pay money for it. Otherwise, you don’t really have a business.

I would go to local trails in my area, or I would stand outside a race, right where they would finish, and I would walk up to runners who had a vest or who had a handheld bottle, and [ask] them questions:

Hey, can I speak with you?
What’s your experience with this product?
Why do you use this product?
What are some of the challenges, if any, that you experience?

That helped me start to get an understanding of what other pain points people are experiencing. Because it’s one thing for me to experience a pain point, but it’s another thing for hundreds and thousands of other runners to experience the pain point, too.

Once I got to the point of really validating that there is a need for a better hydration product, that’s where the actual prototyping phase came in. I didn’t have any design experience, which made that journey a little bit more challenging. But I did have being a student on my side …. There was a design department at my school, so I found some design students who were interested in helping out, and that’s how we started…getting some of the first prototypes.

That eventually trickled into…working with [professional] designers…finding a manufacturer, getting the samples, going back and forth for years up until the point where we finally felt like the first product, our first iteration of the product, was ready to go to market.

What are the key features of the Hydroshirt that set it apart from its competitors?

Jasmine Sanchez: With the Hydroshirt 1.0…[it’s] essentially a running shirt that integrates a one-liter removable water bladder. What we tried to hone in on with the Kickstarter was: We’re creating a shirt that’s lightweight — something that’s actually lighter than a lot of the hydration packs or vests on the market.

It’s hands-free…. There’s a straw that funnels from the back of the shirt, which is where the water bladder sits, to the front. And there’s a little cool magnetic feature that…holds the straw in place. When you’re running and you want to drink water, you easily grab the straw, drink water, and snap it back into place.

A lesson we learned through our early testing was, without insulation, the water bladder is sitting alongside your back, [and] as your back warms up, it’s going to warm up the water. We ended up designing a pretty simple sleeve for the water bladder so it’s all insulated.

Another big feature that we designed into the product was essentially these adjustable straps …. Everybody’s fit is different. Everyone has a different preference in terms of how they wear their running apparel. What’s nice about this is, with the adjustable straps, you can adjust the shirt according to your fit. The straps are also intended to keep the hydration bladder sitting in place and tight, nice and snug to your body, so that it’s not swashing around from side to side when you’re moving.

How did your business partnerships, with Jalen and others, help bring Vessel Athletics to life?

Jasmine Sanchez: Jalen really came into the picture…once I had already started prototyping. He also went to San Jose State, so that’s where we met. [He was] testing a lot of the early prototypes that I had, which were so terrible…so naturally, he just really fit into the role of being there to help with the refinement of the design. He went from testing a lot of the products to…adding a lot of thoughts around [improvements]. He would also join a lot of the calls we had with our designers and calls with our manufacturers.

When we were gearing up for the Kickstarter, he and I were both switching roles for social media content …. It’s just such a tiny little team, just two of us. We kind of had to take on a lot of different roles. So, especially gearing up for the Kickstarter…we would [have] multiple meetings a week saying, ‘Okay, this is what needs to get done …. What can you work on?’

It really takes a village to invent a product and bring it to market. It wasn’t just Jalen and I. It was also the help of our designers …. The last set of designers that we worked with was through an agency called Alice James Global, and they’re based in Austin, Texas. It’s a fully all-female-run design team …. They really spent so much time with us refining such a technical product.

In any business, you need the right partners. You could have either really terrible partners who are just going to make your life a nightmare, or you can have incredible partners who are there for the right reasons and they truly want to see you succeed.

Learn more about Vessel Athletics here.

“I always had the idea to start something, and I particularly wanted to invent something that had some kind of an impact on a community.” – Jasmine Sanchez