Harrison Nott / Founder, CoolTowel
He sold 100,000 towels
before he could drive.
First business at seven. The ninth one was a cooling towel he sewed on his nan’s kitchen table at thirteen.
- $200,000 Alibaba CoCreate grand prize
- Rio Ferdinand invested after judging the pitch
- 200m+ views across one summer
- 16 years old
Hello
I'm Harrison.
I'm sixteen, and I make a towel that goes cold when you snap it. That is the short answer, and it still sounds strange when I say it out loud.
I made the first one at thirteen on my nan's kitchen table, with a microfibre towel and an ice pack, because I kept overheating on a squash court. It was my ninth attempt at a business. The first eight did not work.
Very little of what happened next was me on my own. My nan sewed the first one, my dad shipped the early orders by hand, and my friends packed two thousand on a school night.
What I write here is mostly the parts that went wrong. Those are the ones worth reading, and almost nobody publishes them.
Thanks for coming. Have a look around.
Came here from a video?
This is
the towel.
It gets cold when it is wet and it stays cold while it stays damp. No chemicals, no freezer, no batteries, nothing to charge. Machine washable. It rolls into a bottle the size of a drink and clips onto a bag.
Builders in August. Nurses on wards with no air conditioning. Runners, footballers, dog owners, people going through menopause. Care homes started ordering it for residents who find the cold calming, which is the one nobody set out to design.
Buy it from cooltowel.com and nowhere else. Around twenty five fake storefronts have run ads using his name and face and taken money for towels that never arrive.
Blue
-
Wet it
Any water. A tap, a bottle, a puddle if that is what there is.
-
Wring it out
Hard. It holds what it needs and drops the rest.
-
Snap it
One snap and it goes cold. Round your neck it stays that way for hours.
Why it exists
Heat hurts the people
who can least afford
to escape it
So he gives towels away to people who need one and were never going to buy one. The plan is to make that the mechanism rather than the gesture: the more it sells, the more it gives.
Three years in he has never taken a salary or a dividend. Everything the company makes goes back into it.
Eight businesses before this one
How he got here
-
Businesses one to eightNone of them worked
eBay at seven. A hand sanitiser brand that sold nothing. Dog treats his own dog refused. Dropshipping that took £2,000 and lost money on returns. An agency. Washing cars in lockdown. A pallet of books nobody bought. A TikTok shop that made four sales.
-
ThirteenThe ninth one worked
A towel, an ice pack and his nan’s sewing machine on a Wednesday night. It works on a squash court, so he orders fifty.
-
Fourteen£15,000 in a day
Two thousand orders. A minibus from school, eight friends, five hours of packing.
-
FifteenThe O2, and $200,000
Fifteen thousand entries. Thirty finalists. Ninety seconds. Rio Ferdinand stops the pitch to say he is in.
-
SixteenA warehouse and twenty people
Over 100,000 sold. Stock in three countries. Software he wrote himself because nothing off the shelf did the job.
-
Every year,
The story
in full
First attempts don't need to work. They need to exist.
Start here
What did you
come for?
-
with him He writes, films and cuts it himself. You can license the footage to run as ads, and because he owns a shop himself he will tell you what it sold, not just who saw it. Sponsored content -
in your business Your name on them, for staff, members, customers or a crew. He has run the factory relationships himself since he was thirteen, with stock in the UK, New Jersey and Mexico. Gifting, co-branding and stocking -
of his time A monthly call or a one-off session. Not a coach and not general advice: what is working on TikTok Shop and in creator programmes this month, from someone whose own money is on it. Advice and mentoring
Something else entirely? He reads his own email.
Alibaba CoCreate, the O2, November 2025
Fifteen thousand
entered. He won.
He did not describe the towel. He soaked it on stage and put it round his neck, and Rio Ferdinand stopped him mid-pitch to say he was in.
- 15,000 entries
- 30 finalists
- 90 seconds each
Written up by The Sun, the Daily Record and SWNS, seventeen pieces in all. He has sat down with Simon Squibb and The Side Hustle Show. Every one of them, with its date.
The investor
“A young man with the clarity and confidence of a seasoned pro.”
Rio Ferdinand, the night of the win
Five days later, at three in the morning: “How do I get involved??? I have some ideas.” It took nine months of chasing to turn that message into an investment, almost all of it Harrison’s.
He says himself that Rio did not invest in a towel. He invested in where it might go, and in someone who would still be at it in ten years.
What it opens is mostly business to business, and mostly not public yet.
Running an event?
Book him
to speak
Main stage at Alibaba CoCreate two years running, and a fireside with the chief executive of Kickstarter. Keynote, fireside or Q&A, fifteen minutes to an hour.
A sixteen year old who has sold over a hundred thousand of something and can tell you what every one of them left after VAT, freight and commission. Rooms do not usually get both.
Not an event? Get content made for your brand, or book a one to one call.
Once a month, if that
What he is building, what went wrong, and what he would do differently.
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