Hi, I'm Mike Cessario. I'm 40 years old, and
I'm the CEO and founder of Liquid Death. Start rolling and get
Zach if you want to take it away. Could you talk to us a
little bit about your childhood and growing up
and if there were any if there was any any
moments where you where you kind of tapped into
a creative or entrepreneurial spirit
or any or any influences that you had at that
time that kind of led to what you're doing now? You know, as a kid, I
think the earliest memory I have was sitting on my
cousin's skateboard sometime in the probably
mid mid eighties, and I was always very
interested in skateboards. As early as
I can remember, I got my first skateboard when I
was seven. It was a Nash and then I
got a got really into that. Then my parents
got me this Tony Hawk board and I just was
obsessed with skateboard graphics and artwork
because as a kid I was always really into
drawing and then I started drawing skate
graphics and these things in the world of
skateboarding, which was all really cool art. And I think that helped
drive a lot of my early creativity, what were
like the late eighties skate art esthetic. And then as I got into
middle school, high school, I started
playing guitar, started playing in bands,
everything from like punk bands and metal bands
and that kind of stuff. And I was the guy who
was doing most of the creative stuff for our
bands. Like I was doing the
show fliers and designing the album covers and all
the business creative stuff around the around
the band I was doing. And I loved that stuff. And ultimately, when it
came time, well, what do I want to go to college
for? What do I want to do? I ended up going the
graphic design path because that kind of
seemed like the only sort of job path for me based
on my experience and what I was into. So I went to
school at college called Art Center in Pasadena
for originally for design, and then I
switched to advertising and had a career working
for big creative ad agencies, starting out
as an art director and then becoming a writer
and then a creative director and working on
every different type of brand in business you
could imagine from cars to frozen pizzas to
Netflix. And yeah, that's where I
really kind of built my creative sort of point
of view on marketing, combined with my
background of skate and bands. And then
ultimately that kind of culminated in in, in
creating Liquid Death a few years ago. Great. We're definitely
going to get into all of that. I want to I want
to kind of stick with the early life for you. You talked about how how
important was how important drawing was as
kind of a creative outlet for you. Can you talk a
little bit more about why, you know, why you
kind of connected with drawing so much, why
that became so important. Yeah, I don't know. It was just one of those
things where I guess when I was really little, for
some reason, making this motion with a crayon or
something was more fun to me than it was other
kids. So I just did a lot more
of it. So by the time I was
six, I could draw better than a lot of other
people just because I had done it way more times,
because for some reason it was just more fun to
me. But then, you know, as I got a little bit
older, I just was more and more into drawing
and I think drawing it connected to the things
that I liked most. So, you know, when The
Simpsons came out in the nineties, like, I love
that show and Bart Simpson and that was all
animated. It was drawings. And
this thing that I love watching was also this
thing that I love doing and cartoons and, and
skate graphics and all that. So drawing felt
like the way that I could help, I could create,
co-create these things that I was already
really into. I wanted to ask you about
sort of your your relation with with punk
music and becoming a musician more and also
kind of about sort of the, the DIY esthetic
that you grew up with in the nineties. Can you
talk a little bit about that and what drew you
to punk music into the punk scene? So when I was maybe. Nine or ten. My older cousin, who was
maybe five years older, gave me his whole
collection of Mad Magazine, which I was
probably a little too young for at the time,
but I just completely ate that stuff up. And it
was kind of crass and vulgar, but it was art
and it was really funny and it was spoofy. And I always had that
disruptive, I think, love in a sense
that that helped shape. So when punk music
started becoming a bigger thing, I think it just
really appealed to me because it felt like it
did all the things that I was always into. Like it
was punk was about sort of being disruptive and
funny and creative and all of
these things that I like doing and in other weird
things that kind of brought it all together. So then ultimately, when
it came to being in a band, A it was just
really fun to play music with three other friends
and to, you know, make noise and write lyrics
and just like create something especially
around that age. Having an outlet to do
that kind of thing, I think was, was super
fun. And yeah, ultimately it
really just came down to fun. Like everything
just was more fun than anything that I had done
before. And you know, it was silk screening t
shirts for me was fun, like figuring out how to
burn screens in my basement and do that and
actually press the shirts and then go sell them at
the show. And you see people
walking around with the shirt that you made.
Like it was just rewarding, I think, to
have so many different outlets for different
kinds of creativity. It just made a ton of
sense. Can you talk a little bit
about your decision to go to go to school for
graphic design and advertising as opposed
to sort of continuing on in the music career? Yeah, it was a really
tough decision. I really wanted to have
a music career, like I wanted to have a band be
my job because you could do all those creative
things. But you know, the hard thing about being
in a band is it's not just about how the band
like, how good is the music? It just seemed
like a really difficult path to kind of keep
together. I think when I when I
really thought about it, it was I was having the
most fun doing all the creative stuff more than
it was managing the band and
trying to keep everyone together and make sure
we're writing songs that everybody likes and all
of that, like, I didn't like that wasn't as fun. That felt more like the
necessity to keep this going. But the most fun
where like I'm working in just time, where did 8
Hours just go kind of to be on the creative side?
So I think I ended up kind of going that way,
knowing that, Hey, you can always be in bands,
you know, at some point, but this is the time to
kind of learn a really core sort of skill set
that could give me more options for
how to make a living. I wanted to I wanted to
talk to you about the Warped Tour and getting
a backstage passes and, you know, realizing that
the musicians were drinking water from
their monster energy, energy drink cans. Can you can you tell us
the story of like, how you how you ended up
getting backstage passes, the concert, what that
was like? Yeah. So like I said, a
lot of most of my friends were music people and in
bands, and it's actually where the weird little
high school we went to in Pennsylvania, there were
so many musicians who came from this one
little high school that ended up being in all
these, like pretty well known bands. So we just
had a you know, we had a bunch of friends that
just were in these touring bands that were
on the Warped Tour, on these other, you know,
doing other things. So it was, I think
around 2008 I was living in Denver and
when the it came through, buddy's band was
playing, he was like, Oh, hey, I got you on the
list. Just like, Come in and let us know when
you're here. And then I just went
back in the area where it's like all the band
busses are parked and that's where like all
the bands are just sort of like hanging out
outside the busses or on the busses. And yeah, I
was just hanging out with them and yeah, we saw
these, you know, these bunch of these
like stacks of, of what looked like, you know,
Monster and you know, these guys are drinking
it and it turns out like, oh, it's actually not
monster, it's water because these guys don't
actually want to drink these energy drinks. Granted, like everybody
needs to make a living. So if someone's going to
pay you to promote. Our product. As a punk band, you
don't have Coke and Pepsi in every big company
lined up trying to give you money to promote
them. It was like at that time it was really only
energy drinks who were throwing money at these
guys. So they kind of had to take it. And
obviously, I would imagine, you know, they
need if if they're the
sponsor of the tour, they want people to think
that these bands are actually drinking the
product. And if they're not going to drink it in
the hot sun on the stage or they don't really
like it, they basically have water in these cans
that look like energy drinks. So when these
bands are on stage playing, all the kids in
the crowd think that these guys are drinking
energy drinks when really they're not. And I
remember thinking that that was kind of messed
up. I'm like, Man, that's so sort of sneaky. But at the same time it
was like, you know, it started making me think
about why is it why aren't there more
healthy products that still have funny, cool,
irreverent branding? Because most of the
funniest, most memorable irreverent branding
marketing is all for junk food. It's like one of
the most popular or most memorable ad campaigns
you could think of over the last ten years. It's
like Bud Light, Doh, sickies, Snickers,
Doritos, Red Bull. And I just thought it
was weird that so many people in that world of
punk rock actually did care about health, Like
they didn't drink tons of soda, and some of them
were totally sober. A lot of them were
vegan, even the ones that like the heaviest bands. So there definitely was
a culture of health there, but it was only
junk food. Who was paying any
attention to to this sort of genre of culture. And I just always
thought that that didn't make a ton of sense. And that was, I think,
planted the early seed of probably what ultimately
ended up becoming Liquid Death. Yeah. I mean, I'm curious
why that moment stuck with you so much and at
what point you kind of came back to you when
you were in the process of developing what would
become Liquid Death? Yeah, I don't think it
really stuck with me in in a sense, until it
mattered later, right? Like, I didn't remember
that. Like, I didn't I wasn't
always like I probably forgot about, you know,
the water that looks like energy drink shortly
after that. It wasn't, I think, until
probably 2014 when I was working for a small ad
agency in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and we
started doing some of the first funny, irreverent
marketing for the organic industry. And we had
some success there that it kind of like I
remembered that like, Oh, right, I remember like,
yeah, why aren't more healthy brands doing
this kind of funny, irreverent marketing? And I was like, Yeah,
like I remember back when, yeah, like energy
drinks used to put water in their cans so that it
looked like people were actually consuming the
product that they were sponsoring when they
wouldn't, you know, it's like I have other
friends who are professional action
sports athletes and it's like these guys are
legit athletes. Like they have trainers. They're very cautious
what they put in their body. Like these guys
are not pounding energy drinks all day like it's
a myth. And I think that all
sort of snowballed around the same time when we
were yeah, we were doing funny marketing for the
organic world and then I was sort of starting to
have this idea of liquid death and a canned water
brewing sort of in the background as like a
side project. It just like all these
experiences or all of a sudden kind of coming to
the surface as we're figuring out what should
this thing be? Can you kind of take us
through your your work history post-college
again? I went to college for
graphic design. I didn't even know
advertising was like an actual creative job when
I started college. And then once I
realized, Oh, advertising is where you get to be
funny, because for me, even though I was a
creative designer, I was always into like, I
didn't draw meticulous, beautiful things. Like
it was more like Mad Magazine, like I drew
really funny, bizarre cartoons and funny
situations. I just wanted to make
people laugh, which is what really attracted me
to advertising because it seemed like it was more
of a place for humor and comedy than graphic
design was. So that once I started
going into the advertising track in
college, I mean, there was really only one
agency I wanted to work for called Crispin
Porter Bogusky, and a buddy of mine had
interned at their office in Miami, and they were
doing really funny, disruptive work that I
didn't even know you could do in advertising. So then I really just
had my sights set. This is the only place I
want to work at. I don't really want to
work anywhere else. Got myself an internship
there. They then hired me on
full time, worked in Boulder, Colorado for a
little over a year there. And then I ended up
leaving there. I mean, it was really
insane. It was like 100 hour work weeks, like no
days off for months, like it was known to be a
place that was very intense. And after a
year of that, I was kind of like, yeah, I don't
know if this level of intensity is for me much
longer. And I ended up taking a
job at another agency in Seattle that was nowhere
near as creative as this. And like, I was so young
that I thought, Oh, the only reason these
agencies aren't doing creative work is because
they just don't have the right creative people
there, which is completely not the case
because the people who are at the top of these
places, they make all the decisions of what goes
to the clients, what doesn't. So you can hire
all the super creative people you want down
here. It's the people at the top. If they don't
change, nothing changes. So I ended up kind of a
few years out from from my first job, ended up
like I'm at some agency in San Francisco doing
uncreative work that I'm just like, What did I do
to my career? I was doing this awesome
work, but it was too intense for me, so I
kind of left, chased money around some other
agencies. I was making a great
living but not doing anything remotely on the
creative level that I wanted to do. And it was
not because I wasn't creative, it was because
these clients that we had at these places, they
were not looking to buy really creative work.
They wanted really basic stuff. Like I always
compare it to. It's like, imagine if
you were Anthony Bourdain and you have a
restaurant and you have really high paying
clients come in saying, All I want you to do is
microwave me a hotdog. I'll give you $10,000,
but just please microwave me a hotdog and bring it
out here. I don't want to know what
you can make. And after years of that,
you kind of just start looking for another
outlet. And that was how I sort
of got to becoming an entrepreneur, was my
rationale was, well, if clients aren't going to
buy creative work to promote their products,
I need to create my own product that I can
control what the marketing is that we put
out into the world and actually do truly
creative things. And then you kind of
having that and doing a couple of small, little
entrepreneurial things in my free time, you know,
a couple of years later, I ended up at this
agency in Tennessee called Humanaut. And yeah, we started
doing this funny marketing for the
organic industry and we were doing marketing for
the Internet where you get to play by a whole
different set of rules than when brands are
trying to do these kind of traditional old
school broadcast TV spots. So it gives the
the brands are willing to take more of a risk
because it's like, oh, it's not going to cost
us that much to make a YouTube video. The media
is essentially free. We can decide how much
media we want to put behind it and oh, if
it's not successful or it doesn't work, we can
just take it down really easily. So even with a
brand like Organic Valley that we did Save The
Bros for, they were used to doing these
commercials that were like documentary style
family farms with like sunsets and, you know,
we care about our farms and our history, but
they knew when they were making a protein shake
that they were talking to, like bros in the gym
who are looking to put on muscle like that's a big
part of like the protein market. And they knew they had to
market differently to those guys than they did
like, you know, maybe organic moms that they
did most of their other products to. Venturing
outside their comfort zone, we pitched them
this idea of Save the Bros. They really they
like the idea, even though it felt kind of
like, oh, this isn't, you know, typically this
sort of thing we do. And they almost killed
the idea right before it went live. They were
like, guys, we talked to some of our farmers. Like, they just really
they don't get it. They don't think this is
the right thing for their brand. We're thinking of
pulling it. We don't think we're
going to do it. We said look like it's a pretty
low investment. If it doesn't work, it's
so easy to bring down like nobody would even
see it. And then we launch it
and it goes completely viral. Everybody talks
about it, it's everywhere. And then, of
course, the brand is like and the farmers, we love
this. We need more bros. Can
we have bros at tradeshows? Can we? Do you know Bro's here? What's the second bro
video we're doing? So it's like once you
see the success of something, then
everybody gets really excited about it. And yeah, that's kind of
how we how we got to Save The Bros. Great. I wanted to ask
you about when you kind of made the decision to
kind of take a more entrepreneurial tack
with your career and where the inspiration
for Western Grace came from. If you could just
take us through that timeline and how that
experience prepared you for for starting with
death? Yeah, at the time I was
at the agency I was at, we were working on
Virgin America, the airline, and I started
getting into Richard Branson. I read a couple
of Richard Branson books, and I love Virgin's
business strategy, which was find a really stale
category of products and be the one really cool,
exciting product in it. It almost seems like you
don't even belong in it. And they were able to
get all this market share really easily because
they were just so disruptive and sticking
out like a sore thumb in whatever kind of
category that was. And they did it in tons
of different categories. So when I had that
notion of, Oh, I want to create my own product to
launch, I sort of used that same kind of
approach, which was okay one was, alright, if
you're going to create a product, you need to
have some competitive advantage to win because
there's so many other people that you're going
to be competing against. What makes you uniquely
suited for this particular product than
anybody else? So first I looked at,
okay, what am I maybe uniquely passionate
about? Qualified? Knowing of. And at that time it was
spirits. I was really into all
these different whiskeys, tequilas, mezz, cowls,
like all these different spirits. I was really
into it. It was kind of the
beginning of some of the cocktail, the early
cocktail culture. And I was in San
Francisco at the time. You know, I was you
know, I was dating a mixologist at the time
who was making these crazy cocktails. My
brother was a bartender at the time. My best
friend, she worked for an alcohol distributor. It just seemed like I
was so in this world of like spirits that like,
oh, spirits make sense. I know this world. So then it was like,
okay, what category of spirits are there no
cool brands at all? And it was hard to find
because there was a million cool whiskeys, a
million cool vodkas, a million cool tequilas, a
million cool liquors. So ultimately I found
brandy and I've told the story that brandy, when
I first went and picked some up from the liquor
store, there was actually dust on some of the
bottles in the liquor store and took it home,
tried it. It was really similar to
bourbon, a little bit sweeter, but even I was
doing some little blind taste tests with people
and some people couldn't actually guess which was
bourbon and which was brandy in a blind test. So it was like, Oh,
whiskey is super popular. This tastes a lot like
it. The reason this isn't
popular is a brand problem, not a taste
problem. So then I started
developing a brandy brand that felt more
like the way it tasted to me, which was,
it tastes like whiskey. Let's make it feel more
like whiskey versus these super fancy, ornate gold
bottles that were trying to emulate like French
cognac. There's all this other
different kind of brandy out there. And we
created this brand Western grace, just as a
brand like, Hey, here's what the bottle would
look like. Here's kind of the
marketing vibe of it. And then I found a
brandy distillery up in Northern California and
got a meeting with them, pitch them my idea for
this brand, they loved the idea. They said,
Yeah, we'll, you know, we'll make the brandy
for you or sell the brandy to you. And then
I'm like, okay, I have an idea and a producer. Then I literally went on
LinkedIn and like cold messaged some folks who
made some really great who had helped create
some great brands in the spirits industry, which
were Hendrick's Gin and Sailor Jerry Rum, which
I was huge fans of both of those brands. And
pitched the idea to them. They said, Oh
yeah, this is really interesting. Well, we're
down to kind of work with you to try to get this
off the ground. And yeah, we just
basically spent two years sort of figuring out how
to get a brandy like a liquor brand off the
ground. But it was just so much legal red tape
with alcohol. And every state has
completely different laws. And you have to go
through background checks and you have to store it
in certain types of warehouses, like it was
just a logistical nightmare. So we never
really got to the fun part of branding and
marketing. It was all just very
logistical. But it was it was a
great sort of first beverage entrepreneur
experience because it was probably ten times
harder than any non alcoholic thing that I
would do later. That's great. So I wanted
to start talking to you about Liquid Death. How did you arrive at I
want to create canned water and what was the
initial spark for the idea? We were working on a
project for the agency where there is this this
company. I can't remember the
full name of them, but they would do these sort
of like PSA campaigns against things that were
bad for you. So one of the first ones
they did, they wanted to educate people on how
bad soda was. So they did this
animated campaign where they can't say Coca
Cola. So they use these white
polar bears that were drinking what looked
like soda. And it seems all playful
that eventually they start getting diabetes
and need their arms amputated. And it's like
this really kind of provocative way to kind
of bring awareness to like, how bad soda is. And they came to us to
help. Hey, we had great
success with this campaign. Now we want to
try to educate people on how bad energy drinks
are and you know, we were concepting campaign
ideas. And one of the ideas I had was this
idea of, well, what's funny is like. So much energy drink
marketing is really just complete bull****, for
lack of a better word. None of it's true. It's
like these guys don't actually drink all these
energy drinks. They're professional
athletes. Like it, it doesn't actually make
you run faster, jump higher, do more tricks. So we have just a funny
notion of like, well, like, let's make fun of
what this really is. And I had this idea of
doing a canned water that was sort of like just
geared as like a stunt to poke fun at energy
drinks. They didn't like the
idea. It wasn't something that
they wanted to move forward with. They ended
up doing something totally different. But I always knew that
there was something in that idea and it kind of
just stuck with me and just on the side over
the next few years of working at random
agencies, I was always just sort of continuing
to develop this concept of canned water and
like, what can it really be? If it was a real
brand, what would it need to be? And yeah,
eventually got to to Liquid Death. Yeah. Can you talk to us
about how you came up with the name and
branding for Liquid Death and how long that
process took? It's tough to say how
long. I mean, it was something
I'd been working on in the background for
probably two years. And I think the way we
had what I knew from my marketing background
was. If I'm going to really create this brand
for real, I am not going to have any real
marketing dollars. Like I'm not going to be
able to buy eyeballs through TV commercials,
endorsement deals, big ticket podcasts, and
none of that I was going to have money for. So
the only way the brand would have a chance at
survival is the actual product itself has to be
so insanely interesting where so much of the
marketing is baked into the product, where what
happens with most companies is the product
itself is not insanely interesting. It's just
like, Oh, check some boxes. Like the design
looks good. The name's okay, it's
this, it's that. Then they go to
advertising agencies to then create this really
creative marketing wrapper around this
thing to make people see this whatever thing in a
new light or care about it in a different way,
because on its own it can't do that. So I kind
of went the opposite way and said, let's bake all
of the marketing and fun and share ability into
the product. So once I sort of had
that as the goal and really held strictly
to that goal. A lot of these ideas and
names and things started dying really quickly
because when you have to put it through the
filter of if someone sees this on the shelf, am I
willing to bet they have to pick it up because
it's so weird or interesting and then
they're probably going to take their phone out,
take a photo of it, and post it on their social
channels for free to their hundreds of
followers. And when you really start taking that
seriously, there's only a few types of things that
people will do that with. And then that sort of
once we got to the name like Liquid Death, it
looks more like a beer can that you've
seen than like a typical water or something
you've seen. That's when we started
feeling really good about okay. If I saw that in a
store or if someone I knew saw that in a
store, I'm pretty sure they're going to have to
pick that up and be like, What is this? And once someone picks
something up, you're you've basically won
because every brand in the store wishes
somebody would go as far as actually picking
something up that they don't already know. It's
really hard to do. But yeah, that's sort of
how we got to the name. I mean, writing all
kinds of random names on the paper, like looking
at the things connect together. One exercise
that we still do today is we we ask the
question, what is the dumbest possible idea we
could do for this? Because our brains are
wired to just repeat things that we've seen
be successful in the past. It's just like
we're hardwired to go on autopilot. So when you
try to think, Oh, what's a great name for a water
company, your brain starts going and
thinking about other water companies and you
make it like a water company where you kind
of have to trick your brain to come up with a
bad idea, to truly be thinking in sort of like
innovative territory. It works really well
because you start thinking like, Oh,
what's the dumbest possible name for a
super healthy, safest beverage possible? Liquid Death, probably
the dumbest name. And then as we think of,
like marketing ideas, like what would be the
dumbest way to sell water in a commercial? And then you get to
these ideas that I think are funnier, more
creative, more innovative that way. Yes. So, I mean, once you
kind of come up with the concept, like who did
you start pitching the idea to and what were
the reactions that you got? I always kept good
relationships with a lot of the the the bosses
and things that I worked for at different
agencies. And yeah, I would sort of run things
by them like, hey, I got this kind of idea for a
brand. Like, what do you think? And I think everyone
thought that there was something there. Like, I
was like, Oh yeah, this could be really cool. Even before it was all
totally fleshed out because it was always
kind of evolving in, in the early days, like we
had like a different we didn't have our current
skull on it. It was like a different
graphic of like a wave about to, like, crush
this like boat. So we always kind of
like we iterated as we were sort of bringing
the brand to life. Got it. Talk us through
like launching Liquid Death before you had an
actual product. Like you talked to us
about that, you know, doing the Facebook ad
and how that helped spark investor interest. Yeah. So people were
saying, you know, from the industry, yeah,
retailers will never put something like this on
the shelf. So I knew that I had to
prove out that this was viable first before
anybody would give me money to actually make
the idea. So we designed a 3D
render of a can that looked real. I came up with a
commercial idea for for this brand that we shot
for like 1500 bucks. My wife's good friend
was an actress. She was willing to kind
of star in it, and we made a Facebook
page. There was no Instagram,
no Twitter, just Facebook. We put the
video on there and it was like a two minute long
video. And then we did a couple of funny social
posts with this sort of canned mock up that
looked real. And then I maybe put a
few thousand dollars in paid media to push the
video out and to push the post out over the course
of maybe like three or four months. We made it
seem like a real brand. And then four months in
the video had 3 million views. The page had
almost 80,000 followers, which was more than
Aquafina on Facebook at the time. And we had
hundreds of messages and comments from people
being like, This is the greatest thing ever.
Where do I get this? Is this real? We had a 711 franchisee
in Michigan reach out. How do I get this in my
stores? We had a huge distributor in New York
reach out. Can I talk to a sales
person? So then I use all of that sort of. Social traction to then
actually go get people to take me seriously. And we raised a small
round of funding to actually produce a
minimum run of like actual product. Got it. Yeah. So once you
once you'd spark that interest, how did you
get your seed funding and and who invested
initially. So yeah, once we had
physical product, now it was a real it was a real
thing. It wasn't just like a
funny internet thing anymore. It was, Oh wow,
this is real. Got connected with a
venture firm called Science Inc that were
behind Dollar Shave Club and a few other brands
where, you know, they were sort of looking for
disruptive CPG brands that were typically
direct to consumer Internet brands that
could really disrupt like a huge category, like
razors, for example. So we kind of fit into
their thesis pretty, pretty well, and they
instantly sort of understood the brand. They're very much brand
guys, which not every venture investor is like
are are smart brand people. And this was
truly a brand play. So yeah, we got along
really well. They understood it and
they came on as our first sort of institutional
investor and sort of incubator, and they
helped us really figure out how to get the
website up and ready to sell online and just how
to navigate a lot of the business aspects of this
that I had maybe less experience being more of
like the brand marketing guy. And yeah, we
launched on the Internet in late January, early
February 2019. It was only available on
our website and Amazon and yeah. Our first month we made
$100,000 in sales and we spent about $2,000 on
marketing. And then it's just kind
of we sold out a product we didn't order near
enough that we, you know, with what the demand
was, we were sold out for like over a month. And then we just kind
of, then we had that story to then raise the
seed round of, Hey, look, already this early
traction, only a month in, we need more capital
to kind of get more inventory, get more
product. Did that. Started selling even
more, getting more traction like was going
viral on social. It was showing up on
television shows. It was kind of growing
really big. Then we raised the
series A I think just after that summer in
2019 to really then start going after retail, like
hiring an actual sales team and not just being
a DTC brand. And how do we start
getting into bars and nightclubs and
convenience stores and grocery stores and all
of that? We were able to start
sort of building that capability in like the
back half of 2019. So now that you have an
actual product, like how did you go about finding
a water supplier? Well, that was the tricky
thing. I had to find the water supplier first to
even have a real product, because what was
surprising was there was not a single bottler in
North America who could put non carbonated
spring water in cans at scale. It didn't really
exist because it was like a non existing category. You had these water
sources that had plastic bottle bottling lines,
but they didn't have these multi multimillion
dollar canning lines at the source and it was
way too expensive to try to tanker truck water
from a source halfway across the country to a
bottler. It just didn't make
sense. So I just started searching Europe for
potential options and happened to find one in
Austria where they had canning capabilities and
they had their own springs sources that
they owned. And we flew over there,
met with them. They were really cool
and they said, Yeah, we can totally make this
product for you. So we started there and
we're still using them to this day. So I wanted to ask when
Liquid Death first started getting carried
in in 7-Eleven stores. And can you talk a
little bit about the negotiations to get it
into 7-Eleven and the impact of that landing
there? So 7-Eleven has a bunch
of different regions and you typically are
launching in one region or a couple regions
first to kind of test it out before they put you
full national. So we started launching,
I believe it was the Southern California
region of 7-Eleven in that would have been
fall of 2020. And that was still
during the pandemic and global shutdown where
like the foot traffic and stores was way down. There's a lot going on. And then ultimately, the
test went really well. You know, they were
really impressed with sort of the sell through
that that they were seeing. And then they
took us full national in January, February of
2021. But yeah, it's tricky. Getting in retailers is
hard because think about all the different
products that they sell. How many new products
are trying to get on the shelf? And they have
very limited shelf space. So if they're going to
put Liquid Death in there, they have to get
rid of something else. And there's some big
brands in there. There's not really tons
of small brands in places like 7-Eleven. So they're like, wait,
why are we going to get rid of three facings or
whatever it is, of this other brand to bring in
this totally new brand that no one knows about? It's a tricky it's a
tricky battle to win. And with any retailer you
can, you are at the mercy of a retail buyer. They have to think that
your product is the next best thing, and if they
don't, then you're never going to get on the
shelf. And even if we can show them, look at this
Internet data. We've got a million
followers. We've got this much sell
through. The buyers that these
retailers are not the most sophisticated
marketing people that understand social media
or what's happening in youth culture right now. Like, that's not their
thing. So even when you show
them that stuff, they don't fully know how to
comprehend it. So it's still an uphill
battle. But then at the end of
the day, it's like as you get into these retailers
and you can start showing other retailers real
sales numbers, like look how much of this we sold
in this 7-Eleven or this, you know, grocery store,
the numbers, everybody understands, then they
can start wrapping their head around why they
should put you on their shelf and why it's not
going to be a risk for them to remove something
else. Yeah. Was 7-Eleven your
first retailer or had you already already gotten
into, like, smaller retail chains? No, our first big
retailer was actually Whole Foods. We started
talking to Whole Foods in late 2019 when we were
pretty much only an Amazon and website
brand, but they had definitely caught wind
of it. They're really big on
sustainability. They loved our death to
plastic sort of message to kind of bring death
to plastic bottles, cans, infinitely recyclable. And they liked that. We
were talking about these things in a way that no
other brand in their store was really doing. Like we were making
sustainability fun and funny and making it more
approachable and fun to get behind versus like,
I think a lot of sustainability stuff is
it's like folks trying to guilt trip people into
feeling bad to make a decision versus like
make the solution fun. So they said, Hey, we
want to launch you full national out of the gate
in March of 2020. So we literally loaded
into Whole Foods March 15th, 2020, the week the
pandemic lockdown started. So that came
with its own host of problems. But we still
started seeing like real growth in Whole Foods
throughout the pandemic year. And we just were
getting more and more data sales data that we
could be showing to other retailers that we were
presenting to like the 7-Elevens of the world
to help get them get their heads around why
they should carry Liquid Death. What was your reaction
like the first time when you walked into a
7-Eleven or a Whole Foods? You looked at a
case and you saw Liquid Death there next to
Aquafina and Dasani and all of these other kind
of mainstream water brands. It was really cool. I mean, to me, I think
it always felt like it was cool because it felt
like we didn't belong there, like we hacked
in. It almost felt like if
you saw your own graffiti on something, it's like
it was cool that like, Oh, wow, we went through
so many hurdles to get this here because this
literally probably does not belong here. And no other company
would have ever got this here. And we somehow got
it there. And we just like the
Virgin model, it's like when you can get
something that truly is disruptive, I mean, it's
really magic, like what can happen. But the word
disruptive, I think, is thrown around too
lightly. You know, you're not disruptive because
when the whole category is round bottles, you're
the only square bottle. That's not really
disruption. Real disruption is so out
there that most people don't even
understand it. So it never even really
gets a chance because like, they just can't
wrap their head around it. But we were able to
get it in. I think that was that
was the coolest part to see that like, Oh, wow,
we got this crazy thing actually, actually in
here. And then the next
craziest thing was, Oh, wow, and now it's
actually outselling all of these other things. I think that was the
other really crazy part. I wanted to get some of
the numbers right now. Can you tell us how much
Liquid Death has raised in capital today? Yeah, we've raised in
total now after this very recent series, D, from a
few weeks ago, about 195 million total. And what's your what's
the latest valuation of the company? Our series D, our post
valuation was 700 million after we raised 70
million. I wanted to ask you about
your sales, too. Can you tell us what
your your sales were last year, and and how
they've grown year over year? Yeah. So I can kind of
walk you through sort of the revenue path. But our year one, we
were Internet only 2019. We did about 2.8
million. Then 2020 pandemic year,
first year in retail, pretty much all Whole
Foods. We did 10 million in revenue. Last year we
did 45 million. And then this year we're
on track for around 130. Do you have any
anticipation of what sales will be like next
year and the year after? I can't get into too many
specifics on that. But I mean, we're
definitely looking like likely doubling our
revenue next year for sure. When you first envisioned
Liquid Death, I mean, did you see it becoming this
big? Did you imagine it
becoming a $700 million company, or did you see
it as being sort of more of a niche market item
that would still be profitable, but maybe
not like a $700 million valuation? No, I didn't think it
would be this big. One of the most
surprising things to everybody with this was
how many, how wide the audience really was for
something like this. And I think it makes
more sense when you step outside of beverage and
packaged goods and you look at other things
like entertainment, when you look at like a huge
horror movie that gets released, like Jordan
Peele doing Get Out, one of the biggest movies
that year, a horror movie. And you think
about how wide is the audience that goes to
that movie? It's pretty wide. I
mean, there's moms, there's young, there's
old, there's there's men, there's women, all these
different demographics. Because when you think
about what are people entertained by, it's a
different thing that you don't really think about
in packaged goods, where people are very
functional and rational based, the people who
create packaged goods brands. So I think it
makes more sense when you look at it outside
there. But I think we were thinking too small,
like a like a typical beverage brand about who
the audience would be. But at the end of the
day, we're really creating an
entertainment company and a water company like we
don't want to create marketing, we want to
actually entertain people, make them laugh
in service of a brand. And if you can do that,
they're going to love your brand because
you're giving them something of value, Like
you're actually making them laugh. They want to
follow you. They want to give you
their 1.89 instead of the soulless
brand on either side of it, where they pretty
much think the products themselves are pretty
close. So if I'm going to pick one, I'd rather do
it with this really fun company that I have an
emotional connection to. And I think that was
what we underestimated, that how wide the
audience really would be of people who get a kick
out of this and think it's funny. And we have
hundreds of parents who message us on social
saying, Thank you, Liquid Death. You finally got
my nine year old excited to drink water instead
of soda because he thinks he has something he's
not supposed to have, but he's just literally
drinking the healthiest thing he could possibly
drink. Like that's valuable to a parent. And, you know, the
retailers love it because it's like prior to
Liquid Death, which is a premium water, mom was
never buying Fiji and Vos for her nine year old,
but she is buying Liquid Death. So we're bringing
completely new customers and drinkers into
premium water, just purely based on the
brand that we're kind of building around it,
which is part of what makes it so valuable of
a brand. Just kind of getting back
down to brass tacks again. Could you kind of
walk us through the different products that
Liquid Death offers and how much each can costs? Yeah, So we have still
water and those go for right
now 15.99 for a 12 pack of basically 17
ounce tallboy cans. Then we have a premium
sparkling water which is in a
black can. It's the same price as
the still. And then just this last
January this year, we released the first
Liquid Death flavored sparkling water, which
we actually use three grams of agave to
sweeten it just a little bit. So there's a lot
more flavor than like the zero cal zero sugar zero
sweetener kind of Lacroix Waterloo type
brands, but also way different than all the
diet soda brands that are just still super, super
sweet and using artificial sweeteners or
that kind of a thing. So in a way, it's like
it's a flavored sparkling water, but it's also
kind of like a really healthy, super low sugar
soda, but really it's closer to flavored
sparkling water. So we call it a flavored
sparkling water. And those go right now
for 16.99, a 12 pack and the single
can prices vary depending on what the retailer is. But, you know, like a
single can of the still and sparkling is
probably 1.89 plus or minus some and
the flavors are around $1.99 plus or minus
depending on on the retailer. Great. You know, one
thing that you've talked about a lot is sort of,
you know, Liquid Death kind of there is kind of
health aspect to it. You know, it is water.
It's the healthiest thing you could drink. What's
your own personal connection to health and
wellness? Yeah, I've always been
into into health. I mean, my dad,
you know, he was a college wrestler on a
scholarship. Like, he always took
really good care of himself. I remember when
I was a kid, we used to tell my dad we wanted to
go to McDonald's and he would call it McDog
Foods, and we'd have to ask him to go to McDog
Foods. So we always had kind of
like this health as growing up as like
something like, you know, you want to take care of
your body. And, you know, I drank
Mountain Dew and all kinds of unhealthy stuff
through high school. But I think once getting
towards late high school, actually, I became a
vegetarian for six years, like pretty strict
vegetarian for like six years. And then just
being that for a while, like I got way more into
eating all kinds of other foods besides meat,
getting more of a taste for, for healthy foods. I, I stopped drinking
soda. Yeah, probably in like
my early twenties where it was a rare thing to
have a soda versus like an everyday kind of
thing. And yeah, I, around the Liquid Death,
you know, conception time, I was
drinking a lot of water. And I remember I would
tell people, you know, most people don't drink
enough water and like, you really should drink
more water and like, hey, if you're out drinking,
ripping shots, like you should probably drink
water if you want to not feel like crap in the
morning. So I was always tied to
it in some loose way, but I was not like a health
nut by by any stretch. Like, I think that's a
big part of even how we market Liquid Death. Like we don't try to
preach to people that's bad. Don't do that. Be healthy. You know,
you have to be healthy. It's everything in
moderation. Hey, if you're going to
do this, maybe have a water, you know, hey,
like, start incorporating a healthier thing in
your day. That's so much better
than doing nothing. And I think that's one
of the coolest things about Liquid Death. It's
like we're seeing that the construction worker
guy who goes to a 7-Eleven and typically
buys two energy drinks now might be buying one
energy drink and actually going and buying a
Liquid Death. And he was never
stopping to buy a bottle of water prior to Liquid
Death. You know, he found out
about the brand because he thinks it's a cool
brand. And now they're actually drinking like
buying and drinking water for the first time ever. And I think that that to
me feels like the big win. There's plenty of
healthy brands that just preach to the choir. They have healthy brands
that are designed for people who care about
health. Liquid Death for me is how do you get all
these people who don't typically make healthy
decisions to now all of a sudden, want to
participate in a healthy brand purely from the
brand standpoint at first, and they just
start incorporating it into their into their
day. Do you think that there's
like I mean, in your opinion, is there a
difference in the taste between, you know,
Liquid Death water that's in a can as opposed to
water that's coming out plastic bottle. Probably not in any real
noticeable way. I think that's one thing
that people get wrong in packaged goods. People
think that taste is why things are successful or
unsuccessful, or why one brand is better than
another. But all the data shows that is not even
close to the case. You know, Monster didn't
become a $50 Billion company because it
tastes so much better than Red Bull. Most
people probably couldn't pick out an energy drink
in a blind taste test if their life depended on
it. And I always use the the example of in
fashion and apparel, people can understand
this dynamic way faster where the reason
people pick Nike over Adidas or Converse has
nothing to do with Nike talking about its uses
better rubber in their soles and it uses a more
long lasting durable material. That's why I
pick Nike. Or why does Gucci sell a
$700 t-shirt when the same t-shirt
made from the same materials that serves
the same function can be bought at Target for
15.99? It's like people can understand, Oh, I
get why Gucci can do that, because it's a
brand. They do this. They do this like people
want to communicate something about
themselves. That's why they do this. But people
just don't immediately think that way in
packaged goods where it really is not taste like
some of the biggest, most popular money generating
brands are some of the worst tasting. So yeah, it's not really
like taste isn't why. Now we do use real spring
water, which I think people like
knowing, Oh, this is real water from a mountain
when you're buying a plain water that you're
literally just buying the water, you're not
there's no ingredients in it. There's nothing like
that. If you're just buying water, they want
to know it's good water. Even if they can't taste
the difference psychologically, they
want to know this comes from a good source
versus, you know, there's a lot of brands out
there where it's literally just processed
municipal tap water from the factory and they
sell it as premium bottled water, and they
call it purified water. And most people don't
know that. And if they did, they're
probably like, Oh, that that doesn't make me too
excited to spend a premium on bottled water
if I feel like it's literally tap process,
tap water versus water that comes from a spring
source or something natural. You talk about the the
environmental initiatives that Liquid Death is
involved in, and why that's an important part
of the brand. Yeah. So our whole, we
sort of have two taglines. We have Murder
Your Thirst and Death to Plastic. Aluminum cans
are infinitely recyclable. It's
actually the only material that really
gets recycled. There's countless
stories on the Internet you can find
that plastic has never actually been
economically viable to recycle. There's like
plastic lobbyists that have started since the
early eighties. They want people to
think that when you put your plastic bottle in
the recycling bin, that it goes to the recycling
facility. They recycle it and it
just becomes more plastic bottles. That is not at
all what happens. What was happening for
years is plastic goes to the recycling facility. Recycling facilities
would then put them on giant cargo ships and
ship them to China because we get all these
Chinese goods that come into the country on
these boats. But then the boats are
empty. They've got to go back with something. So they were filling
them with like plastic garbage, basically,
because once it would get back there, China would
take the plastic garbage and they would down
cycle it into like cheap carpets and textiles,
not getting recycled into bottles, but getting
down, cycled into these sort of lower grade
consumer products. And that worked for a
little while. But then eventually
China said we are no longer going to accept
plastic garbage from the U.S. Anymore. And that
was maybe four years ago. And what was happening
was when they were saying plastic is getting
recycled as soon as they put it on the boat, that
was considered recycled. Now that they can't ship
it over there, plastic has no value to it. So recycling facilities,
they could try to spend all this money to
recycle the plastic, but then they have to sell
the recycled plastic to someone at a profit. And
no one wants to buy the ground up plastic. So what they do is they
either just have to store it in a warehouse until
they figure out what to do with it, or they
literally just put it on a truck and send it to a
landfill because they go out of business trying
to recycle it. So the more that became
public knowledge and how bad plastic bottles
really were as a problem, that was something that
aluminum cans can be a much better alternative
for. Cans come with their own
problems for sure, but it is a way better solution
or option than plastic bottles because cans
they can get melted down into bricks of metal. They can be sold at a
profit to the recycling facility. So it's
actually viable and you can literally do it
infinitely. Cans and metal can be recycled
over and over and over forever. So we wanted to
have that death to plastic be a big part of
our brand. And you know that that
reason that people should care about the brand
beyond just oh it's a cool can. But hey look,
they're also trying to do a really good thing with
this funny, irreverent thing. It's not just
there to be funny and that's it. Like, what
else are you actually doing? Which I think
most people know in today's day and age,
what you do as a company beyond your product is
more and more important to people than it ever
was before. So. And then finally, I just
wanted to ask, how do you plan to maintain and
increase growth and sustain interest in
Liquid Death, especially as more competitors try
to kind of replicate what you've done for the
packaging to the marketing and whether or
not you have any ideas for future products that
might be coming out. Yeah, I think it's really
hard to replicate the marketing, really hard. People think people
think it's easy and you'll see people come
out trying to do it and fall completely flat on
their face, trying to do it. It's one of the even
like the big companies, like the Coke and
Pepsis, they're historically bad at
creating brands, which is why a lot of what they
do is acquire brands. They know how to
maintain huge brands, but they don't have a great
track record of creating brands and creating
these super interesting things. So for us, you
know, we're in the, our brand is all about
comedy and making people laugh. You know, we're
not tying our brand to some specific niche,
like let's just say action sports like
action sports might be really cool two years
ago, in ten years, are they still going to be
relevant or cool? And if you build your
whole brand around that, what do you do? But
people are always going to want to laugh. And we
think about our marketing team more like Saturday
Night Live than we do A typical marketing thing. It's like we see cool
things in culture and influencers and
celebrities and we invite them into our funny
little comedy machine and we create these funny
things like what we did with Tony Hawk and Bert
Kreischer and Martha Stewart, just like how
Saturday Night Live has like celebrity guests
that they write funny, bespoke content for that
the guest is into because it's fun for them and
their brand, and it obviously works for us
too. So I think as long as we're constantly just
riffing on culture, you know, this can go
basically for as long as something like Saturday
Night Live is relevant because you're you're
literally just a part of culture and making
people laugh. And we're not tying our
our brand to one specific niche or thing that that
may not be be have as much longevity. Right. Mike, is there
anything else that you want to say about
Liquid Death, about sort of your your journey as
a as a founder that we have that we haven't
asked about? No, I think we went over
a lot.
