#81 with Mike Cessario - The Genius Way Liquid Death Sells Canned Water

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for me i'm like glued to twitter and the news and all this stuff all day then you know by seven eight pm i just need a break i go walk my dog and i go listen to some mindless stuff about sports or whatever else just to you know just to calm my mind it's hopefully we could be that for some people where a bit of a diversion or a bit of an escape from the heaviest that's going on so you know mike i'm glad you're hear we you have a product that we've talked about on the podcast before which is liquid death so okay if somebody doesn't know what liquid death is give them the what is liquid death and then we're gonna talk about how you started that and then we're gonna brainstorm some cool ideas and spaces around around what you do sure so i mean i guess at the heart of what liquid death really is we're really just completely trying to change the way healthy food and beverages are marketed it at the end of the day most of the most hilarious memorable ad campaigns that you asked most people about at the last ten years they'll tell you bud do snickers doritos skittles like all junk food and alcohol that's the funniest most memorable kind of youth culture owning and energy drinks like red bull that's like the most you and old spice let's not leave old spice it's not really a food beverage but yes but yeah it's like all the all junk food and alcohol that does all the funniest coolest youth culture marketing whereas healthy food is traditionally marketed to like mom and it's quiet and it's responsible or it's like look better where you know show you you know fitness models you know drinking bottles of water like it's a very different they don't use fun to market whereas right unhealthy beverages stuff like that like they wanna own fun so we're basically doing that with water so we wanna be able to take the healthiest thing you can drink that most people don't drink enough of and brand it and build a you know a cool thing around it where it's something that you feel totally comfortable drinking a liquid death in a bar or at a house party or at a music festival of right or at work or in the gym and just making it more fun to walk around and have a water you definitely made headlines when you raised all that money because everyone was like this is such a silly idea and they raised all this money i didn't i agree that it's a silly fun name i don't agree that it's a stupid reason i mean it was it's it seems like an awesome company and totally worthy of going big but so it kinda worked right like you you definitely you definitely ruffled some feathers and i think that's good no yeah i think you know i always bring up you know i one of the you know i i listened to the the reed hoffman podcast a lot masters of scale massive scale yeah and it's like i love that he always pushes these like truly innovative ideas are almost comic at first because if it seems like it makes a lot of sense right now it probably means there's four other companies that have been working on it for five years already it's like the things that are truly unique and innovative like almost don't make any sense at first they're seem laughable and i think like that's kind of the case of liquid depth i think it's like we're really trying to disrupt the category in a way that's not just disruption for the sake of disruption you know i think it's like we strongly believe that and i don't think it's something hard to understand in a in a category where almost all the products themselves are perceived as the same you know people aren't assuming i only drink fiji because it's got point seven five more electrolytes than smart water which has point five and the ph is seven point seven it said seven no it's like most people assume water is the same it's more of a brand play and we believe if we can make you laugh we have a way better chance that you giving us your dollar sixty nine than the the face list brand next to us who's trying to shout at you electrolytes let you know they're like guys this all seems like snake oil to me like i feel like there's real human beings behind liquid and i'd wanna have a beer with so i'd rather give you my my dollar sixty nine in the guy next right and let's talk a little bit about the form factor so is it's a it's a tal is what i've seen are there other form factors no no it's just a talk can which is cool the branding of it is sort of like you know almost like heavy metal or how do you describe it yeah i mean yeah i think at the end of the day you would you would say we're like alternative punk metal inspired design and and vibe the way i like to think about our brand is like we're a professional wrestler like it's all theater and fun no one thinks it's trying to be real like no one thinks the undertake is really an evil guy from the dead who likes metal no it's a character and it's fun to like have a character by it yeah and that's kind of that's how we think about it like we're just playing this fun character it's fun to choose to believe yeah that that that this is what it is and and not take it to seriously and you right like you know if you're at a bar at or a music festival and you choose water you feel like you're choosing you're opting out of the fun and in fact they'll they'll sort of you know they'll make you feel that way you know you'll get the small plastic rink bin cup with with the with a baby straw right if you versus if you order to you know alcoholic drink or something else that that's actually a good point i mean i don't drink and i still go to bars and i always felt like i used to order sprite with lime in it because i was like i don't wanna make people people it looks like like i make people feel uncomfortable what so i'll just even though i don't like to drink soda like i'll drink it anyway and i don't wanna have an dual because i'm like ugh then everyone's just gonna like it's just gonna come up and so it's a it is a great alternative to that and and so mike i i'm was curious where does this idea come from so i think this was really just like a culmination of all my passions and experience sort of like converged into one you know it's like i grew up in high school playing in punk rock and metal bands and skateboarding and you know i would do all the show flyers and album art and stuff for our bands which kinda got like the entrepreneurial probably side of things because like you know we're booking shows and we're selling merch and like we're pressing records and doing all that kind of stuff then i got into a career of like graphic design which led into advertising so then i was like an advertising creative director for a long time and i worked on big brands like nestle and toyota and volkswagen and naked a juice and all this kind of stuff so i i think i got a good sense of where i think big companies screw up i guess like where i think they're shorts sighted like i can't tell you how many boardroom rooms i've been there where i'm trying to convince people that social media isn't some like niche little thing you add on to your business like it is the internet when you say i'm going on the internet nine times out of ten you're going on social media i think a lot of brands are just way behind the ball to understand what it really takes to be successful in the social environment like your little social posts aren't just competing against other beverages you're competing against influencers who are uncensored and can do crazy off the wall stuff you're competing against movie trailers you're competing against everything awesome on the internet when you're scrolling through your feed that's what you're marketing is competing against so when you really think about it that way do you really think your little ad that seems like a typical beverage thing is gonna actually stand out in someone's quick scrolling feed amongst all this other amazing stuff probably not so i think the bar for what stuff needs to be is way higher and i think that's what i built liquid death around like we think about marketing like entertainment i don't ever wanna put something in your feed that feels like marketing i wanted to feel like actual entertainment that made you laugh or it was the funniest thing that you may be saw that morning that you wanna share with your friends or whatever that like we're never just sticking marketing in your face like it's always gonna entertain you or it's gonna do something of value that it gives you i'm looking at their facebook ads right now and what you're saying is true so here's the two ads i see wish i could show this through a podcast i'm gonna show this to your ears but there's a giant can of liquid death in front of a mountain and it says this is dumb don't buy this then there's another one that's like i don't even know what you would call it's like a it's like the mountain from game of thrones but instead of his head is a can of liquid death erupting from his head muscular body and he's standing in a grocery store aisle holding an axe and it just says liquid is available nationwide in both is there anything you can give me that shows or the listeners how big this business like what what what size you guys are yeah why should we why should we tear about what you say is this working or not yeah i mean i can't get into like specific kind of sales numbers but since we launched national and whole foods basically we launched the day the pandemic started so we we went into whole foods march fifteenth and basically even even though we've been in a pandemic where they've had like eighty percent decreased store traffic and everything else going on we have insane growth in whole foods and we're now the fastest growing water brand in whole foods right now and you've raised like how much money to make this so far nine ten million grand total since the very beginning of everything i think we we raised around twelve total right now so great okay so we kind have an idea a little bit about sizing when when you look at when you were looking at this business and what and what to start was that your perspective which is what is something that i mean i it sounds like you're into health and and that type stuff what is something that is like good for you but has shit marketing and how can i build a business around that was that your perspective in a nutshell i think it really came from you know when i grew up playing in punk bands and and and metal bands and stuff like that i was still and a lot of my friends in that world we're very much into health like i was a vegetarian at age sixteen a lot of my friends in that scene were more of my friends were even vegan a lot of them like you know didn't drink alcohol i i do and i i don't i think that's one thing that we've been like branded it's like liquid death it's water for the straight edge crowd that is not what we're trying to do i think it's something that's been adopted by them for you know the reasons of yeah it is more fun to walk around in a bar if you don't wanna drink than something like this but i think another thing that the health food industry does i don't think we wanna do is we don't wanna be preach to people we don't wanna say you should be doing this and you shouldn't be drinking this and you shouldn't be doing that like we're like hey you wanna go rip some shots at a bar fine but maybe take a break and have a water for an hour you know or like hey you wanna smoke weed or whatever it's like great like maybe hydrate while you're doing it you know even if like hey you wanna go buy a monster energy drink or whatever great maybe buy a water too and have a water after you just pound a bunch of sugar and caffeine right that's the good news anybody who does any lifestyle also drinks water and so you you you pair it to any lifestyle that you want it sounds like you guys are trying to do that let me ask you like you've said some kind of abstract ways like you know we felt this was missing but but i want you to like rewind and make it real so like take us back to the moment you have the idea what's going on where are you where does the idea come from who are you talking to and then like how did it turn into something sure so as as you know in the world of of rock and roll pump metal whatever the only brands that have invested in trying to own that culture have been energy drink primarily monster so monster was sponsoring the bands warp tour with all the pump bands they sponsor all these different metal bands like you don't see that with many other beverage bands doing that and that's been going on since you know i graduated high school in two thousand so that's when i think you were really starting to see that swell up and a lot of my friends were in vans we were at the bands work tour that was sponsored by monster back in i think it was like around two thousand seven somewhere around there i was in denver working for an agency there went and hung out at the warp tour with my friends you know they took me backstage were hanging out with like all the bands you know the band's tour buses and i saw that they had like huge stacks of monster that these guys are all drinking and i was like how you guys pounding energy drinks right now like in the hot sun like it's like ninety eight degrees and they're like no dude it's water and it was like monster gives all the bands they look like monster cans but at the bottom it says to water because they know right that none of these bands are gonna drink this stuff in the sun so bands on stage are pounding what looked like energy drinks to all these kids but it's really just water and i remember thinking like that's so fucked up like you know like you know and i think that was the moment where i where it kind of started me down the path of oh like why isn't it stuff like water like marketed in a cool way like this and it was like when you actually had a freezing cold can of water it's just more refreshing to use psychologically there's actually a the popular science i think it was they they did this study where they showed the temperature was the number one quench of thirst neurological which is why like if you're really thirsty and you suck on an ice cube it actually kind of quench your thirst a little bit even though no water's actually absorbing into your body really right so i think there was just like that was sort of the aha moment for me while i started thinking about why isn't that healthier things because none of us none of my friends hang out one to actually drink energy drinks like we just want to drink water or beer you know right but it's like of course your band you gotta make money you're touring so of course you gotta take the checks from these companies and and you know they they they play ball to an a certain extent but that's where i think the idea really started and what other verticals did you explore that you think would also work for this did you explore any other products that you think like so this definitely there's definitely opportunity here if you do what we're doing but in this this thing or that thing so it's twenty what so that so that worked tour thing happened in yeah like around two thousand seven two thousand eight where i started thinking about that but then it was a cup like maybe two years later i was living in san francisco and i actually developed a spirits brand on my own called western grace and it was basically brandy so it was like hey how do we make brandy cool because i had brandy it was really good i'm like why don't people drink more of this it's just like whiskey without the burn but every brandy bottle literally in the in the liquor store had dust on it it was like what your grandfather drank or some trying to be replica french luxury with cursive golden text on the bottle but was more similar taste profile wise to a whiskey which was the biggest fastest growing spirit so i had this idea to create a brandy that felt more like a whiskey and felt cool and sure enough like i found a brandy dis in northern california who were like oh my god we've been waiting for someone to try to make brandy like mass and cool for like twenty years so they were like hey we'll make the brandy for you then i went and found some spirit industry folks who helped create hen jin and sailor jerry rum to kind of come on board they thought it was really interesting and then all of a sudden we have a brandy company and i moved back to my hometown of philadelphia where my partners were and we basically like i was only a couple years that have ad school no entrepreneurial experience no liquor inter industry experience and we started building this brandy company and it's still around today they're in probably eighty bars in la they're all over austin they're in nashville they're in florida but i left the brand a little bit early on because i just me and arc the the spirit folks we brought in kinda like didn't see eye to eye on a couple things from a marketing level so i said hey you guys keep growing it from here i'm gonna kinda go do my own thing and you know i'll i'll keep my little chunk of best of equity and best of luck to you guys like no hard feelings i'm sure you'll do great with it and then went to work for an agency in tennessee that a a friend of mine started called human where i started doing a bunch of well human and i we did a bunch of funny work for the organic world we did this campaign called save the bros for organic valley so it was like the first organic protein shake and we did this funny viral video that just went bananas and it was like the first time that like humor had really been done like in the world of organic and that was like the reinforcement of the warp tour thing where it's like right like why aren't more health brands like playing with the kind of humor and a revere internet stuff that these other you know unhealthy things you're doing and then that's really where i started building the nuts and bolts of liquid depth and figuring out the production and coming up with the branding and then it was i think maybe two years after that was when we officially kinda launched it that's that's pretty cool do do you do you think that there's still opportunity for that i mean because when you go to seven eleven i'm in awe i live in san francisco i'm in austin right now they're seven eleven everywhere is and it's only muscle milk that's the only protein based drink and that is similar to your analogy of like an that's like an e or a fiji or something like a mass brand well i i think if i'm if i'm not wrong i think it'd be more like taking cottage cheese and making cottage cheese fun than it is muscle milk or the kind of protein shakes which are already kind of like trying to mass market and and get in with a sort of different lifestyles whereas you know some random product category where it is only trying to play it safe non internet based marketing those are the ones that you're talking about right mike where you you think those have the sort of a larger delta between what's out there and what could be out there yeah it's tricky and i think that's where it's a so protein shakes if you think about who the protein shake consumer is probably predominantly male like dudes try you know bulk up a lot of the time you know at least in that world and that's why organic valley when they came to the agency they knew that like all the ads they've been running because most of organic valley products are milk and cheese and stuff that they sell at whole foods all their commercials are like picturesque sunsets over family farms and our family farmers ages care more than anyone but they knew that when they launched an organic protein shake it's a very different customer than the mom who's shopping at whole foods for their other products so they wanted us to come in and say hey we know that it's like a muscle dude that we're selling this to who's typically not an organic you know a big time organic shopper maybe they are buying the tubs of of you know protein powder at g where they're buying you know muscle milk so they're like we still want to appeal to that audience with this very you know a protein shake that's made by family farmers so we did this whole funny video that's like you know if bro like all the chemical crazy shit that's in protein shakes if bros keep drinking them they might not last much longer and they'll go extinct then like who's gonna bring the beer pong table when they're gone and like you know like this whole idea of like save a bro get them on an organic protein shake that was sort of like the funny idea that we had that went really really well and it's because the product even though it was healthy is still a liquid that wants to be drank by a consumer who identifies with the marketing it's like if you just try to say alright we're gonna make an oat oatmeal brand that feels you know badass and rock and roll the oat milk customer probably isn't guys who ride harley davidson like they're not drinking oat milk but you're trying to market to them so it's like that's probably not gonna work as well because you got way more marketing education to do to try to convert new customers into something that they've never drank before water is different for us because everybody drinks water we don't have to explain how to drink water how to use it like everybody drinks water from harley dudes to metal dudes to yoga moms to everybody and now it's just about from a from a demographic or psycho standpoint who just thinks this is a cool thing to be a part of their day with you're not trying to convince them why they should drink water gotcha and so you also went through science or how how did science get involved because this when i first heard about this is like oh this is coming out of science labs is that did you bring the idea to them did you meet them and then inc the idea how did that happen and and for for people who don't know what we're talking about sciences like this weird quasi venture capital firm but also like a weird incubator they launched dollar shave club and a variety of things or maybe they helped launch i don't know what the court correct verbiage but they're definitely just weird combo of like company builder and investor based out of yep yeah so we launched liquid debt in a bit of a backwards way the most i think beverage brands launch which was we launched a year before we met science we launched liquid death on social media before we ever had product because we knew that with such a crazy idea like liquid death there's nobody who's writing me a check for the idea of liquid depth they're like you're this is stupid you're crazy like who would ever buy this it's a negative name it says that retailers will never carry it yada yada yada so i knew that i had to prove it out as a concept on social first before i could actually make people feel like i'm der risking this thing a bit to actually raise so we designed the can to look like a three d realistic can we shot a fifteen hundred dollar video and then we just put it on facebook no twitter no instagram just facebook we put maybe i don't know three grand and paid media behind the video and then cut to three months later we have more facebook followers than aqua fe than video has three million views we've got a range of dms from hi i am a seven eleven franchise in the midwest how do i get this in my stores or hi i'm the biggest non out beverage distributor in new york city called big geyser how how do we talk to a sales representative to distribute this and we didn't even have product yet or no idea of how we were even gonna really make it so then i use all of that social traction and distributor interest and retailer interest to then start raising a small friends and family around so we can actually produce physical product because with cans the minimums are really really high like quarter million cans is the lowest you can actually produce with a can manufacturer so it's a little bit capital intensive just to even start playing the game how much is a quarter million how do how much a quarter of a million of product what would i mean if you're just starting what would that cost i mean it all depends what you're filling in there but i mean i mean yeah i mean you're you're talking hundred and fifty two hundred two hundred and fifty grand just to like kinda get started probably you know doing cans so yeah once we once we then kind of raised a little bit we started producing cans we we bottle or i should say we can and source our water in austria in the alps and let me let me ask you what what does that mean when whenever people are like oh this is you know spring water from this mountain it's like you know my head is always like this is bs s what does this mean does that matter like a is this true b does that matter so like why do you go get your water from austria in the alps like what is that is that is that branding is that like is there something about water that i don't know like why do you have to go there to get your water let's be totally honest water for the most point part i should say for most people is water like if you had people try to even even water stops if you had them blind taste test fiji versus e versus whatever can they really tell the difference probably not right i've done this test many times as an e drinker e versus so e in fiji or taste similar to me e versus crystal ge like it tastes different yeah i've i've bet money and i've got it right before that's interesting but yeah i think the things that make water the the affect the taste of of water are the natural minerals and how much of them there are in the water and the ph of the water is it more acidic is it more basic and what those minerals are affect how acidic or how basic it is so when you for us our water comes from the alps and it literally goes right from the mountain into the can obviously it goes through filters and things that filter out the debris and all of that and then we put it through like a pasteur characterization process that makes sure everything you know it's all clean and good to go but everything in that water is that's the natural mineral profile of the water that has been built up over probably hundreds of years in the mountain and it's like you know naturally a line at seven point eight or seven point nine ph it's got a nice mineral level nice mouth feel when you're drinking it because of the level of minerals so that comes right off that way it's all everything's natural about it almost every major water brand in the us whether that's smart water aqua das most of those brands they're using municipal tap water from the factory that then they reverse osmosis which strips everything out of the water all the natural minerals all the bad stuff everything so it's literally just like empty water then they have to add in minerals back in to kind of make it taste good so they'll add in the natural things that occur in water but just kind of artificially with just doing it at the factory to kind make something that has a decent ph and a decent mineral profile that tastes good so those are kind of the two options when you say something is spring water it's very strict from the fda of what that has to be like to call it spring water you cannot alter the original mineral prop profile of the water so even if you take it off the mountain if you put it through reverse osmosis and it strips out the natural minerals and you add them back in you can't call it spring water anymore because you've altered the original right thing everything we have in our water is natural that's how it comes off the mountain it's kind of its own perfect thing we don't have to go through the whole process of like using municipal tap water from the factory stripping everything out adding stuff in and kind of like creating a water you know that that that's the big difference okay and you know i've never actually had liquid death is it's flat water though right not sparkling and it's not flavor we have a sparkling version but so we have a still and a yeah and and so you sorry just to sort of finish it so you you you did the social media to prove hey we can build a fund brand that people resonate with then you figured it out okay to produce the minimum run i'm i'm gonna need a couple hundred grand to get this thing off the ground and you raised kind of the friends and family round that was from science or afterwards science came about and they wrote a bigger check we raised the friends and family around just to basically cover like a super limited you know a smallest run of product we could do and then once i finally had a physical can of liquid death for the first time which was probably around october of twenty eighteen we had a a guy that we knew who knew someone at science who said hey you guys should really talk to science like they'd probably be all over this so we went and met with science and brought him a physical can and once someone could really hold it and it wasn't just like us showing digital images from social it made it way different it's just like they understood the magic of it and how cool this would be walking around with this or how you know how into this people would be so then we that's when we kind of decided to do a deal with science and over the next two months after that they helped us gear up our d launch where we launch online in january of last year and do you think this will be mostly d you think this will be retail where how do you think about that obviously you're doing both where do you think is the kind of bulk of the business gonna come from i think we've always known it was gonna be retail from the beginning we just didn't know how soon do you start really pushing into retail water something that you don't wanna just order on the internet like you wanna be able to buy a water when you're thirsty somewhere so it's just naturally a retail play versus like you know something like maybe like a soil that's like a meal replacement thing you could order those to your front door because it's not like you just randomly deciding to go get one of those but now they're pushing into retail as well but what's your pitch on how big this gets and the way i like these pitches is kind of like bottoms up so it's like you know rather than saying you know well vitamin orders sold for this much so maybe we can get that much or more because blah blah but like bottoms up being like you know there's this many grocery store i don't know if you think that way but like do you do you have that sort of analysis of like i think this gets this big because i can say that there's this many venues or this many grocery stores or this much d demand of this so i think we can you know when we grow up we can become this big do you think that way or or how do you approach that yeah i think it's a a combination of things i mean one you can obviously start at what is the size of the bottled water market which in twenty nineteen the bottled water market in the us alone was twenty billion dollars for just still water made up a little under fifteen billion of that twenty and sparkling is about three and a half billion of that twenty so it's a massive market in seven and what's the rest flavor a like private label okay yeah and and flavored stuff in there gotcha the biggest retail in terms of doors channel is convenience stores there's like over a hundred and fifty thousand convenience stores and then i think there's maybe thirty thousand grocery stores or something like that and then the well the biggest channel is restaurants and on premise like restaurants and bars there's about a million in the us so you can start looking at you know velocities of what certain water brands do in convenience stores we can look at some of our velocities that we're seeing and what they could grow to and yeah you can really start to like forecast out how big this gets but it's like well performing water brands just in seven eleven can be doing fifty million in sales just in seven eleven in scan sales for like you know you know a a decent water brand and that's just seven eleven who are the top three the top water brands in terms of six scale are as you could probably imagine like aqua and san they're both over a billion dollars year and it's on those are owned by pet nestle and the or who those owned by pepsi pepsi des is coke okay wow yeah okay that's and and then nestle is the other big initially has a couple brands like nestle pure life and kind of the more budget value water and yeah they're another they're over a billion as well who owns at how who owns and how much so fiji own by wonderful brands they're down near you in la right or i don't if you're in la but in la yeah how much how much revenue do you think fiji and e does i think fiji a privately owned company is e public i don't know i don't know the exact numbers i i've seen a couple things so i can't really comment if they're if they're accurate or not but i assume that fiji e on they're probably somewhere around like five hundred million a year something like that i would guess what would the margin on that be so is it as big as i would think it's not as big as you think really because the retailers they want the most margin on bottled water like the the they wanna mark up bottled water higher than almost any other beverage that they have in the store so the retailer wants a lot of margin and then you've got distributors that need their margin so it's like you really get down it's not like bottled water is some like insane margin for suppliers than other products you know like energy drinks probably getting more margin than than water is three of which i i think the conception is dude they're just bottling water that's like you know you're like selling air but but in reality the margin is probably i i would guess sub you know sub thirty percent not above thirty percent is kind of my my my guess yeah i think most in in most beverage they say like you know a target like really solid margin for beverage would be like forty percent that's like fifty percent is like you're killing it and then it's like i think we get down like to thirty is probably like on the low end of what you want but yeah so when i i i used to own a train of hotdog dog stands in nashville and when it was real it was called southern sam lean as big as a baby's arm and and i would crush it un bottled water in the daytime bottled water would cost two or three dollars and at nighttime when everyone's drunk you definitely add a little bit more to it i think from restaurant depot i think a bottled water was fourteen cents or like your it was like stupid and so i like the hot dogs would like make a little bit of money i would make it i if you can make a thousand dollars a day off bottled water that was where the money was at was the bottled of water yeah that was definitely worth it so if you if you need a sales guy you got sam here yeah i mean i was talking water like crazy that was where it was at mike we had this question which was if you had to make a thousand dollars tomorrow but i stripped you of all your kind of like current income streams in your print business how would you go try to make a thousand bucks in a week or whatever and i think sam's was i go to a hot place i buy waters for fourteen cents and and go sell in front of a stadium emergency in the corner like at at the at the stoplight like yeah yeah because like people don't care about the water they more so care about the convenience they're like oh fuck it's right here it's i got two dollars next and i totally over thought it and i was like well i guess i would create this online store as i now it's like too too slow too complicated i would go sell i i would be like a vendor at a like a concert series like the summer concert series that cities has i i swear to god i would make a thousand dollars a day in bottled water sales you just you know that's not every day but you crush it at those concerts to sell bottled water yeah that that was where i where i would make a killing what other opportunities have you seen that if you weren't starting this business you would be very interested in i mean i guess obviously like you're always looking for white space right i think where i was really inspired most by my point of view on business and branding is from virgin like richard branson what you know early in my advertising career when i worked in san francisco the main account that i worked on was virgin america the airline so i got like super deep into virgin and and i read you know richard branson books and i just loved that their model was like we go and try to find a stale category and we make the one really cool fun brand within that category where it almost changes the category where the rest of the category almost has to start adapting like airlines like nobody was excited to get on an airplane or eat airplane food or anything and then they were the first ones to make planes with like neon blue lighting and like you know tvs in every seat which now is like a common thing in every airline now right right it was like that really inspired my way of looking at where i would look for things that were like what is something that like you said like cottage it's cheese like what is something that is extremely boring or like what's a category that just nobody cares out where you can't think of one cool brand in and obviously like if it's something that seems like it could still have appeal it's just the victim of poor brands not getting it and you know just not innovating or whatever it might be and you see an opportunity hey this is actually could be a thing that people really would love but it's just been stuck in this like dull drums of branding for so long that it needs something because at the end of the day with especially with packaged goods like branding is so much more important than most suppliers or or companies think you know because most companies are started by business people in in the most part it's like someone with an mba someone who understands the nuts and bolts of building a business it's rare that businesses are started by creative people like artists and people that are you know graphic designers and stuff like it it's two different things and usually what happens is the business folks think really rationally like okay my product contains this so the name of the product should be about that and i should list all the rational reasons why someone should buy right it's like yeah and then that gets them a certain part of the way but then they end up hiring a creative agency to get all these creative thinkers in to build a story around this boring thing to make people actually care about it so what i think is interesting is when you have creative people at the very beginning of the process where it's like just considering what the company should be what the name should be what the product should even look like will someone even care about whatever it is you're selling because i think the creative people do have a good sense of culturally what's going on what's cool what do people care about what's the climate business people not so much i feel like they're more in like the the the nuts and bolts and weeds of like numbers in manufacturing which is hugely important which is why there's so many brands that never get the creative side but still they just become these logistical swiss army knife did still get acquired right but it's like just imagine if they had great creative too you might be a two billion dollar brand you know i'm i i'm speaking of water good friends with this guy scott harrison from charity water have you ever met scott yeah i i never not i heard her i heard of the brand and so so you've heard of the brand because i think they've done a phenomenal job with the brand and so this is just a like we were thinking when we're just brainstorming know what's another category in a grocery store that you could do this with which is definitely a totally legit brainstorm we can do but this is a a very different analogy but i you did the same thing so scott was a party promoter like you came from a punk rock background then ads and then you went into this cp space which is not the maybe the most conventional path he's a you know party promoter club promoter in new york for ten years you know convincing dudes to buy you know three thousand bottle three thousand dollar bottles of great goose that they know you know you could go by for fifty dollars across the street to get table service right and so then he goes and he he you know sort of hasn't it come to jesus moment goes to africa decides i'm gonna dedicate the next year of my life to phil and giving back and but he's all he knows is how to promote parties how all he knows is cool and so he reinvented charity as a cool brand and he has his quote he does when he like tells his story which is it's a quote from someone talking about philanthropist and they say man imagine if we could sell charity with one tenth of the finesse that brand sell toothpaste like imagine if we had one tenth of their marketing power that they do they use on toothpaste imagine how much good we could do in the world and so that's basically what he did where he was like alright i'm gonna make a brand that actually stands for the for these three things and i'm gonna have awesome design because every charity website sucks and you know it looks like they hired their eighth grade cousin to like build it for them and i'm gonna do these with influencers i'm gonna do these print campaigns etcetera etcetera and you know he's now been raising you know over hundred fifty million dollars for the call he's one of the fastest growing and best charities out there because he did what you did which is he applied cool to a category that was totally un cool before yeah no totally and i think there's so many different places where you can think about you know i i think cool is a weird word because it's like it can be taken so many anyways i think it's like it's less about cool but it's like how do you make it interesting or how do you make it like desirable like i have to have this thing you know that's intriguing to me i mean are were there things that you've explored or you're like you know this actually is one of those categories i'm i'm busy now but that would be interesting for someone to change that category i think we're even thinking about that with liquid death too like i think liquid death you know is so much bigger than just a water company like at the end of the day like i think we think about ourselves as like a pop culture factory like we just made we released a liquid death vinyl record recently i don't know if you guys saw that but it was like in less than two weeks we sold seven hundred vinyl records which is like more than most metal bands actually sell when they release a record on a major metal label and it was like this funny idea where we took social media hate comments and made them the lyrics to this metal album and it's like wow a water company now just became a record label for a minute and it's like i think about all these other places where there could be innovation that tied to our general mission of like health that's like do we like what if liquid death creates like a chain of heavy metal yoga studios you know where it's like people who wanna do yoga but they don't wanna listen to yan when they're doing it like is there some room for like some kind of cool like how do you make a a totally new kind of like fitness experience you could do like tough guy multi vitamins if you need to right you could take healthy product multi vitamins and be like okay cool instead of that's kind of interesting those and care bears like maybe we could just make this form factor a little different brand a little different right to to speak to a different audience who yeah so you you guys have raised let's say ten i forget the number ten or twelve million dollars you're not huge yet you're definitely still getting going how do you decide so like at my company we have a brand that people know and people just if we make stuff people will buy it but in my head always like i don't wanna make other stuff let's just like focus on what we doing in kick assets that and then maybe eventually expand whereas you've done these little experiments like the vinyl record it may maybe you're also trying to do maybe you weren't joking with your heavy metal yoga thing in my head i'm like no fuck that focus what do you have like a like logistically how do you decide where to throw a budget that and throw money at in order to so so let let me ask you that so this this is what i mean all these other products that we could potentially make that actually sell or actually it succeed they double as marketing for the water you know it's yeah it's just marketing that's profitable it's profitable exactly it's like we made a vinyl record i can't tell you how many eyeballs that got liquid death on from people repo the album sharing the album talking about it and that album for us to execute including printing the vinyl cost us twelve thousand dollars and we've already made all of our money back and more and we hired a guy that we knew there was a friend of a friend who's an incredible metal musician who wrote the whole album his name's is gus rios he wrote and recorded the whole album his buddy mixed the whole album and his buddy mixed up for justin bieber and all these other guys so we got the whole album recorded we made a commercial for it using only stock footage so we spent maybe two grand on stock footage and my wife edited the video so it was like awesome you know that's all that's all we launch with it it was a a little a launch video made with stock footage and we pressed records and sold the records in our merch store and it's like all that stuff adds together that's why it's like what would it cost to to start let's call it a chain of five small heavy metal yoga studios in la like small little studios not a lot going on you find some you know some instructors like maybe you could actually build that out for call it five hundred grand let's just say like you can make you could build a five chain yoga studio heavy metal yoga studio chain for five hundred grand what does five hundred grand buy you if you try to run one tv spot during the fucking oscars like maybe you get a thirty second spot and what's gonna see more lift and brand evan for your brand running one five hundred thousand dollar commercial during the oscars or building a chain of five heavy metal yoga studios in la that gets talked about by every publication heavy metal yoga studio launches in la people actually go to it everyone who goes takes photos and shares and talks it's like that's a way smarter way to spends your money and you might actually make some of it back if it's a good enough business model right you know this is like elon selling flame throw right you know right yeah he he is the you know sort of iron ironman trying to be a badass rockets and you know drilling into underground and electric sports cars so he comes out with the flame through for seven hundred dollars i think it was and he sold i don't i don't know i think he sold like millions of dollars worth the a shit tied the flame i think it was ten the whole thing is basically just being like you know feeding the evan like you said of the cult of elon of yeah life should be a little more badass ass we need a little more fire a little more speed and a little more like you know rocket tree to to to in our in our lives and so it fits that brand yeah and it's like it you know when when you curate your own new experiences or whatever for the brand you can also control what goes on there so at all these yoga studios it's gonna be coolers as of liquid depth as the water's right you know it's like yeah it's it all kinda can work together yep my my takeaway from this whole podcast is i'm gonna do i'm gonna do a handful of i'm not gonna launch a yoga studio but a twelve thousand dollar vinyl release or something like of that scale is super interesting i need to do more of that do you have one person on your in your on your team who like does these odd things or is this just like a pro like a project that you lead and coordinate so we work with you know we do have like creative agencies that we work with like most of which are run by my friend who i i knew from the industry they've got small little startups and what's nice about liquid death is because we wanna do such cool different things people are willing to kind of work at a nice homie rate because like they want that thing up for their real yeah we're not just asking them to make some board you're crazy enough to be willing you're open enough to like try to need to go jesse and saying hey look at this amazing thing we did with liquid death and they want the nestle check not the liquid death check but they need you to get the nestle check well they're doing the same thing that you're they're doing they're doing the same thing what you're doing with the vinyl they're like it'll maybe pay for itself but it's also marketing right right exactly so yeah i mean we we we get a lot of you know smart creative people that are throwing ideas into the mix but you know at the end of the day like you know i'm a very creative focused ceo i think we've built like a nice team around us that like is really smart with operations and supply chain and that kind of stuff it's not so much my strong too and i can you know focus more on the brand and creative side which you know liquid depth it it's really a brand plan you know like and that it's so important and i think building out all these fun things we're talking about of like how do you build this brand that has such an evangelist audience to it and it continues to grow like that's that's really the focus i'm also creative but i definitely am like fiscal conservative and i'm like no no we gotta focus and this focus on the cash cow but i'm like you're right this dumb shit that seems dumb but it's awesome you can do that for way cheaper than you think yeah i guess it's just like always think like one of my old bosses i used to work i was a creative director at bain media so gary van vaynerchuk was like my my boss essentially and you know i learned a lot from him in terms of like marketing is really just about day trading attention like it's marketing is all about attention and attention has different cost to it and different price to it depending where you go the price for a billboard you're paying so much per eyeball it season it's like yes it could be effective but you're over paying for it versus create a yoga studio in la you might generate even more eyeballs and attention at a way way lower spend so i think it's just always thinking about who how do i get attention for my brand and what are all the different possible ways that you can get attention and what's like the most cost efficient ways to get that attention and i have to ask was awesome or not awesome working for him is is the guy the real deal or what i love gary i think he's like an incredible human being like you i've worked for a lot of corporate folks and i think there's there's a lot of egos there's people who don't care and i think gary like truly cares like even if you're gonna tell him you're you're quitting like he's gonna be like oh awesome like do you need any help finding your next thing you know like he's just like he cares and i think that's what he's built his whole company on is like you can build a massive company with like a compassionate point of view on your people and not just being some like tyrant do you think there's any anything about gary because he's a very public presence right he's personally out there a lot and you know anytime you personally put yourself out there post putting a part of you out there not the whole thing is there anything that either people don't really know about him or is misconception that you've seen about him is there anything like that i would say that like talking with him normally one to one is obviously the volume isn't as loud as it is when he's on camera mh you know because at the end of the day like he's an entertainer to a degree right yeah now he's an educational business entertainer but he's entertaining the watch like the way he talks like how his passion is like how he's smart like there's plenty of business people who say smart things but not maybe as many that are like is entertainment animated yeah animated on camera so it's like in a way he's kind of playing you know a bit of his character but it's like off camera like he's way more mellow i would say i was on i was i was on his podcast and he was very nice that's awesome alright well mike we'll wrap it up where should people follow you find you if if they wanna hear more thoughts or liquid death you know get people shout out where where people can get more of what they got today yeah i mean most everything happening with liquid dev is on instagram so follow us it's at liquid dev on instagram you know at liquid death on twitter and liquid depth dot com our site and yeah that that's that's it this is awesome i'm looking at it right now thanks for taking the time man this bad ass yeah i i got you gotta be in fact sorry if my typing is is something you hear on the podcast because while he was typing while he was talking i was like i need to write this down i had three ideas while you're were talking about exactly what you said but you inspired something while you were talking i was like i gotta write this down because we're gonna do this and if we don't do this like i'm gonna g it so apologies if everyone here is typing in the back i'm not do the same thing i'm like looking up everything you're saying that's a that's sign of a good podcast now and it's all about speed like that's the one thing i always push it's like the idea shelf life these days is very short like if you have a cool idea right now if you don't make it tomorrow someone else is probably it until weeks you know it's right that's just the reality right on cool alright mike thank thank you so much for coming on alright thanks guys take care bye thank you you