Liquid Death

Chris Koerner

@mhp_guy

Red Bull is the world's best marketing company, and they also happen to sell energy drinks. Liquid Death is definitely following in their footsteps. It's been said that Red Bull spends 30-40% of revenue on marketing, 3-5x what other beverage brands spend. https://t.co/QnfyKgU5hG

Anish Moonka

@anishmoonka

A tiny energy drink company put a gross internet joke on a can, sold every last one in days, and barely spent a dollar making people want it. More than 800,000 people watched. The company paid for none of them. Echelon is a small brand out of Nashville, started by military veterans. It mostly sells online and on military bases. The U.S. energy drink aisle it's trying to crack is worth about $22 billion a year, and Monster and Red Bull each own roughly a third of it. Breaking in normally means paying stores for shelf space, paying distributors to haul the cans around, and burning money on ads for years before anyone notices. Most never make it. So Echelon didn't play that game. It teamed up with White Phosphor, a clothing brand with a goth style and a big online following, and put a meme on a white can: "Goth Girl Spit." The drink copies Monster's wildly popular white can, the one tons of people are already hooked on. Citrus, no sugar, 200mg of caffeine, about two cups of coffee. There's no actual spit in it, the label says so. They made a small batch, charged $35.99 for a six-pack, and called it a one-time drop. Then it sold out, and selling out was the whole point. A drink that runs out becomes its own news story. The people who missed it post about missing it, the people who hate the name keep arguing about it, and every one of those posts shows the drink to more strangers for free. Echelon got 820,000 views on a single tweet without spending a cent. This move has built billion-dollar companies. Take Liquid Death, which sells plain water in a beer-style can. The founder spent $1,500 on one stupid video, a guy getting waterboarded with the water, and rode the attention into a brand. It's now worth $1.4 billion and sold $333 million of water in 2024. The giants it competes with spend more on ads in three months than most drink startups raise in a lifetime. Liquid Death won with jokes instead. Prime is the cautionary tale, though. That drink, from YouTubers Logan Paul and KSI, ran the exact same playbook: limited drops, empty shelves, kids fighting over bottles, single ones reselling for as much as $1,500. It pulled in $1.2 billion in sales in 2023. Then people got bored. In the UK, sales dropped 71% the next year, and the bottles ended up in clearance bins for about 40 cents. The hype got everyone in the door. It couldn't make them stay. So the real test for Goth Girl Spit is whether enough people like the drink enough to buy a second can after the funny first one. The launch already did its job. A few thousand cans, gone, plus a free spot in the national news, for the cost of printing some labels.

Cernovich

@Cernovich

Picking fights with people works as a growth hack for a small company. Liquid Death is in the big leagues. They raised PE money at a > 1.5 billion dollar valuation. It’s a case of “what got you to one level won’t get you to the next.” Tactics have to change as company grows.

Nick Shackelford

@iamshackelford

Liquid Death sold out & it hurts me because I was an early lover of them. 🫣 (this is a Nick Shackelford ONLY take) From punk rock water brand to... just another energy drink company. Here's how they destroyed their authenticity that was once rooted in rage against the water machine lore: I have followed this brand since inception, I have a deep love for beverage from a consumer standpoint and now obviously from a brand stand point. The Liquid Death timeline: 2009: idea came about at Warped Tour 2017: trademark filed 2019: Anti-water (brilliant) Sell your s 2020: Sparkling water (okay okay I get it...) 2021: Flavored water (hmm okay I see it right right...) 2022: Hydration packets (uh hmm didn't see it coming but loved the ad) 2023: Energy drinks.. gooootttt ittt I see where this is headed (RIP) This is textbook brand dilution. When you stand for everything, you stand for nothing. Here’s what it looks like; → $100M: "We need to expand our TAM" → $500M: "Let's hire that CPG exec from Pepsi" → $1B: "Remember when we used to do that thing we did?" Meanwhile, Red Bull: • Same product for 40 years • Same message • Same positioning • $11 billion revenue Liquid Death had authenticity in a sea of sameness. They traded it for shelf space. 💎 The lesson: Growth at all costs is death by a thousand SKUs.

weisser

@julianweisser

"Millions of people creating with the same tool for totally different use cases, but the output looks the same. That's where the feeling of AI slop comes from." She's making it her mission to put an end to it. Solo Founders Podcast ep 18 is live with @thaiscbranco_ of @tastelabs. 00:47 Why she went solo 02:08 What "taste" actually is 11:30 A quirk on one, slop on millions 13:09 The real cause: volume 19:37 Why it had to be a "lab" 30:04 You're bad at commissioning AI 44:01 Branding, Liquid Death and what lasts 58:34 The bear and bull case for going solo

Markie Devo

@markie_devo

Liquid Death Cinnamon Roll sounds mighty interesting!🤔 New beverages heading to stores and online. * Liquid Death Cinnamon Roll Flavored Tea (On Amazon) * Liquid Death Peanut Butter Cup Sparkling Water (Spotted at Five Below and 7Eleven) * SPELT Banana Milk (20g Protein) (On Amazon) * Mountain Dew Baja Tropical Lime Blast in a bottle made with real sugar (Spotted at Walmart) * V8 Energy Honeycrisp Apple Berry (On Amazon, currently sold out, restock soon) * Lipton Fusions Peach Passion Fruit Lemonade Iced Tea (On Amazon) * CELSIUS Summer Edition Spritz Vibe (Sparkling Limoncello Twist) (Spotted at Target) * Premier Protein Sparkling Protein Soda – Black Cherry (On Amazon) * Premier Protein Sparkling Protein Soda – Grapefruit (On Amazon) * Premier Protein Sparkling Protein Soda – Lemon Lime (On Amazon) 📲For the items available on Amazon I added them to my affiliate link>> https://t.co/MZ1FHnMdwV 🛒The rest you can find at the stores mentioned! (News/Image::Target, Amazon, 7Eleven, Liquid Death, Thanks @rockgirlmaxim84 & @kdsnackfinds for in-store finds!✊🏻) Feeling any of these👇🏻

Mike Cessario

Co-founder & CEO

Former Netflix promo and ad-agency creative director who conceived Liquid Death as the 'dumbest name possible' for a healthy drink; drives the brand's marketing-first strategy.