The Startup CPG Podcast

How are you?

Hi, Hamid. Welcome to the show today.

Hey, what's going on, Jessi?

How are you?

Doing really well. So excited to talk with you today. I'm a big Liquid Death fan personally, my friend group is and then Startup CPG. We're all fans. So it's just so fun to get to have you here today and get to learn more.

So yeah, thank you so much.

And can you tell us just a little bit about yourself and about Liquid Death for those that might not be familiar?

Yeah, for sure. And thanks for having me on.

Again, I really appreciate it.

Yeah, so I'm Hamid Saify. I'm the SVP of digital retail at Liquid Death. I started with the brand from the beginning back in 2019 when we launched. I ran marketing for about a year and a half and then ecom for the last probably a year and a half and then most recently building up this new practice around digital retail, which encompasses everything from Amazon to delivery apps to our [retailer.com](http://retailer.com/) retailer media.

So kind of been responsible for that.

So yeah, definitely. We've certainly seen the brand grow from seed round to now series D and where we are today. So it's been pretty insane to kind of see how far we've come. Liquid Death is a premium water brand.

We sell five skews of water right now two skews of unflavored one is still one is unflavored sparkling and then we have three flavors of sparkling water as well that launched earlier this year. The brand is known for being pretty irreverent tongue in cheek really comedy led kind of a brand that is really just designed to kind of shake up a pretty stale water category and just make water fun again.

That's essentially what our kind of motive and driving factor is just to make water fun again.

And yeah, we've been able to really grow the brand pretty insanely since 2019 to where we are today. So it's been a fun ride. But that's a kind of a quick high level on the brand and me. Amazing. That's awesome.

And just kind of to expand on the stage you mentioned like series D, can you tell us a little bit like you know how many how many retailer what are some of the major retailers how many total you know doors right now what and what kind of like, you know, what's kind of top of mind for you from a day to day perspective just to kind of help us get a further idea of the current stage that you're at.

Yeah, sure. So between like 2019 and 2020, almost like the first year and a half of the business liquid death is really an Ecom business first and foremost. So we sold to our website we sold on Amazon as well. We're really trying to build up our presence at retail.

As you can imagine the way that we market and the kind of brand that we are and with a name like liquid death, there weren't like distributors and retailers like clamoring to put us in those. So we really use Ecom as like a proof point in a case study on product.

So I think a lot of these events have helped for why this brand had momentum and really would be successful at retail. And it wasn't until March 2020 when we had our first national launch which was at Whole Foods.

So, you know, many people didn't think that, you know, natural and Whole Foods would probably be the first avenue for us. In retail but we have been in Whole Foods since, you know, COVID. And then where we are today is we have about 70,000 retail doors that we're in everywhere, anything from, you know, C stores, like seven 11 to nationwide with whole foods and target, um, and Albertson Kroger and so forth.

So yeah, the brand has grown pretty significantly at retail and it's now more of a retail business than it is an econ business. Both sides are growing.

Um, but you know, you, as everyone knows with CPG, you really have to be within like a one to two block radius of people at any point in time to pick up liquid death. And so that's kind of been the focus of the business.

Um, in terms of where we are and kind of next phase is, uh, you know, we're going to be releasing some innovation early next year. As we get into some new categories like tea, um, we're going to have, you know, another flavor of sparkling that we're going to launch as well.

Um, and then we're going to continue to push the boundaries on really thinking of liquid death as not so much as like a purely CPG brand, but more of like an entertainment company, which is really how we are.

Um, and kind of stuff that we put out the kind of content that we make, um, things that obviously do well in terms of capturing awareness, but also we have all this stuff going on behind the scenes, which is really the things I'm focused on around like, how do we activate?

How do we spend money on retailer platforms?

How do we continue to grow on our Amazon side of the business?

How do we crush at Instacart?

Um, and all those things just kind of move retail velocities up using digital channels. Yeah. Amazing. Excited to dig into a lot of those pieces. That's so cool.

And I'm curious for your yourself, you mentioned a little bit, your like career journey in different positions, like how many people were at the company when you joined like versus now?

Yeah.

So yeah, a bit of a background. So Mike who's our CEO and really the creative visionary behind liquid death, um, co-founder, uh, him and I worked together in advertising for a couple of years and we were working, you know, on a pretty big like CPG holding company. And you know, we would just see ideas go from really good ideas to like really watered down and distilled ideas.

Um, and Mike first mentioned liquid death to me, I don't know, maybe back in 2017 or 2016 or so, and I just thought it was like the most insane dumb dumbest idea you could ever think of.

Um, but he started showing me things and I was like, Oh man, this really makes a lot of sense and it's, you know, super cool.

Like I think this could like be something and working in advertising, you generally work on one account at a time and, um, or you're spread across a couple of different accounts and the CPG brand that we had, um, they were consolidating and wanting to move to like a global agency and we weren't a global agency. And because of that we didn't make the cut.

And as a result of that, Mike and I both got laid off on the same day because we lost that piece of business. And so Mike kind of consulted and freelance for a while and so did I, and then he just hit me up a couple of months later and was like, Hey, you know, I met this guy, he's willing to invest some seed around.

Do you want to come and like, you know, do this thing with me and like run marketing?

I was like, sure. And so when I first started my first, first official day, um, we had just hired a bunch of people cause we just raised some money.

And, um, so I think I'm like technically maybe employee number three or four. I don't know which one, but I think we had total of nine people around that first month that I started heavily on the sales and distribution side. And now we're 160 plus, um, as of right now. So pretty insane growth, um, you know, in the last three years. Yeah. Wow.

Can, can you share with us some of the like early days of like, of your, your, you know, your first role there and like what that looked like to kind of get things started in marketing?

Yeah.

I mean, I think for us early on, it was just trying to get people to, um, really understand what the brand was about and be a little bit more disruptive. And when you're early stage startup, you're throwing, you know, you're throwing shit against the wall and just hoping like anything sticks. Right.

So we were doing a lot of things that were like, whether they were like paid social ads or bigger kind of campaign videos that we probably wouldn't do now, but it's like we were just doing them because we were just trying to figure like what, what is the thing that would work, but we were in an ongoing kind of mindset of just like testing.

So early days before it was like a massive team, it's like, I would work on anything from, you know, we would be at the adult swim festival in Los Angeles, figuring out like a backdrop for that and how do we execute there and how do we take this coffin that we had retrofitted into a cooler and how do we get into the stadium?

And then it was like working on Instagram and Facebook ads and also doing analytics stuff. And then also working on investor decks. It was almost like any and everything just to kind of make things happen.

And at the time it's like, we weren't necessarily thinking every idea had to scale, but it was like every idea just had to give us like some kind of a data point that we could use for just something in the future, like how to make creative better or how to position an investor deck better, or how to, you know, work with our sales team more closely.

So those, that was kind of like early days of the business. And then as we kind of built out a team became easier to think about, okay, the things that we did, even though we built out a team, it's like, we were very purposeful and focused on doing the things that not only made sense for today, but in, in many cases, like, almost like future proof the business as well.

So one of the biggest ones was, you know, we launched with just one skew and we had that one skew, which is our still water, the white can, um, for the first 18 months of the business, we didn't have a second skew. And that goes very contrary to a lot of CPG brands and, you know, a lot of founders that I talk to, it's like, oh, we're doing these 10 skews.

And then like six months later, oh, we're going to do this. And now we're going to introduce that. And for us, like we, you know, in terms of just operationally being able to pull things off with excellence, being able to make sure that we had like a good like product market fit, um, that people understood what the brand was about. We did still water and then we did sparkling water 18 months later.

And then it took us like another year and a half to do flavors.

Um, so we're very methodical and that's kind of the approach that we use for like product development, but in on the content side of things, like the, the approach that we take is, you know, Mike says this really well.

It's like, you know, we're like comedians telling jokes every night and we're working our set, like some things are going to work and some things aren't going to work.

And then for the things that work, we just try to figure out, like what's the blueprint for why that was successful and how can we do more things like that?

Oh, I love that analogy. That's a really cool analogy. I'm curious on the, the still water piece, cause the first time I had liquid death, it threw me a little bit of like, oh, I'm drinking still water in a can. And I was like, I like that. That's super cool.

Has it, has it been like a, has it been something you've had to educate people on or if people kind of like, you know, figured it out over time, I'm curious about the like still water in the can piece of that had to be involved with any of the marketing. Yeah.

I mean, we, you know, we're the aluminum can is like aluminum is an infinitely recyclable. So there's definitely a sustainability piece to it, which ties to our tagline around death to plastic.

Um, but we know like, you know, putting beverages in a can is not inherently ownable. Like any brand can do that at any point in time. And you know, brands like Dasani are, you know, selling water out of a can now.

So early days, it was strange, I think for a lot of people, because when you see a skull on the side of the can as well, when it's called liquid death and it looks like beer energy, people did expect it to be something else.

So it always threw people off, but there was a beauty in that in terms of people leaned in and were just way more curious and inquisitive about what this was.

So, you know, early days, early fans of liquid death there, you know, they tell us like, Hey, I was at a party and I don't drink anymore.

And I just had liquid death on me and everyone's like, Oh, what are you drinking this or that beer brand?

And they're like, no, this is like water. And they're like, it's water. They had more questions. So there's a lot of growth baked into just like the name of the product, you know, it being in an aluminum can, of course, um, and the design of it, but there is certainly education, I think that happens because people sometimes do think it's energy. They think it's beer.

Um, and that's kind of changed over time as more people would become aware of the brand, but people think it is that.

And I think the other thing that we constantly have to, it's not something that we actively like work on, but I think because our marketing is so supercharged and good and interesting that people almost expect more sometimes when you're just popping open and still can at the end of the day, it is just water. It is a commodity and it's delicious water. It's amazing.

But at the end of the day, it's like, you know, we're selling, it's almost like a lifestyle brand that just happens to be selling water. Right. Yeah. Yeah. That's super interesting. And how did like, uh, in-person events and like, I'm curious about that piece, cause like Expo West, uh, in early, like in 2022, like I've never seen a takeover, like what Liquid Death did at Expo West.

Like I could not turn a corner without seeing someone trying to hand me a Liquid Death can, which I loved and I stayed so hydrated, but like in the line for the bus, like walking through wherever, like there were just people, there was like an army of Liquid Death brand ambassadors and it was so impressive. And that was like one of my favorite parts of Expo West.

And I'm curious about like how those kind of in person activations have played into the strategy. Yeah.

I mean, our sales team is pretty insane. Like those are all our team members. There was no like third party models or anything that we hire.

Oh, wow. That's purely our team.

Um, yeah, I think what we learned early on, like 2019, as we started doing events for the first time, it's like, we didn't need too much. Like there's the brand is like interesting enough on its own and kind of the center point for a lot of our activations was this like coffin that we'd retrofitted into a Liquid Death kind of ice cooler.

And, you know, the casket is open and there's Liquid Death cans kind of inside of it. And then we have like, you know, other displays to kind of help surround it. But when you're at a, when you're at a trade show that's in CPG, you know how inherently boring that is.

Like, you know, everyone's brand talking the same things or talking about sustainability and like everything feels very safe. And then here we are with an open casket with cans of water inside.

Um, and then at some of them, we also had like our mascot, which we call the Thirst Executioner also there as well.

So yeah, early days, then we just realized like, okay, cool. We have a very simple blueprint, a model for like what we want to do here. It doesn't need to be insane or inherently jazzed up too much. There's enough energy behind it.

And as the brand just became more popular, through social and digital and at retail, you know, our presence at, you know, at events kind of just dialed up a little bit. We got a little bit more space. We had more people there to help activate it. And it became more of a spectacle than anything before.

It was just maybe we had two to three people working a booth and that was kind of all we had in terms of team. And now we've been able to thankfully been able to scale it from there. Right. Yeah.

Are there other like, are there any like campaigns that stand out to you that you've run or like, you know, specific like events or something that either stand out as something you learned a lot from or that was really successful, like just, you know, kind of any stories of, you know, as you've as you've grown?

Yeah, I mean, I think there's like when you're early days, there's success, because there's like chatter and then there's success that actually like drives money into the account. And for us, we're, we're, we're at a place with the brand even early on where we still did the things that really drove buzz and awareness, while still doing all the quote unquote, like, hate this term best practices that drove revenue.

So a lot of our campaigns, like, were really designed and driven around creating as much chatter or awareness as possible.

And so, you know, we're now a year going into year four, you know, we've done a Super Bowl spot, we did a Super Bowl spot earlier this year in like 25 local markets, which was successful.

But one of our early things was because we had such a community that was developing around this brand, the first like six months to a year, you know, sometimes like retailers would like say no to us, like we would use our like ambassadors to help us out in terms of like, not ambassadors, but our community to help help us out and reaching out to some of these different retailers and asking them why they weren't even stocking liquid death.

So that might have happened through social that might have happened through their websites, that might happen through their contact forms. So we really utilize a very, like engaged community to help us get on the radar with retailers thing that was like just a very simple thing that we did, but successful in terms of a number of people who we were thankful enough that would do that for us.

Other things I think like campaign wise, you know, we put out like a campaign or a video thing generally every four to six weeks or so, but we had really good success with with this campaign that we did for with Tony Hawk, the skater. So Tony Hawk legend in the skating world, of course, he's an ambassador on the brand.

And so we're like, cool, how do we activate something for Tony Hawk?

Well, let's make a skate deck. And as a part of it, you know, we have a community called the country club, or you sell your soul for eternity to join our club. And it's like a legally binding document that you sign. And then the early days we would give you like a free case of liquid death on your first order. That was the premise of it.

And the idea around this program was just to get more email addresses and phone numbers. It was it was just a better way to do a 10% off right for your email address. And so we were working with Tony, we're like, cool, like, you know, we'll get him a sign his soul. But as a part of that, we'll make the graphics that are read on the board contain his actual blood.

So we drew his blood, we mix it in the paint, and the 100 or so Tony Hawk boards that we sold for $500 a piece. They had actual Tony Hawk in them. And so yeah, we sold out of those like in 10 minutes or so they started reselling on eBay and other places for like $3,000. And that campaign kind of went viral for us was like probably our biggest brand moment to date.

There was some controversy between like, little Nas X being like, why is his blood okay, but my blood wasn't okay when he did a collaboration with these Nike Air Max, and I think mischief a couple years ago. And so yeah, those are probably the you know, one thing that's very like tactical and small that all we did was just tap into our community to help us with.

And then another thing where we worked with someone who has like worldwide notoriety, someone like Tony Hawk, that we just made a video fairly quickly with that also is super successful, not only in pushing our merchandise side of the business, but just improving the awareness of like, what is this brand liquid death?

Yeah, wow.

The relationship with Tony Hawk, was that something where like, Tony Hawk started drinking liquid death, and then you're like, hey, we should chat or was it like, you know, sending out like samples to people that you thought like, matched the, you know, matched the right vibe?

Like, how do you develop like a relationship like that?

Yeah, I mean, our early kind of initial kind of cohorts were obviously people in action sports, metal and punk, like that was the first kind of audience that we would market to, through our paid media targeting or just generally, and we have a really amazing lifestyle marketing team that's led by Sticks Nielsen, who is my counterpart, and he has built out a really amazing team.

So we have like, almost like, to put it in marketing terms, like a subject matter expert in every industry, right?

So we've got like a snowboarder who was a pro snowboarder, we have heavy ties in skating, we've got people who work in a bunch of different industries from hip hop, to punk to rock, metal, whatever.

And we, you know, seeded a lot of product and through our, you know, just seeding product, we'd be at events that we needed to be. And we were just fortunate enough to have like celebrities, whether they were at concerts or otherwise just become familiar with the brand. And sometimes their managers would reach out or sometimes we would reach out through a network or connection.

I don't know exactly how the Tony Hawk thing materialized and turned into a thing. But you know, a lot of celebrities have found out about us just because it's been in the wild. And in other cases, it's been like us being very methodical with like reaching out to others.

So it's been a mixed bag, but we generally want to own spaces where like, it's cool content, people are making cool stuff, they're doing things that are a little bit off the beaten path, and a little bit quote unquote, non traditional to push the brand forward. Very cool.

And on the country club membership, where you mentioned like, you didn't sell your soul, I've seen that on the website, like, there's also the option to like buy a membership for $125,000 or something like has anyone ever done that?

I just that was my first question.

Yeah, I mean, yeah, we take a like, no fucks given approach when it comes to our marketing. And so one of the early early earliest things we did when we first launched country club is we were selling on our merch store, which at the time only had maybe like 10 t shirts and hoodies and hats, super limited amount of items.

And then we also were selling like, like a 1987 Lamborghini Countach, which was like the car that every, you know, boy who's like late 30s early 40s to have on their walls back in the 80s and 90s, we were going to sell one of those that was wrapped in liquid death for like $385,000.

So for us like on our site, even ecom wise, we always would just like throw something dumb out there and just for like interest to make it interesting. And on the Lamborghini, for example, I think like every month, we would have something like close to 1000 people would add it to their carts, just to see if it was real.

And of that 1000, we maybe had like 200 or so that would go into like step two of like adding in like shipping and payment info. But that was kind of the the genesis around, okay, let's continue to sell stupid stuff on the site. And so the next thing that we did is, like, we, one of our Halloween ideas, we cursed our water with like a witch doctor.

And we were like, okay, if you want to remove the curse, you have to buy this curse reversal spell on our website. And it was actually an actual spell that the witch doctor created for us. And we sold it for 99 cents.

And then we sold free green screen footage where you could do anything with our executioner mascot through the green screen footage that we had, and make whatever you wanted to make from we gave that away for free. And then on the country club membership thing, yeah, when we were retuning country club, we were like, alright, country clubs are like exclusive and expensive.

And, you know, it costs a lot of money to get into a country club to application processes and interviews and all that stuff.

All right, if you don't want to sell your soul to us, like we'll let you buy it for $125,000. And the little nugget of an insight in that was like, we would have people sell their soul to us. And this is a very, very small percentage, but then sometimes they'll email us back and be regretful that they did it.

They're like, can I get my soul back?

And we'd be like, no, you've given it to us for for for a lifetime for eternity. So you can't have it back. So that's kind of like the formula or like kind of process that we would follow just like selling things at weird prices and very obscure kind of oddball items. I love it. That's so fun.

I'm gonna link the country club membership in the show notes just because I think everyone should check it out and like, read some of the reviews of just yeah, people like when I sold my soul soul to liquid death, it changed my life forever. I'll never go back to Poland spring or like just there's so there's so much good content on there. That's awesome.

I'm also curious about how you don't you mentioned the you know, building up the the e commerce and the community, like what did that, you know, look like to help kind of you know, build this community of people that are hyped to murder their thirst?

Like was it you know, like you and team members like one on one interacting with people on social or like how did you really like nurture that community, especially in the early days to create this group, this group of people that are then willing to like call their local retailer, whatever, like I'm curious about what the early days of that looked like.

Yeah, I think early days, it was just we were so fresh and had such a different approach that in the kind of people that we were targeting in the groups that we were targeting, it was like, wow, there's a brand that's actually like speaking my language and kind of speaking to me for the speaking to me and with me for the first time.

So I think we got to like a lot of just like natural brand love that way.

And then as we, you know, developed ads for like paid social, which was our primary channel, like many, like DTC brands early on, as we built out, like our paid ads, our ads always were just like weird and different, like some ads would even tell you like, don't buy this product, or we would take, you know, a lot of the hate that we would get and we would use those hater comments in our ads.

So, you know, we take this comment from a person being like, you know, I curse everyone who works at this company is going to go bankrupt within two years that we would use that in an ad and with like a little thing that just said people love us on the internet.

And it's like, as those ads started running, and people started just responding and comments early days, it was us trying to like, respond to every comment, and, you know, go up against haters. And then what we noticed is like, after a month, three, four, five, six, you know, we just had an army of people that were just doing that for us and on our behalf.

And I think that's like an important thing is, you know, a lot of startup founders that I talked to is one or two little people that say something about their brand, they want to like, retool everything, right?

They want to shift everything. And we'd used, you know, hater comments for a positive thing for us in ads. So I think how we spoke, and it was a very like personal touch on how we spoke in ads was was like an important part in how we kind of like put out content, because it was entertainment led it, we didn't come in there with like, oh, here's these infinitely recyclable cans.

And, you know, with these electrolytes and this alkalinity, like we were there to make people laugh. When you make someone laugh, when you make someone think or whatever, like you have a way more of a connection to them. So that's how that's really the genesis.

The premise of the brand is that and then over time, you know, as we built out like our retention channels and email, people would get emails from us, it just sounded like your friend would have messaged you or emailed you that way, you know, or as we send texts, like it just became very personal.

So at the end of the day, it was like people just like the brand and for what it was, it was almost like making a new best friend versus being like, this is this is a brand that I love is like this is a person that I really love and connect with. Right.

Yeah, that's super interesting.

And for your current role with with driving retail, I'm curious about kind of the that like launching in retailer and being in so many retailers around the country, like what it looks like and has looked like for you to to, you know, drive marketing that that you can you see a see a change in store velocity velocities and like how you've intentionally worked on that and you know how the the earlier work you did has has played into that.

But I'm curious about like the retail, you know, help having your marketing drive retail sales now. Yeah. So the way that's kind of been split now is like, you know, we have a marketing team that's really there to grow awareness of the brand and put out really cool content and amazing stuff and social like that's, you know, what they're really pushing and driving towards.

And then when it comes to like me and my team, you know, we're thinking about like, how do we move velocities and it starts from like us figuring out one when we're at retail, because there's so much like growth baked into the brand, we've been able to really start out of the gate at a lot of retailers with really, really strong velocities.

And that's because like one, a lot of people now know us. Two is when you're in a water aisle and you see blue bottle for every plastic blue and white bottle that talks about alkalinity and da da da da. And now you see this thing, you're like, well, what's this beer doing on this in the water aisle and people will get a little bit more curious.

So that's been helpful in terms of just like having stopping power in aisle. We've also been really, you know, fortunate enough to have like in caps and displays that are really insane displays that we're able to win at retail that sometimes they're in the shape of a skull or sometimes they have like a coffin thing.

And people it's just disruptive and a sea of sameness at retail where everything kind of feels and looks the same to see the way that we market. That's been disruptive at a kind of more physical level. And then on a digital level, like we've really been mindful and continue to invest and been early in like investing into platforms like Instacart.

Like we just renamed number three on the fastest growing emerging brands on Instacart list for 2022.

Oh, wow. So we have invested pretty significantly in Instacart and started off with a very, very small test, $5,000 super tiny just to see how it would perform and it crushed great ROAS, great performance. And then we just have slowly just scaled and scaled and scaled and scaled that up. We're doing that right now with the retailer media platforms like Kroger and on [target.com](http://target.com/) and other ones where we're starting off.

We always start out very small just to kind of see how things perform. And then in lockstep with how our retail footprint is growing, we continue to increase our investment. So that we've been super mindful of, you know, how we put ad dollars behind driving velocities at retail.

And then I think the other part of it is just like we have a pretty, you know, well engaged with website and we've done things like invest in our store locator, showcasing and letting people know where they could buy it at retail through either buying it online or availability in store through platforms like pair commerce, which has been really helpful for us, letting people know they can pick it up at retail.

We've also connected the digital and physical worlds together. So we have a rewards program where you earn skulls, which is kind of the currency for every dollar that you spend on liquid death. And before it was like, you know, you could earn a skull for buying liquid death water on the website or merch. And now it's like you can earn skulls through buying things at retail.

If you bought it at retail, you come through the website, you upload the receipt, you get verification, you'll earn skulls from it.

So we're bringing like these two worlds together with it, which I think a lot of CPG brands always struggle with is how do you connect the physical and the digital worlds?

And we've been able to do that well right now, but there's still a lot more we can be doing to make that even more seamless and integrated for next year and beyond. Wow.

Yeah, that's super interesting.

Have you seen good customer engagement on going and uploading their receipts to get skulls?

Yeah, absolutely. It's because we have a merch program now that's almost in the style like how a streetwear brand would think about merch and release merch.

So, you know, we put out anywhere between one to two things every week. We drop it on Tuesdays and Fridays. We work with artists. We have limited edition things. We do things beyond apparel.

And because the merchants become even more valuable and, you know, just popular, when people buy it now at retail, because it's super easy now to find liquid death at retail, easier than it was, obviously, but people still want to rock our merchandise.

So like, cool, I'll buy it and I'll upload it. And so when we first launched the program, I don't know, we were getting somewhere like 500 people a month that were doing it. But now we're getting like four or five X that amount every single month where people are uploading their receipts. And it's still admittedly a bit hard to do that.

And we're working on tech right now to make that even easier for people to upload receipts and to earn skulls. That's an initiative of ours.

But yeah, people have been keen on just ways to just get, you know, points against their merch they can buy on the website. We've also done that on our cases, like our QR code on future cases, we'll talk about like, hey, you can also buy really cool and sick merch. Once you scan this QR code.

So we're doing everything in our, in our, in our kind of power right now to continue to push this like retail to merch kind of connection and digital connection.

Yeah, interesting, just kind of continuing to build that super fan base that's committed to, you know, anything, anything that that comes out and they're just they're ready because they feel they feel a part of something. Yeah.

And, and the one, you know, platform we haven't talked about, which is Amazon. So Amazon is our biggest retailer. We're the number one water on Amazon.

Oh, wow. So we're number one in mineral water. And that's like us beating Avion and Fiji. These are brands that for, you know, long, long, long time we're number two in sparkling because sparkling ice is just dominating carbonated water. So we're number one and number two, you know, we're in the top 30 now in grocery.

We started off the year at like 750 and you know, we first, you know, we've been selling on Amazon since the beginning. But on Amazon now, you know, we used to think that, Hey, as retail grows, there could be more of an impact like, you know, [on.com](http://on.com/) because you see it in retail, then you just buy it on Amazon. But we're doing studies with Amazon.

We've done a study with Amazon that shows that we're actually driving pretty significant return on ad spend, not only just in the Amazon ecosystem, but also what happens at retail.

So it's been like a mutually kind of symbiotic relationship in terms of like, as we invest in ads and advertising on the Amazon side of things, not only are we crushing it on [amazon.com](http://amazon.com/) and app, we're also seeing that play out in terms of awareness growth and velocity growth at retail as well. Yeah. Wow. And Amazon is such an interesting channel.

Is that something to grow that channel that you hired team members that were like experts in Amazon or is that something that you applied your like, you know, test and learn methodology to like existing team members?

I'm curious how you like learned about Amazon and like really got it going. Yeah. For I would say the first maybe year plus of the business, we kind of just, we were doing the things in Amazon that many small brands do, which is like you invest in like sponsored products and keywords and all that stuff. And there's just only so much scale that you can get out of that.

And then we, we partnered with my big focus was like, we need to grow Amazon beyond what we have. And the next way for us to do that is through Amazon DSP, where we're now targeting audiences and not just people who are looking for products.

And then, so we brought on an agency partner named Tinuiti. And when we started with Tinuiti, my big focus was like, look, we need to five X this Amazon business in the next six months.

Like, how do we do that through DSP?

And Amazon was very tiny for us at that time. We had a third party relationship with Amazon and we just went really heavy and invested very methodically on the DSP side of things. We just saw month over month, like really good growth, growth, growth, growth, growth, growth.

And internally, you know, it was essentially just me and another team member kind of managing our agency partnership where we were kind of driving a lot of the strategy. They were doing a lot of the tactical day-to-day execution. And that helped us see pretty significant growth.

And like where we are now is, you know, we, we spend about 10 X what we did, you know, a year and a half ago on Amazon because of the growth that we've seen on that site. So we're doing new things like we continue to invest in DSP. Think about audio ads, we're doing streaming connected TV, you know, we're thinking about how we use Alexa and voice.

So we're, we're rounding out the entire ecosystem as Amazon being by far our number one retailer.

We're, we'll continue to invest in that through bodies and, or just like dollars. Right.

Can you explain a little bit more about Amazon DSP?

Like I know you gave a little bit, but I'm curious a little, a little more context on that specific program. Cause I think it requires a little bit more of an investment to, to do the program, but then it, and it works a little bit differently. Yeah. So Amazon DSP is essentially like a programmatic media buying arm of Amazon.

And rather than just like targeting people who are searching for something on Amazon or placing your ads against a competitive product or buying or bidding on your brand terms or competitive brand terms, DSP gives you scale outside of that. So not only what people are doing on [amazon.com](http://amazon.com/), but as they're moving around through places online, so that could be apps that could be third party websites.

That could be other things where you could have an ad for your brand show up because you've identified this person as someone in market or someone who has a good chance to like buy your product. And you could set up DSP in many ways. It could be all about awareness where you're just trying to get new people into your brand. And it's all about awareness.

You could also use DSP for things like retargeting where someone lands on your product pages and leaves without buying. There's no way to do that with the kind of course suite of ad products on Amazon. You're not doing DSP. And so through DSP, you can now retarget those people that have left your website where you don't have an email address. You don't know what you could do.

And there's also a loyalty component on DSP too, which is people who have bought your brand before through Amazon, who you want to improve, you know, replenishment, frequency purchase frequency with. So you can then use loyalty targeting where you can say, Hey, Jessi's bought liquid death once in the last 60 days, but she hasn't bought again. Let's get ads in front of her with a message that can get her to replenish.

And so it's now more of a full kind of funnel approach to Amazon advertising in terms of reaching people versus just being reliant on a very, the lower funnel part of it. Right. Okay. That's yeah, that's very interesting.

I also, I remember seeing a conversation in Slack that was popular that you were part of about using, I don't know how to pronounce it though, Okendo or Okendo attributes. And I'm curious about how you've used like a platform like that for like readings and reviews. And if you could talk a little bit about that. Sure. Yeah. Yeah.

Kind of a weird thing happened early days of liquid death, where we started to see people, cause at the time we didn't have reviews on our website. We only had it obvious just through Amazon. And we started to see people leaving reviews that were almost like, just like creative fan fiction. Like they would write reviews almost like they're trying to, out duel us for like a more creative paragraph.

And we're like, okay, wow, this is like interesting. Like people are really writing fun, clever, smart as hell reviews. And so we're like, okay, well, let's bring reviews onto our website. And the initial thing we were running up against early, because everything we do is very thought out.

It's not like just haphazardly thrown out and we're like, okay, if we're going to do reviews, it can't just be like regular reviews, like, cause it's water, like how, how are you going to like really review water in ways that feel like fun?

And so we were sourced talking to a couple of different review platforms. We decided to use Okendo early days.

And it was just like, you know, the attributes that we selected was like, do you like people to think that you're an alcoholic, like, like strongly agree or strongly disagree?

Like we created these attributes that were just like funny and still let people review the water, however they wanted to, but we created these attributes where we're just like, yeah, do you look like you live in a camper van?

Yes or no, like great on this scale or this scale.

And so, yeah, we use those ratings and reviews to just like one still be brand led and be funny and interesting and engaging, but then it also like, it gets people in the mindset of just trying to out-dual other people who are like leaving really fun and interesting reviews.

And when we first launched the reviews on our website, we saw like a 25% conversion rate lift just by adding those reviews on our website.

Oh, wow. Pretty straightforward. Like I think it's just like given that, oh, you add ratings and reviews to the site, it's going to perform better. And it generally does, but like we took it a level upwards became entertainment as well. Yeah. That's how we approach that. Wow. Yeah. That's super interesting. And I'm curious about just like the, you know, the cult maintaining the culture of creativity.

Cause like adage put liquid death as their number eight marketer of the year, which is amazing. Cause that list was like Walmart, Airbnb, like these huge brands. And then you've got liquid death on the list using a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a budget that, that Walmart used in one of the posts I saw.

And so I'm curious, like how from a creativity and like culture perspective, do you like foster and encourage your team to like maintain, you know, the level and the edginess?

Cause I feel like there can be this push as brands get bigger to kind of like, oh my gosh, I'm going to be pushing that. How do you keep that culture up to make sure that everybody's like, you know, there, there, they're still continuing to have that, that vibe and the energy that you had in the early days. Yeah.

I think we're just really extremely fortunate to have, like a leader and a CEO like Mike, who's an advertising guy and an advertising creative where he knows like he spent his whole career coming up with really amazing ideas that didn't get sold and how frustrating that is.

Just being a creative guy, you know, he's like, you know, he's trying to that is just being a creative to come up with really insane, amazing ideas that like, you know, no offense to anyone, but like really boring brand marketers never said yes to. Right.

And so that's the DNA of this brand is like, we want to do everything different and how we approach everything has to be from like answering a question, like, what's the dumbest thing we can do?

Will people give a shit about what we're doing?

Would we care about what, if we saw this, would we actually like stop and pay attention to it?

And so that kind of permeates like the creative process and how we built out a creative team and how we work is like, it has to answer some of those questions. And everything is designed to just really get attention and awareness and earn media out of it. Like we don't have the dollars that these big brands have.

As you know, CPG is a super expensive space to like just plan and be successful in. We don't have the dollars of all those brands. So we have to get attention and capture it. And so that's really truly the DNA.

And, you know, we hire people who have a little bit of a rebellious spirit, but even people who come from like bigger brands, like Red Bull, or if you've worked at other CPG places, even brands that are like pushing the boundaries forward, we always have to like, you know, like de-brainwash them from like the way that they've done it before, right?

Like everyone would just, I think, that's everyone's human nature, just to do the same things over and over and the things that have worked well before to continue to do them. But that just means like work isn't gonna get interesting and more interesting.

You just like, you know, you're a senior brand guy that goes from one CPG brand to another, and it's just like, it just feels like the same stuff over and over and over again. If we just look at advertising, that's really what it is. Like any ad that you can think of, it's just a formula that everyone is following.

And for us, it's about just like rewriting the formula and making that formula very unique and inherently us. Right. Yeah.

Well, that's super great. I'm also like, are there any, like, you just mentioned there are some like questions and, you know, ways of looking at evaluating things. But I'm curious if there's other like guiding questions and faced with the like tough decision or deciding what to do.

Any questions you, other questions you walk yourself through and deciding what to do next in a tough situation?

Yeah.

I mean, I think, you know, your earlier point about like as brands get bigger, they tend to kind of get a little more stale and generic. I think for us, you know, we always try to balance like, what is the thing that's gonna like maybe, you know, drive some store velocity and retail velocity or like online velocity, but also doing it in a way that feels like us.

When it comes down to like questions, like we, you know, we're still like mini CPG brands and emerging brands, like trying to build out a data set for, you know, for a brand that is growing as fast as we're growing, like it's almost inherently just like impossible to know every single thing because like the audience composition is changing so frequently and things, the kind of campaigns that we're making and what we learn from them are so diverse and varied.

So we just try to lean into data as much as possible.

And, you know, when I talk to people, I think sometimes like there's this idea that we're just like, these like kids in a lab that just like make these things and just put them out there and just like see what happens, but there's a lot of just data analysis and just thought that goes behind the kind of things that we're doing.

And ultimately when it comes to decision-making, we try to just like really dissect and get into the data as deep as possible. And then there's other things that we just do by feel, like you're not gonna have a data on everything. You're not gonna have data on everything. You're not gonna be able to like fully quantify the return on investment on every single thing.

But we do things that just feel right for the brand that we think will push the brand forward in a way that doesn't alienate our current fans in a way that, you know, make sure our partners are on board lockstep with us and continues to like become like a model for like disruptive kind of behavior in marketing. That's how we kind of approach like tougher decisions.

Yeah, that's very helpful and is there anything for 2023 that you mentioned at the beginning, there's some new things coming out, but you know, what should we be on the lookout for in 2023, both from a like consumer standpoint and also like, you know, what else are you thinking about from a business standpoint?

Yeah, I think we're gonna continue to raise the bar on just like insane creativity. There's gonna be a lot of fun stuff that we've planned for the first half of next year, which would be amazing. Some new forays into territories that we haven't been before, which is gonna be really fun. That's kind of on the creative side.

Yeah, on the innovation side, you know, we're gonna be launching Tees soon. So that'll be new kind of category for us to kind of figure out and determine, you know, how that performs and how successful we are with that. So that'll be just even more things for people to connect with the brand on in a very stale category like Tees.

And then just that, I guess, like just business-wise, like where we are, like continue to roll out and improve door counts, you know, working on velocity growth, and then, you know, thinking about our digital platforms and our channels like Amazon and retailer media to continue to drive those velocities. That's kind of next phase of the business.

And like with us, like, you know, we have a pretty thorough strategic planning process right now, but based on kind of where we are, like we learn a lot of things very quickly, and we move and update and adjust off them very quickly too.

So, you know, we're still, even though we're a series D brand, we're still super nimble and flexible with how we pivot in and out of like any kind of the channels that we're in or what we do and how we optimize and or the creativity that goes behind and like fueling the awareness growth. Right.

And one last question would be, how do you, cause this is all a ton of work building a business that's super fast growth, growing the team, like all of this is like an incredible amount of work.

Like how do you stay motivated or take care of yourself?

And like, just, I think it's help can be helpful for our audience to hear how people kind of, you know, are in this for the long run.

Like, you know, how, what does that look like for you to just like stay motivated and keep coming back every day and keep building this?

Yeah, I think the one thing that like, a lot of us have here in leadership, and I definitely have is like, like a little bit of like a chip on our shoulder, like an inferiority complex in the sense that, I just want to be at a point where like, I can just tell someone I work at Liquid Death and like everyone that I tell that to goes, oh, I know Liquid Death and we're not there yet.

Like, and you know, when I post things on LinkedIn, I always say, we're just getting started. And that's what, how I truly feel. Like as an outsider, people might look at this brand and be like, wow, man, they've accomplished so much and we have and super grateful and thankful for like where we are.

But I feel like we're at the such a tip of the iceberg in terms of the stuff that we can be doing, not just in CPG, but with entertainment content, with merchandise, with like so many other things that well, like round out what this brand truly is in the world.

And so for me, you know, staying motivated isn't hard because there's just like so many challenges left ahead of us where it just continues to feel like 2019 when there was like five of us in a room trying to figure it out.

It still feels the same because now it's just like, you know, that same number of people within a department trying to figure out another problem or another space that's just brand new to us where it's like almost like startups within startups happening where we're constantly being challenged by something new.

So that's how I think a lot of us keep our motivation and our drive is like, while we've been successful, like there's just so much more world domination ahead of us that we could be doing.

Yeah, oh, I love that.

Well, this has been so awesome and I encourage everyone to go to [liquiddeath.com](http://liquiddeath.com/), follow Liquid Death on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, all the places, go check out the country club. I hope everyone and you know, find it a retailer near you because there's definitely so many options now if people haven't tried Liquid Death or get more in their life. So this has just been so fun to have you on the show.

We're so like glad that you're in our Slack community. I'll link your LinkedIn in the notes as well so the people can follow you there. But this has just been so fun.

So, so appreciate you taking the time to share with us today.

Yeah, of course, thanks, Jessi, thanks for having me on.

If you want more Liquid Death in your life, I feel compelled to tell you, perhaps by my t-shirt, that they have a section on their website called the Time-Waster 5000 - it proclaims “Need to kill some time? Watch every dumb thing we’ve ever made.” I can confirm it did murder some of my free time but I consider it well spent.