How Liquid Death’s Founder Began A $700 Million Water Tag | Founder Attain

One exercise that westill do today, we ask the question, what isthe dumbest possible idea we could do for this?Because our brains are wired to just repeatthings that we've seen be successful in the past. You kind of have totrick your brain to come up with a bad idea totruly be thinking in sort of like innovativeterritory. This is 40-year-oldentrepreneur Mike.

Cessario, and when hedevised the brand name for his product, he cameup with something unconventional. What's the dumbestpossible name for a super healthy, safest beveragepossible? Liquid Death. Probablythe dumbest name. Yeah. Liquid Death. Water in acan. Dumb name.

Skulls on the packaging. But according to Mike,the co-founder and CEO of Liquid Death, that'spart of the reason why his company has broughtin nearly $130 million in sales this year alone. If I saw that in a store. Or if someone I knew sawthat in the store, I'm pretty sure they'regoing to have to pick that up and be like,What is this?.

And once someone pickssomething up, you've basically won. There's three numbers towatch out for in Mike's story. 3 million. The number of views thatLiquid Death's first commercial got onFacebook. 100,000, the amount ofsales that Liquid Death made in its first monthand 195 million, the total amount of fundingthat Liquid Death has.

Raised. Here's how MikeCessario took a funny idea he once had for acommercial and turned it into a $700 millionbrand. For CNBC, Make It. I'm Zach Green. This is Founder Effect. As a kid, Mike remembersan older cousin gifting him his collection ofMAD magazines. It turned out to be aformative moment for him.

I just completely atethat stuff up and it was kind of crass andvulgar, but it was art and it was really funnyand it was spoofy. Mike started playingguitar in punk bands and says one of them hadseveral offers from recording labels to putout a record, but he also felt creatively drawnelsewhere. I was doing the showfliers, designing the album covers.

All the business creativestuff. Instead of pursuing amusic career, Mike opted to attend the Art CenterCollege of Design in Pasadena, California,studying graphic design and eventuallyadvertising. I just wanted to makepeople laugh, which is what really attracted meto advertising, because it seemed like it wasmore of a place for humor and comedy than graphicdesign was.

In 2009, a friend ofMike's put him on the backstage list for theWarped Tour in Denver, Colorado. Many of thebands were sponsored by Monster Energy. I was just hanging outwith them and we saw these stacks of whatlooked like Monster. These guys are drinkingit, and it turns out like, oh, it's actuallynot Monster, it's water because these guys don'tactually want to drink.

These energy drinks. I remember thinking thatthat was kind of messed up. I'm like, man,that's so sort of sneaky. Like at that time it wasreally only energy drinks who were throwing moneyat these guys. So they kind of had totake it. But at the same time itstarted making me think about why aren't theremore healthy products that still have funny,cool, irreverent.

Branding? Because mostof the funniest, memorable, irreverentbranding marketing is all for junk food. BudLight, Dos Equis, Snickers, Doritos, RedBull. And that was, I think,planted the early seed of probably what ultimatelyended up becoming Liquid Death. Early in his career, Mikestarted working at ad agencies around thecountry. While the work.

Wasn't always creativelyfulfilling, his clients helped hone his ownmarketing philosophy. We were working on VirginAmerica, the airline, and I started getting intoRichard Branson. I love Virgin's sort ofbusiness strategy, which was find a really stalecategory of products and be the one really cool,exciting product in it. And they were able toget all this market share really easily becausethey were just so.

Disruptive and stickingout like a sore thumb in whatever kind ofcategory that was. Mike put his theory aboutfunny advertising to the test while working at afirm in Nashville, Tennessee. The healthfood brand Organic Valley, wanted them tocome up with an ad campaign for theirprotein shake. They were talking to,like bros in the gym who were looking to put onmuscle like that's a big.

Part of the proteinmarket. And they knew they hadto market differently to those guys than they didlike organic moms that they did most of theirother products do. So venturing outsidetheir comfort zone, we pitched them this ideaof Save the Bro's. Every day, millions ofbros drink protein shakes in order to get jacked,yoked, totally swole. But most bros areunaware of the scary.

Chemicals and artificialingredients inside these shakes. And they almost killedthe idea right before it went live. And then welaunch it and it goes completely viral. But despite success inadvertising, Mike still struggled creatively, sohe decided to create his own brand where he couldcontrol the marketing. After an unsuccessfultry at craft brandy, he.

Remembered a pitch hehad once made for a canned water ad pokingfun at energy drinks that the bands at the WarpedTour definitely weren't drinking. I always knew that therewas something in that idea, and it kind ofjust stuck with me and just on the side, overthe next few years of working at randomagencies, I was always just sort of continuingto develop this concept.

Of canned water andlike, what can it really be? But how could a newproduct break into the crowded bottled watermarket, which is valued between $146 and $350billion, according to Pitchbook? The only way the brandwould have a chance at survival is the actualproduct itself has to be so insanely interestingwhere so much of the.

Marketing is baked intothe product where if someone sees this on theshelf, am I willing to bet they have to pick itup because it's so weird or interesting and thenthey're probably going to take their phone out,take a photo of it and post it on their socialchannels for free to their hundreds offollowers. To prove that the ideawas viable, Mike decided to produce a commercialfor it.

Despite having zero cansin production. We designed a 3D renderof a can that looked real. I came up with acommercial idea for this brand that we shot forlike 1500 bucks. We put a few thousanddollars in paid media to push the video out andto push the post out over the course of maybe likethree or four months. Don't fall for themarketing bu******. Water is not yoga.

Water is liquid death. Four months in, the videohad 3 million views. The page had almost80,000 followers, which was more than Aquafinaon Facebook at the time. And we had hundreds ofmessages and comments from people being like,this is the greatest thing ever. Where do Iget this? Is this real? A 7-Eleven franchisee inMichigan reach out.

How do I get this in mystore? So then I use all of that sort of socialtraction to then actually go get people to take meseriously. And we raised the smallround of funding to actually produce aminimum run of, like, actual product. Mike was able to raise$150,000 in initial funding and afterfinding a water supplier in Austria, sold thefirst cans of Liquid.

DDath online as a directto consumer business. Our first month we made$100,000 in sales and we spent about $2,000 onmarketing. We sold out a product. We didn't order nearenough what the demand was. We were sold outfor like over a month. The first big retailer totake an interest in Liquid Death was WholeFoods. They're really big onsustainability. They.

Loved our death toplastic message to kind of bring death toplastic bottles cans infinitely recyclableand they liked that we were talking about thesethings in a way that no other brand in theirstore was really doing. They said, hey, we wantto launch you full national out of the gatein March of 2020. So we literally loadedinto Whole Foods March 15, 2020, the week thepandemic lockdown.

Started. So that camewith its own host of problems. But we stillstarted seeing like real growth in Whole Foodsthroughout the pandemic year. While still far belowbrands like Dasani and Aquafina, Liquid Deathsales have grown from $2.8 million in itsfirst year to $45 million in 2021. Mike saysthey're on track to hit $130 million by the endof this year.

One of the mostsurprising things to everybody with this washow wide the audience really was for somethinglike this. Hundreds of parents whomessage us on social saying thank you Liquid Death. You finally got my nine year old excited todrink water instead of soda because he thinkshe has something he's not supposed to have. The construction workerguy who goes to a.

7-Eleven and typicallybuys two energy drinks now might be buying oneenergy drink and actually going and buying aLiquid Death. Liquid Death for me ishow do you get all these people who don'ttypically make healthy decisions and now all ofa sudden want to participate in a healthybrand purely from the brand standpoint atfirst, and they just start incorporating it into their day.

Liquid Death has raised$195 million in funding and is valued at $700million. A big part of thatgrowth has been fueled by Liquid Death'sappearance on the shelves of over 60,000 retaillocations throughout the U.S., including7-Eleven, Wal-Mart and Target, where it sellsfor about 1.89 a can. But more than anything,Mike says that it's creating an emotionalconnection to a brand.

That drives consumers. People think that tasteis why things are successful orunsuccessful, or why one brand is better thananother. All the data shows that is not evenclose to the case. Monster didn't become a$50 billion company because it tastes somuch better than Red Bull. Most peopleprobably couldn't pick out an energy drink in ablind taste test if their.

Life depended on. Ourbrand is all about comedy and making people laugh. We're not tying ourbrand to some specific niche like actionsports. So I think as long aswe're constantly just riffing on culture, justcan go basically for as long as something likeSaturday Night Live is relevant because you'reliterally just a part of culture and makingpeople laugh.

At the end of the day,we're really creating an entertainment companyand a water company like we don't want to createmarketing, we want to actually entertainpeople, make them laugh in service of a brand. And if you can do that,they're going to love your brand becauseyou're giving them something of value.

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