Yeah. So I had to take a refresher on everything that's going on in the beverage industry after I was on threads. I actually haven't opened threads every day as I was, and I was like, let me go in there and see what's going on. And I come across this suggested post from Liquid Death that basically just says, who gives a shit? And it's just their first threads post. And then I started seeing a few DTC brands popping up, and I found it really interesting because Twitter hadn't really taken off for e commerce brands as a strategy. And I'm seeing brands actually trying on threads, but I wonder if they've actually lost their steam and if everyone has lost their steam on threads, I really thought every marketing room right now it's putting together a full strategy for threads, and I just don't know. Now after maybe it comes back after Twitter just got named X. So we'll see what happens over there and if we get a migration. What do you think with Threads, how it plays out? Do you think brands should be on this right now and assembling a strategy around this?

Yeah, I mean, I think what we saw when Threads launched was a quick migration to the platform. It was really easy. Like their onboarding was super slick. Everyone was setting up profiles and everyone was right there. Since then, we've seen a massive fall off in terms of engagement from a retention standpoint. But when you're bootstrapping a social network like that, that's hard. Yes, you have it baked in, yes, you have the habits that are already happening on Instagram, but launching a whole new platform and expecting everyone to interact in that medium, that's a tall order. So it looks like they got the adoption side really dialed in. But now the people who are using Threads are the people who are really good at it, know how it works and are willing to kind of take that jump. So if I had to make a bet on what the strategy and what the play is here for, whether it's us, individuals, brands, et cetera, I think we're going to see slow and consistent growth for a platform like Threads. I think there's a whole bunch like you were alluding to going on in Twitter land that even as similar as the products are because the social graphs are a bit different, threads just feels like a different product. So you've got Twitter rebranding to got. Did you see TikTok today? Launched text based posts on TikTok as well?

Oh, really? No, I had no clue.

So that just came out today. But I think Threads what will happen is it's just going to be its kind of own platform. Like, dude, people still use Facebook, people still use a lot of social networks that may not have quite the penetration of an Instagram or a Snapchat or like a tier one sort of social media platform. But what I think the strategy is, I think the people who focus on it as a channel diligently over time will likely be rewarded in the long term. Obviously it's going to take coordination, planning and dedication to the platform. But if I had to bet, I think there's going to be some good opportunities coming for people who put in the time.

Yeah, I mean I was wondering if it was a mistake on their end of just adding everyone from Instagram and making it so easy to just jump over and check it out rather than a little bit more friction on the onboarding because that's where you see the drop off. However, all this stuff is like, this is exactly what happens with reels, with stories and they're just going to make it so easy to use that people are going to use it. People are going to go back and if I had a brand, a DTC brand, I'd definitely have a play around threats because the social graph and just because the targeting of the marketing is going to be a lot more predictable and scalable than it will be in Twitter for the foreseeable future. So on those lines just came across Liquid Death and then did a bit more research on them and saw that they're aiming for an IPO in 2024. I feel like this brand just grew so fast with like guerrilla marketing outside of the Super Bowl ad. But that in itself was creative. And so it just goes to show that you can put water in a can and if you're creative enough, you can build a really big brand.

Yeah, I think it's super interesting to see. And I actually have a little bit of personal experience in the water space. So Ramon, I don't know if I've ever told you, I think I mentioned it, but my first job out of high school was actually working with a private label water company. Right. And that waterboard. Waterboy, exactly. And I would go I'd like go deliver all the water to office buildings and everything like that on the truck. And the name of the brand was Niagara Water, which now you'll see this brand in a lot of big retailers.

It's really big in Puerto Rico. Honestly, I don't know.

No, like it's big. I've seen it in Mexico. I've seen it all over the place. And I know they have plants and everything everywhere. But their whole play was as a private label water brand in the beginning. And what they started to see was they were like, we're good at this, but we're not going to necessarily compete at the brand level with other entrants. And you see someone like Liquid Death come in who absolutely crush it from a brand and marketing perspective. But what was interesting, what Niagara did was they almost pivoted and said, hey, we have our brand, which we're going to continue to run with. But what we're going to be really good at is the bottling side of things. So they actually went enterprise. They started scaling up the shit out of their production facilities. And now I think they have over like 50 plants all over the world. They bottle all the water that you see in Costco. So every time you see Costco, and it's like Kirkland signature water that's Niagara, they bottle for, I think, a bunch of major brands also, like Pepsi and Coca Cola, who have their water based products. I was actually talking with the founder and he told us the story about how they actually turned the what's the alcohol? It's like the seltzer, the hard seltzer, the first one.

What are those? Well, I don't know if it's truly or truly.

It's like the main one.

Yeah. White Claw.

White Claw. Exactly. They actually turned down the bottling contract for White Claw, but they're massive and they would be doing more revenue now just doing bottling. They'd be the equivalent of basically like a Fortune 50 or Fortune 100 company. And they're literally private, so they're doing like billions of year in revenue, private bottling for everyone in the industry. So it's just really interesting to see A from the liquid death side, how you can kind of come out of nowhere, capture lightning in a bottle, be on the path to IPO just from like a branded kind of perspective. And B if you don't necessarily absolutely crush it at brand, there are other directions that you can take. And pivot a business that's been around for a while, right? Like Niagara, they're an absolute slow grind, but they really accelerated their growth, I'd say in the last 1510 years, really, when they really started to scale, they went from like two plants and two factories to literally 50 supplying for the biggest brands in the world. So anyway, two cool kind of juxtapositions of entrants who can come in scale with brand, others who maybe don't find that same success on the brand level and find other ways to scale.

Where is their plant? Where did they distribute from?

In Southern California? And they started scaling out a bunch there. But now they're global. Like they've got plant I know, in Mexico, all over the US. In other countries, as you know, I'll have to pull up the.

We had I feel like the beverage space.

The.

The biggest boom a while back was like Red Bull then. I remember I lived in Austin a few years ago, topo Chico was like a massive exit there for a billion to Coca Cola. And then, yeah, we started having a lot of market beverage pop up. But most recently I feel like one that is at that level, if not more, is like Celsius. They've just been everywhere. And I know they've always been big, but it seems like they just hit a whole new level. And it's funny because this rapper, Flo Rida, he's more like a festival rapper now, but also Celsius is based in Boca Raton, which is not a CPG capital like Austin or La. So you can build big outside of these major hubs. But it seems like Flow Rider had 1% ownership of the company and they kind of forgot about him and he came back and sued them and won a lawsuit for 82 million, which is a great payday. But what I found that was interesting is that Pepsi owns 8% of Celsius and they bought that 8% with 550,000,000. So they must be doing really well. And that's a very high multiple. One of the highest I've seen for a beverage brand.

Yeah, I mean, I think there's a couple of things to unpack there. First, on the creator side of things, I think it's a big win for creators. But also on the brand side, well.

More the celebrity side, right? For example, when I worked with Pharrell, there's these funds and then there's these people in the back end that they partner with existing family offices and still then a lot of this stuff is just like celebrity investing is really unstructured. There's still so much room in that space. This happened with 50 Cent and Vitamin Water and it just keeps happening over and over. It's pretty wild.

Yeah, but what I was going to say is, I think the takeaways here are like there's a couple, right? A it's like if you have the facilities, if you're on the right track and your beverage brand is scaling, these things can result in massive exits, right? It's the brands that continue to drive the success of the major conglomerates. So they're looking to acquire the major brands that are driving sales that consumers are into, et cetera, that they can sell through shelves across the world. But the other thing is on the brand side of things, it's like these creator and these influencer deals, right? Make sure to have your stuff buttoned up and make sure to it looks like in the suit that basically the brand promised FlowRider he'd get 1% of the company. Obviously never happened. There was nothing on paper. And he was able to go ahead and sue because they had never done a formal agreement or anything like that. So I think also on the brand side, when you're entering into relationships with creators, you just want to make sure that you've got your stuff buttoned up in the case that either you blow up, the creator blows up, whatever it is. You just want to have your housekeeping in order.

Yeah, and I mean, it's interesting too. If they had to deal with on growth and everything, like if they had a deal with Flow Rider for 1%, who else did they have a deal with? Is this an insight into what their equity structure with Celebs and Big Partners was like? And I did a bit more research. I found that they just structured a huge partnership with Inter Miami that has messi now. They did something in the early days where they worked with Jake Paul. They have a deal with him. They did something with what's this guy Russell Simmons? And so there might be something there in how they structured those deals because that's always the toughest part of working with celebrities. But actually on that Jake Paul front. So that prime was investigated by the FDA, but it seems like a lot of this stuff was also BS. Like all these recalls in Canada. They actually don't even distribute in Canada yet. It was all the people that illegally imported into Canada to sell the product. That's how it ended in all these retailers. But people are buying it left and right. Do you have their revenue numbers?

No, let me pull up their revenue.

So they did 45 million just in January, and I think they're the fastest growing beverage brand ever in history. I don't know which one would follow.

Yeah, they're on track to do a bill, right? Yeah, annually. That's insane.

Yeah, over 250,000,000 just in retail in year one. So it's just wild how much room there is in retail alone. Like retail is going to forever be a strategy and in fact can be the only strategy. I don't even know if they sell direct to consumer.

Well, that's another thing to bring up in terms of strategy. And I think we could also actually one thing real quick. I know we were talking about Flowride. Funny. After that whole suit was done, he actually with the winnings, I guess decided he was going to spin out his own beverage brand. So now if we ever see him working on it, I guess he was going to call it Jetset or something. Jetset One is the name brand which is like a healthy for you, carbonated beverage brand. But anyway, it's just crazy.

There's just beverage brands left and right. Actually I typed in Jetson One and accidentally went on this website, Jetsonaro.com. It redirected me to it's like a flying car.

Yeah, I think that's the Jetson. Jetset. Jetsett One, it's a little different. But what I was going to say about beverage D to C strategy, what you had mentioned about retail is it seems like if you're in the CPG space and you're operating or thinking about dabbling in this space. We are really excited to announce that Dtcpod is officially part of the HubSpot Podcast Network. The HubSpot Podcast Network is the audio destination for business professionals and we're really excited about being part of the network because we're going to be able to keep growing the show, bringing you guys amazing guests and obviously helping you guys learn from the best founders, marketers and builders of the most successful consumer brands. So anyway, keep listening to DTC, Pod and more shows like us on the HubSpot Podcast Network. At network it seems know retail is clearly the main strategy and what a lot of the brands who have been coming on the podcast and chatting with us, it seems like the clear strategy there is. Ecommerce is all about not only community but also real product evangelists. People who are the type of people who want to try your brand new flavor when it comes out for the first time. They want to get the flavor drop that isn't available on the shelves in all these different retailers. But it seems like from a strategic point of view, the way you use direct to consumer in beverage is to really focus on a couple key SKUs that you want to sell. Really use it as a test mechanism also for your core community and also from a bundling perspective, you want to be able to provide things that you're not able to just get in retail. And that wouldn't maybe make sense for you to roll out en masse and retail just yet. So I know this is something when we talked to Paul from Orobora, when we talked to Melanie from Gia, when we've even talked to Desois and a whole bunch of other brands, this seems to be a recurring theme that we're seeing in Beverage for D to C. Yeah.

I think also from their side of strategy, the partnership with Barcelona and UFC that they did was massive. And you can do this at a smaller scale with creators, which is don't look at creators at exactly how much ROI am I going to get from each post? But use the partnership as a social proof to then be able to earn trust for your brand and land distribution partnerships, whether it's corporate or business partnerships, there's, like, smaller leagues. There's so many different partnership strategies that you can do that will be a byproduct of the social proof acquired with the partnership of that creator, rather than trying to squeeze out that creator's audience over and over.

Yeah, I think that's a really good point. And one recurrent theme that I always think about in all sort of businesses. So whether you're building a D to C brand is this idea of leveling up, right? So every opportunity that you can to level up, you trade up in all the different parts of your business. So maybe you get a partnership with a creator, you take that partnership and then you go parlay that into the sales meeting you're having with the distributor or retailer, and then you take the meeting that you have with the distributor and then you go and parlay that into your conversation you're having with an even bigger creator. So it just seems like you always want to identify different opportunities that you can leverage to just keep moving forward in the business. And that's a theme that I love and any scrappy entrepreneur should definitely put to use.

I mean, that's basically what the founder of Outdoor Voices is now know. She grabbed her one asset after getting out of that Rocky situation with Outdoor Voices and the asset was community building and the community she had built. I remember when I was in Austin, you'd see all these groups running around and there was like hundreds of people at these Outdoor Voices gatherings, in the park, at bars, et cetera. And so she was really good at building community. And then now she started a company called Joggy, which is basically a beverage like plant based energy supplement. It's a sparkling hibiscus tea, jitter free caffeine from organic guayusa extract. What is it?

So guayusa is actually this plant. It's like a tea sort of like supplement. I actually have a bag in the other room, but it's basically like this dried plant. You put it in your coffee and it's similar to yerba mate, but it's like a different format of it. It's called guayusa. I'm probably totally wrong, but anyway, I've had it the whole idea behind it is it's giving you caffeine, but it's like more jitter free, it's more calm. It's not like the caffeine buzz you're going to get from either drinking a celsius or a prime or something like that. It's more natural, chill, calm. So it's more like a tea sort of caffeine that helps you focus.

It seems like they use this distributor called Applied Food Sciences and it's grown in Ecuador, in Peru, and amateur Max is from this distributor, this supplier. Sorry. And somehow, for some reason, they're positioned for gamers. So, like gamers is their market, but.

For jogging or what?

No, not for Joggy, for their supplier of the Waiusa extract. So it's this company called Applied Foods. They seem pretty big, but yeah, interesting.

I got you. So the Guayusa is a caffeinated holly tree and the leaves of the tree are what they use to dry out and brew and do a it's. It's native to the Amazon rainforest and I remember hearing about it. I think you know who talked about it a bunch was Huberman. Maybe that was one of the first things he talked about when he was talking about alternatives like Stimulants and alternatives to caffeine was like guayusa and yerbamate.

So anyway, you could launch a brand out of extracting something from Huberman's podcast.

They may have I don't know if Joggy did that, but if you look at the like, he was talking about this sort of stuff and this could be a pretty and I've already seen a couple of them, to be honest, but like supplements that Huberman's talking about, you just take those, you spin them up. He's got kind of the zeitgeist of the consumer, biohacking sort of consumer who's really interested in their health and there's definitely a lot of opportunities there to bring in the scientifically backed supplements that people are really into.

Yeah, for sure. So, yeah, go listen to Huberman and start a brand and then combine it with the learnings of DTC Pod. She launched in April 2022. I'm sure she's going to do extremely well. It's just really cool to see how a founder really leans into their strengths and understands and can move that same exact audience over to a completely different product vertical. And it just shows that most founders have one thing that is their mastery and what they're really good at. And being a jack of all trades. Yeah, it's good in the early stages and it can only get you so far, but just doubling down on that one thing and for her, it was community building. So I'm really excited to see what comes out of this community. I'm sure it's going to be a powerhouse. I'm sure they're going to crush it on social. It's really interesting. Their website doesn't have any real photography. It's all 3D based stuff, so that's pretty cool. But yeah, along those lines, it just reminds me too of Vehicle, which is vehicle is dope.

One thing I want to talk about before vehicle is one thing you were saying about her as the founder and how she does all these different community based things. Another one that I've seen and that's why you're saying it's like lean into what you're good at. Another example of that is if you're really good at Community. Sammy from form who is on the podcast I've seen, she's launching her brand and she did something some activation in Austin with her community and they did a walk together. But people who can really leverage community are doing a really good job at it. But I would say community is one of those things that you can't half ass if you're going to do it and that's what you do, you need to do it. And your community is going to back you. But if you half asset, just don't do it.

It seems like the ways it works the best if it's founder led to just say we're going to do all this on marketing and then we're just going to hire someone to run community. That's just really hard for it to work. It's like companies that try to have a podcast and the founder isn't the one doing the podcast. It's tough the attachment of that person's face to the brand. It becomes too important. And then the audience isn't going to relate when they know that it's just like not the founder and the person's interest is doing it to get paid for a job. So definitely recognize whether it's a strength of yours or not. And if it's not, there's many ways to grow. Doesn't have to be through Community 100%.

Okay, Vehicle, let's talk about one of our favorite brands that yeah, no, I saw Organic Social. This brand has really figured out Organic Social.

Yeah, it's funny because one of my good friends, he's Bad Bunny's manager who I went to school with. And I actually saw his instagram. And then there was a picture of I saw a picture of Bad Bunny and he was walking around with a vehicle and Kendall Jenner. And it's funny because we had him on the podcast and we hung out with him in Miami. Christopher and he mentioned you were like one of the first people to spot him out in the wild. And I just think it's going to be like sort of the next Red Bull. And the reason I love this brand is because Chris has like this he found this boat community. He's like, why is nobody paying attention to this? Is this like the dopest thing? It's like a bunch of rebels, like ex drug dealers and all these people. And this is a badass community with a badass story. And he's going to tie it to something that I know is going to become really big of like outcasts and misfits and rebels and all this type of stuff. But I bought his coffee recently. I will say it's on the high end price.

Yeah. So he's got a couple of coffees. One, he's got the cold Brew. So before we even get into the coffee and what he's doing, what I think is really unique about them is they're almost like this creative products production studio where he's nailed down this formula to go basically viral on organic social. So they've got all these old school power boating clips that they're able to repurpose, put their own edits on and publish that's all about basically offshore boating, racing and almost drug culture in the 80s Miami sort of vibe.

But they go and they drive to the person to get a voice clip and acquired old clips and get that authentic vintage content, which is like, if you try to measure the ROI of like, is it worth me driving 4 hours to go and get this guy to talk into a tape recorder? But that's what makes it work.

Yeah, they do crazy stuff. So they figured out the organic stuff. I think they're doing something like 40 million organic impressions a month or something that are not from their followers. So even as a branded account, I think they have like maybe fifty K or they just hit 50 or 60K followers. But like, organic reach, they're just like.

Going and without much without crazy volume.

Yeah, no crazy volume, no crazy ad spend. Just like purely organic. And what he's been doing from that? They've launched a couple of products. I mean, they're a super premium sort of DTC brand. So they were the brand that had the magazine that they sold for like 100 or $1,000 per edition. And then they spun that off and they started building out some other products, including merch and sunglasses and really cool street wear sort of stuff. But then they moved into CPG and they've launched Cold Brew, as well as Kopiluak Coffee. So Kopiluk is like the most expensive bean, I think. There are these Asian civet in the forest that basically eat these coffee beans, shit them out, and then people have to pick them up off the forest floor. And that's how they brew this coffee.

But that's why wait, say that again.

These people, these little, like, basically jungle monkeys or something.

Yeah, they ship them out.

Okay, so here's the story for how.

I thought you said shipped them out. And I was going to say, yeah, no.

So here's how it all started. So this coffee started because I think back in the day, when I think it was like the Dutch, they were like, colonizing and creating all these coffee farms in Asia, right? And the people who were working on the farms, because coffee was such an expensive export, were not allowed themselves to have the coffee, or they'd be like, I don't know, the people who worked there would be either executed or sent away if they stole the produce, which was the coffee, because they. Were selling it for so much. And so what these people started doing is they started to notice that these civet would come in, go to the coffee plants, eat the beans, and shit out the beans. And then so they were like, well, technically if these animals are like eating and shitting out the coffee beans, then I can have that coffee. So they started brewing coffee with that and it turned out that there's like some fermentation process with the civet. Whatever. Long story short, in order to collect, these people literally have to go picking up civet shit off the forest floor to harvest these beans. Hence why it's the most expensive coffee in the world. But apparently it's delicious. Whatever. Anyway, vegetables obviously bottled this stuff up and yeah, the beans go for, what is it, like $500 per pound of 500 a pound?

Is this the one you had in your apartment? That was the little bottle thing? Yeah, I didn't try it. I haven't tried it yet. I've tried their other one, their Nitro Cobra. But that's crazy. Yeah, I think people are going to see this brand everywhere.

Yeah, I think it's a dope brand. They've got a really cool strategy. Chris is like a proper creator, creative, so I think they're going to be up to really cool stuff. And they're also a bootstrapping brand. So what you said they could be the Red Bull of the future. I think there's definitely a world in which we see something like that. I think the big constraint is going to be cash conversion cycle. How fast can they grow, how fast can they grow their distribution, et cetera. Because they're doing it fully bootstrapped, fully. No outside investors, no.

Miami based.

Yeah, Miami and Germany. In Germany. So they're definitely going to be fun to keep an eye on. And if you guys haven't listened to it, tune into our episode with Chris because it's a little bit unhinged, but amazing.

Yeah, well, I think that's a good roundup of everything that's going on in the beverage industry. I think energy drinks making a strong comeback, especially like natural energy drink, field, plant based, all that. So lots more to come. It's going to be exciting to check in on all these brands that are also launching and see how the space evolves, but it just shows how much more room there is to go in the beverage industry. Is there anything else you want to add, Blaine?

That's it. We'll see you guys back next week. Make sure to check out our newsletter too, because we've been dropping a and.

We add the sources in the newsletter of all this stuff that we're discussing too. So it's the link in the show notes. The first link in the show notes. You can sign up to the newsletter. We don't have that there yet. Blaine we can add that there so you can have sources and it comes straight to your inbox every single week. And we also add more stuff than just what we discuss in the episode. It's not just a dump of what we discussed. It's actually really good, so I encourage you to check it out. Let us know what you think about about it, and if you have any requests, always feel free to reach out. But that's it for this episode of DTC Pod.

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