What's up, Dtcpod? Today we're joined by Vasa Martinez, who's the founder and CEO of Perfy. So, Vasa, I'll let you kick us off. Why don't you tell us a little bit more about the beverage brand you're building and maybe some of your experience.

In the past as well. Yeah, I'll start with the experience in the past and finish that up with Perfy. I started my career as an unpaid intern at Quest Nutrition. I was working in the nightlife industry after I graduated from UCLA for five or six years, and there was no jobs. It was terrible recession that we probably all remember. And I'd swallowed my pride, started working in the service industry, got tired of that, saw literally an ad on Craigslist that said, unpaid marketing intern. I was like, yep, I'll do that. And going from making a ton of money in the nightlife industry to an unpaid intern was a bit of a change, but ultimately was able to work my way in to a full time salary and learned there for four years.

After that, I was able to create my own social media marketing agency called Growthbuster, where I was able to learn a lot from a bunch of different brands that we've worked with, like Magic Spoon, Legendary Foods, Outer Al, Gourmet, tons of other brands too. And then after four years, five years of that, I was winning a bunch of awards for the agency, not just me, like the team was. And I felt like just it wasn't doing the trick for my personal reason for being. Simultaneously, I had undergone a tremendous amount of loss from my mom getting diagnosed with a sickness, to misdiagnose, to rediagnose, to losing my best friend of Fentanyl, my old roommate of five years, to suicide. And it was ultimately like about 18 friends and family members I lost in that course of five years. So I dug deeper and deeper into the agency, and it's no wonder why the agency did well, but my personal health went to shit. So I wanted to do something that was a little bit more impactful. And I'm a huge fan of soda.

And I saw that there was a trending type of soda out there for gut health. And I was like, well, I love soda, and I need to take these supplements because I don't take any prescriptions or anything like that. I'm not about not even over the counter stuff. I was buying, like Ltheanine and Ashwagandha stuff like pills. I was like, what if I applied these two things together and created a soda that's just as delicious as a full sugar soda, not even a diet soda, way more delicious than a sparkling water and had it be good for your brain. So that was the idea there. The mental fitness market is three times the size of the functional carbonated soft drink market. So there was some strategy there in the positioning, but ultimately it was based out of need.

And Perfy is actually I didn't even tell you what Perfi is. It's a low sugar enhanced with nootropics and adaptogens. It's got LDnine in all four flavors, ashwagandha and two and Turmeric and two no.

And it's so meaningful being able to work on a brand not only you have domain expertise in, but also that has, like, personal meaning to be able to go after. So that's awesome to hear. And the question that I'd have around that, that I'd kind of like to go into before we get into Perfi is let's talk about some of the agency stuff. Right. Obviously, working with some of the top brands you've been able to learn from, kind of the best in the industry and help them scale up different initiatives. So what were you working on in the agency? What were some of the initiatives that you were taking on with these brands, and what were some of the key learnings that you were able to learn across all these multiple brands you were working with?

Yeah, so I'll take it back to the beginning of Growth Buster, when it was just me sending personal invoice to brands that I was working for. It started with just content creation and the why behind content creation. I like to say content within context, something along those lines. You can't just post pictures of your product. It's got to balance information and entertainment and a bunch of other things. There has to be a goal behind it. And it's not just like a shot in the dark, let's go viral type thing, which a lot of founders kind of think can happen especially that don't have the experience in CPG or marketing in general. So I started very small with just content creation, building editorial calendars, getting the post up, writing the copy, staying on trend with pop culture.

So memes that were trending in 2017 aren't necessarily memes that you want to go with today and then did that for a year. It went well. I started hiring people. I hired one of my best friends at that time. It was 2018. So he came on and that was great to have another resource. I had two guys that worked with me at Quest Nutrition helping out on the side. And it wasn't until 2019 where I saw this cereal brand that hadn't launched yet.

It was February of 2019. I was like, Magic spoon, that looks pretty freaking cool. Low carb. We specialize in like low carb Keto, especially all that information that we learned at Quest. And I was like, hey, I don't know what you're up to, but it looks pretty cool. Can we chat? And we chatted for like a month and a half. We ended up working with them. We still do.

And that was like the next phase of GB where we've tacked on influencer and we graphic design, and we even helped out with retail initiatives and basically getting reps in all sorts of different areas of marketing. Like, the only thing we don't do is build websites for the most part. And we worked with other brands like Outer Island was a good one that we started working with at the same time. I ultimately became their CMO and they were a small mom and pop shop doing X amount per month. Now they're doing 5000% more than that from when we first started. So it's a lot of different repetitions in different areas. That one I may or may not have known, and if I didn't know it, I figured it out. That has been able to give me the repetitions I needed to be comfortable starting my own thing.

So when you say content, is this creative assets like videos, images, is it graphic design? What does it touch in the creative realm?

So at first it was just organic social, and if they wanted to run it as an ad, it was theirs. When they work with us, they own their content. I don't own it or license it to them. And then it ultimately graduated to, hey, this asset really performed on organic. What if we tested it on Paid and that turned into, okay, we need to start creating organic and Paid. If something performs on organic, we want to take that, repurpose it for Paid. And this is before the huge UGC trends of today. So the studio style photography, different RTBs or reasons to know, punching them in there where it's an animated text overlay, that really started working.

We also brought on a designer. He still works with us today, but not as an employee. And he actually does a lot of the perfy stuff. He does everything. He wrapped a Quest nutrition, food trucks. I just got a food truck for perfy and he's going to wrap that. He does pop displays, he does shelf talkers, he does barrel coolers. So we have the capability to really have that in store disruption.

What we don't do is obviously print them. Like, I don't have barrels in my garage that we put the sticker on or whatever. We outsource that to people who actually do that. But we give them the designs. So we do a lot of graphic design these days. Even some of the stuff you see on gigantic candies, social, pretty cool stuff, 3D looking stuff. It's really evolved from just organic to paid to print.

Yeah. So I think this is my space, so I want to dive a little bit deeper into it. Just given what we do at Trend, how do you think about this whole thing about UGC? A lot of people think, like, UGC is the new thing, but I personally think it doesn't have to replace good quality, not it's not like the form of content. It's just one vertical of content, but creative touches a bunch of different elements, and it's all used for different contexts behind a specific marketing campaign or resonating with a specific audience. It also doesn't work for all audiences. So how do you guys view that? Because you could also do really beautiful imagery, for example, especially if it's social organic, and it might not hit, it might not work. So how do you balance those two in terms of performance versus very beautiful content?

I think you really have to deconstruct the creative and you got to think about a couple of things. One, what's the exhibition of it? Some people think that, like, for instance, I'll give a bad example. The UGC video that you paid somebody on whatever platform to make for you, and you gave them some sort of script, that's not going to work in an email. You're not going to put that video in email. So the exhibition of it matters if you're going to run it unpaid. Makes sense. But I think where people fail is in the creative brief process. So part of a creative brief is where is it going, the exhibition of it.

But they don't really chime into what problem are we solving, what's the goal? And most importantly, what part of the funnel are we in? So from a creative perspective, if you're running certain ads, top funnel, middle funnel and bottom funnel, you're saying different things. The top funnel might be, this is why we exist. Here are some cool things about our product. This is a problem we solve. You might be saying different things down further in the funnel. Ultimately, about UGC, I believe personally, and I'm probably a big detractor in this space, I think it's a bubble right now. I think there's too many people that are saying that they're UGC creators that know how to use an iPhone, and that's cool, that's a cool new creator part of the industry or creator economy. But the education process of working with all of these, you really need somebody that can say, hey, here's the brief.

This is everything about the brand. The problem is so many UGC creators are working with so many brands, and they're trying to pipe out so much content that you really can't get anything meaningful. And there's too many people that are speaking in absolutes, so there's a lot more that goes into it, in my opinion. Hope that kind of helps.

Yeah, no, for sure. I think the bubble part resonates in the sense that some creators say influencers throw out like $1,000 for a video of UGC or something, and they're going straight out off of because they're an influencer and they're getting a bunch of inbound for influencer posts and stuff like that. It's like, no, you cannot bake in the price of your audience into this stuff. And so I totally empathize with you in the sense that there is a bubble. Even you can see it in the rates, and so everyone is just jumping on. But it all ties back to what I think you hit on. It's like some brands just heard they need creator content, but they haven't asked themselves the question, what do we need this creative for? And it's something we see in our platform internally, too. It's like, Well, I don't know, we just need creator content.

Yeah, I might be wrong, and I'm always happy to be wrong because I'll learn from that. But there's a difference in seeing Chris Paul having endorsements with XYZ Brands, with Jumpman and with Allstate or State Farm or whatever it is, and whatever brands, you don't feel as though it's inauthentic. You know, that's the drill. You're an athlete. You're making millions and millions of dollars. You have a huge platform. You get paid to work for brands. But when it comes to UGC, for me, when I see the same creator with different, I'm like, oh, I don't know if I trust that brand.

And sometimes you'll even see founders or family members of founders, and you have to really be in the business to know. So I get it. It might make sense for the customer, but they're pretending to be customers. So what I think that needs to happen is a little bit more transparency with it. You'll see a lot of ads on TikTok ads and Meta where it says the people showing up in this video were paid for their time or whatever. But I really think what needs to happen is a disclaimer. This person actually purchased the product. They weren't gifted it.

And I think that will settle things.

So just to shift gears, not make this a UGC podcast, but sorry, no, all good. How do you, as a creative agency then view, let's say, high end creative agencies then view when they need a model for any of their shoots or anything like like, what is that crossover there?

So with my agency, I try not to show above the smile, and that's just a personal, creative, subjective preference thing. So you can't really see if we're using the same person in different assets across different brands. We try not to. We try to try to rotate models every single. We actually we used to shoot a lot of models before COVID hit, and there's just still some legalities in California around the risk that I don't want to take. So we don't really shoot them as much anymore, but if we do, it's usually, for the most part, like nose to smile down, and I don't think that that waters anything.

Well, I think, speaking of creativity, and that's in your nature to be a creative, to not necessarily be tied specifically to a spreadsheet and performance and let the creative resonate with people. How has that influenced how you built Perfi? I know you guys are doing a collaboration with Doodles now. It totally makes sense. Creativity is in the roots of everything you do. How did you implement creativity into perfy from the very beginning?

So I think there's two foundational elements of creativity for a food and beverage brand. I don't really speak outside of that because I just don't know those things well. I speak always in the lens of food and beverage, and for me, the foundational element of creativity is how do you set up your positioning statement? To me, that is the Rosetta Stone of any brand. And there is a positive correlation between brands that know that like the back of their hand and how well they do, and the brands that are figuring out everyone's figuring it out. I figured it out for a period of time for Perfy, but the faster you can get to that, there it is, the better chance of success that you have. So the first part, finding out what's perfy's positioning and how do I speak to that? It was all from the customers. People that I sent samples to, they called it a certain way. They said certain things.

I took those cues, I got advice from people, and boom. Perfect 2.0. Nailed it. Actually, Coca Cola gave me advice on Perfume 2.0, which I thought was pretty cool. And the second part of that is, how do you visually represent that foundational creativity? How do you bring a positioning statement to life? And just I always plug this book. I have to I don't get paid by her, but it's forging An Ironclad Brand by Lindsay Peterson. It was a huge unlock for me. She's amazing.

I emailed her, said, Your book changed my life. She was like, oh, my God, that's so cool. I sent her perfume. She loved it. Her kids loved it. So, epic book. And Warren Jolly from ad quadrant put me onto that. So bringing that to life the second part of creativity.

I think it's important to do things differently, even if you fall on your face. So what I did was I searched for months. I felt like I was like the Coach K from Duke recruiting a creative to do the branding for perfume. So I found somebody in Was, had several different directions, and I gave her the brief. It was so in depth, like a huge mood board. This is what I want to feel like. Told her it was named after my mom, a nickname for my mom. So we wanted to make it feel very happy.

And Perfy is all about being happy. Like our little tagline is for a happy you. And everything around what we create has to be either funny and show a sense of personality without being overly Slim Jim or just beautiful. Honestly, I don't care that people are FUDding organic social, particularly Instagram. I'll post those studio style shots up all the time, but I'll have a different hook to it. I could go into my philosophy on organic social and why I think stills still work. I think they still work because most brands post pictures of their product. But if you get down to why this picture exists, there's micro stories you can tell in each photo.

I'll give an example. There's one photo I wasn't too big of a fan of for perfume. It was like our photographer had his hand squeezing a blood orange and it was like the juice was going into the can. I was like, damn, I don't know what I'm going to do with this. There's no context behind it. But I was like, oh, it's not from concentrate. None of Perfi's juices are from concentrate. So I told an educational story about it being not from concentrate, why that's important to the customer and why that's better for them, and that still crushed.

So I think the reason people are fighting organic social so much, particularly Instagram. Yeah, we have to pay for more reach or you just have to crush it. Honestly, I think better content crushes it. There's two things. Your caption and your visual have to tell a story and they have to be in sync. Just think of like the recycle symbol and when you're looking at your phone, if those things are in sync, typically meme formats, the reason why they get so many likes is they're in sync. There's like the Tweet thing, there's the picture, then there's a comment and you're like, damn, that's hilarious. I'm going to laugh because all of that's talking together.

So that's one thing. The second thing is I think people are looking at the wrong goal posts. I think people are looking at likes and comments. Still. For me, what's more important is saves and shares. I want to know that Ramon shared that. My post with Blaine, I won't be able to see that it was you, but I'll be able to see that people were sharing it and people aren't looking at those anymore. Example, it just happened this week with the agency social.

Blaine doesn't even measure saves and shares. It measures likes and comments and then it calculates your engagement rate. And we had to say, hey, it's not calculating that, that's why it seems lower. But even so, there's more things to look at. So sometimes if you reframe how you think of KPIs and get out of those 2015 2017 ways, like, oh, this is actually working and I think people haven't identified their goals yet.

Yeah, I mean, it's like this podcast that was fire. We will see all the downloads and everything, but this podcast might get way more shares and that's actually something that Blaine and I look at too. And even today, Blaine, I think we were talking about it like the shares is probably one of the strongest metrics because you know, you're gaining fans. You know, it's resonating with know, when it comes to organic social, I think some companies what are your thoughts on companies that are solely using that as their growth strategy? Like only organic social? Do you think it's possible to scale organic social? Another way to frame this question is like, how do you do organic social at that level of quality that you're talking about and creativity with high volume?

It's all about planning. Some people are against planning. I can't say that I use my agency's editorial calendar for Perfi the way that I should, but I have it in my brain and I don't have a team yet, so I can kind of get away with that and I can be really nimble. But I think when it comes to a brand, I think organization is key. And I think that the more that you are diligent in saving your content out, let's say me and we're all hanging out, we're in Venice Beach or wherever, and if we're content creators, we have somebody that recording everything and you store that, you never know how much repurposing you can do with that sort of stuff. So having that like a bank of content is important. Identifying your content pillars is important. Is this informational, is this educational or is this a hero post? I have something called a hygiene post.

Like a hygiene post is a base hit. You don't need to win baseball games with home runs. You can win with base hits and your feed needs some of those. The problem is there are certain founders that see a base hit and they're like, what happened there? That was a failure. And I think people get in their own way. But if you're open minded and you're understanding that that's just a content pillar that typically doesn't perform, but is important for the whole, then you could get a lot further. To answer your question, specifically, perfi is completely organic social. It's organic social.

Perfy has its own podcast. That's our anchor. I study a lot of B to B to run B to C. That's, like, my biggest kind of secret that I have. Some people study other brands, some people study their competitors. Hell, no. I'm going to a different industry. I want to know what the SaaS companies are doing, and I apply that to Perfi.

So I do think it's possible to scale. I think that we're unlocking hundreds of doors. I am not running any ads. I've cut pretty much all of my spend. I needed to be diligent in how much money I have in the bank and what that runway looks like. And I think it is. Yeah, but if you're a D to C brand, probably probably not so much. Unless you really hit it like brands I think of that really hit it out the gate.

But they're still spending. Graza. Shout out to Kendall. Magic spoon crushed out the gate that day. I swear. I haven't asked Gabby yet, but I'm going to ask him to be on the perfume podcast so we can talk about that first day because there was some funny stuff that was just amazing just to see expectations kind of surpassed. But I think 100%, it's just a matter of again, it goes back to the operators. If you think that you need to run your business as a D to C brand when you should be focusing on retail and maybe have a website that's doing some sales, it's different than being a 100% D to C native brand.

And I think that people just need to identify that.

Yeah, I love that. I mean, why are only Enterprise B, two B companies doing webinars for their customers? Why not do an educational webinar on Gut Health for DDC brands? All it takes is taking the head out of the butt and just looking at something completely different.

I always tell this story when I was younger. I have five older brothers. They always taught me how to play sports. And when I was playing baseball, they always say, don't look at that guy's swing. Don't look at their swing. It's going to f up yours. When I play basketball, don't look at that person's jump shot. It's going to mess up your mechanics.

Anything like if we were working out, don't look at that guy lifting weights. Focus on your set. It's always like, I do enjoy seeing what other people are doing just to be in the know. But I think being aggressively yourself and even if yourself, I'm being aggressively perfy. Perfy is aggressively itself. I think there's a way that you can stand out and break through the noise doing that.

Yeah, I think that's VAS I think that is really foundational for a very smart founder, like a trait to have, because it's something that is a core kind of mission pillar for us in the podcast. Right?

Yes.

We're the D to C pod, but we don't want to just bring on founders of D to C brands that do things the same way every single time because that content would get boring. We want to bring in marketers, from consumer, social. We want to bring in founders from B to B and be able to apply all these different learnings and tips from growth, from brand, from marketing, from all this across, because that's going to be the best way to learn. And then you might hear something and you might have an unlock in your brand and be like, oh, wait a minute, if I apply that in my lens and I'm being myself, that's going to give me a leg up on the competition. Because if you're just doing the same thing that every other brand does, right, you're by definition, going to be behind.

The ball 100% 100%. Another saying that we had at Quest, I learned this from Tom and Nick. It was ideas in equals ideas out. So the more that you fed your brain and your strategy and all of that, the more things are going to come out of that.

That's why there is such an interesting crossover happening between Web Three and DDC, because it's like, hey, we're all trying to reach mass consumer, but this is a completely different vehicle to be able to do this. And the creativity is endless. Where do you draw creativity from today? Wait, hold on. Exactly. There we go. The doodles perfy. So where do you draw creativity from today? And then how did this whole doodles thing come about?

So the creativity comes from just hundreds of ideas that got shut down in the past ten years. Whether it's from Quest or whether it's from being an agency owner. How Doodles came about is I took some time off in December of last year. I wanted to take five weeks off end of November all the way through Christmas, and I had to focus on some health things. And in that time, I wasn't dealing with hundreds of emails per day and all of this stuff building perfume, getting liquid in cans. I was able to finally sit down and say, I know this is something. I'd been investing in crypto for a while. My brothers were mining bitcoin in 2012 or something.

But I first started investing in crypto in 2017, and it's actually something that helped. I sold a lot of my crypto to get perfy off the ground, and I wanted to study what's going on in this NFT world. What is web three? To be honest, I didn't know. And the first thing I did was study for like three or four days every time I got back to my hotel room. And then I was like, okay, I think I got this. And then I saw Dylan Francis post a doodle, and he influenced the hell out of me. So I went on doodles. I was.

Studying for another day after I was on Doodles, which 01:00 A.m. I going to buy and landed on this one right here. And ultimately I was like, wait, with NFTs can't you own that? Doodles has limited holder rights board. Ape has, like, I think, unlimited. I was like, I own that. I own perfy. I'm going to put my doodle on a can. So if you look on my Twitter or Perfy's Twitter, you'll see like, December Eigth or 9th.

I post it on the can. I post some random fake out of home billboards that says, you're a perfy, dude, and shit started taking off. People and Doodles were like, do mine, do mine. I still have hundreds of requests to have people's, doodles or other NFT projects put on a Perfy can. And you'll see how it's evolved since then. So I knew that I was going to do something with it. And the way that I think about using in this case, like, creative. So NFT creative.

I think of Web Three as a technology. I think of NFT as more of, like, art. I was like, I'm going to put this on my limited edition can. So this is an evergreen flavor, but it's going to be a limited edition can just the way Marshmallow did something with Coke. It was limited edition label run. The evergreen branding looks just like other perfume branding, but it looks kind of like this, too. Just no doodle on it because I have limited revenue that I can make from it. So the way that I think about using NFTs is as ambassadors.

So Dr. Perfy is now an actual person as much as she is Doodled 3966. She is now Dr. Perfume. So when people see her like, oh, isn't that soda? It's a doodle, sure. But as a holder, I want to bring value to the community and try to turn her into the next Bart Simpson or Lisa Simpson. So that's how I try to bring value and use other IP to build a brand without having to pay a celebrity to be on the can.

That's one of the coolest applications.

Thank you. Her origin story is pinned on Perfy's Instagram, where she goes up to a vending machine in this metaverse looking world, and Perfy pops out and she takes a sip and the checkmark hits her in her face because one of her main traits is the checkmark. It's pretty cool.

No, I love that. And I think it just goes back to that philosophy you were talking about, about being open minded, studying and investing and learning in different channels and seeing how that can apply to what you're doing. Right. Because that's a much more innovative way of thinking about NFTs and consumer than a lot of things. So I think that one that's really cool. The next thing I want to go into is after doing all that learning, after realizing, like, okay, there's a cool opportunity here. Between the doodle and being able to put it on a can, create a limited edition run, that sort of thing. What did you see as the opportunity and crossover between NFTs and CPG in terms of the loyalty and retention as you kind of think about growth in the future?

So we launched our loyalty cards. I think the easiest way to describe it is kind of like Starbucks has loyalty cards. They're actually doing kind of the similar thing, but Starbucks has prepaid cards. Actually pretty creative what they do. People put $1020 on it. There's always like seventeen cents a dollar left over and they have hundreds of millions in the bank from those and people never really redeem the last little bit. So it's kind of like that or it's kind of like if you go to Dave and Buster's and you load up a card for games. So Perfy's loyalty program took concepts that exist but uses web Three technology to empower the consumer.

So right now it's hidden on the site. Only people who have been airdropped a perfume loyalty card. There's five tiers. There's bronze for people who've purchased once since launch. There's silver for people who've purchased three times since launch. Gold Five, platinum seven and diamond ten. All of them are going to give different perks on the back end of the website. So you'll be able to get limited edition merch, limited edition discounts that other people can't get.

Those links won't be available to the random shopper that comes to the site. On top of that, one of my goals is to as this gets bigger, I don't want to use Discord, I want to try to create something on the back end of the website. Almost like think old school aim. I want to create something like that on the back of the website where people can share different things with outer aisle one of our brands, we have 9000 people in a Facebook group and we almost don't even need CX anymore because everyone's answering each other's questions. So my goal is to take this technology, gate things with the key. So your NFT is your key to unlock. You connect your wallet, says, oh, they have the perfume NFT or the doodles NFT or whatever NFT. They can access certain things that the general customer can't.

The goal there is really gamification and lifetime value. Again, I'm not going to be spending a ton of money trying to acquire customers to buy online, but I want to be able to have a place or a home. Like think about it. The way I think about it is after school playground, you go home, your friend's mom would fix like a grilled cheese sandwich. I want it to feel the way that felt, but I'm using web three to do that.

Yeah, that's such a cool application. What's the technology you are using to build it and gate that entire experience?

I'm glad you asked. Novel. So there's two out there. Both of them are really cool. There's taco and novel. I ultimately went with Novel because at the time I needed it, it was ready to go. But the guys from Taco are great as well, and what they do is it's like a headless codeless application. It's an app on shopify shout out to ish from Novel.

He helped me set this up for the past few months. And it's pretty seamless. It's just app that you trigger. I think, to be honest, subscription platforms were harder for me to use than Novel. You pump in your artwork, you can connect, like the way I connected Doodles to be able to unlock the gate. It was pretty seamless. Yeah, it was easy.

That's awesome to hear here. We've heard great things about Novel, so that's really cool. And then the other question that I have this isn't more of a question, but it's just me kind of thinking about it. If you guys are doing these limited edition cans, is there a way you could do stuff where you do challenges, where you have random limited edition cans that find their way into retail distributors and those unlock different NFT levels? Like, someone might just end up in this one grocery store and find the lucky can that unlocks some sort of experience.

So I'm doing the first part of what you said this was going to roll out into a retailer the end of September, early October, and I plan on it being the only one that can pick it up. Unless some of the smaller independents that gave Perfia a shot want to grab it. I'll give it to them too. But I gave it to a certain retailer that picked up all four of our SKUs, and it's going to be three Evergreen branded perfume cans, and this is going to be sitting right next to it. The second part of that is like having a QR code on the can to go to another experience. I haven't got there yet. I didn't want to rush it. If I do anything, I want to do it right, or I didn't want to risk this particular kind of execution.

But yeah, I think there's a world where you can scan a QR code and redeem something or go to a different experience that's limited to people who have bought it. The only thing is one thing about QR codes on cans for things that you want people to feel FOMO, anybody that scrolls through a store can kind of scan that QR code and have it. So I haven't really thought through what that ultimately looks like, but 100%, this will be on a shelf in somewhere in the next four or five weeks.

Yeah, that would be super cool. I feel like it's like a combination of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory sort of Willy Wonka thing. Plus, I think didn't Snap or like Pepsi back in the day. They would do like crazy giveaways and you'd have to get in. Obviously it's different in a bottle. You open the cap, so maybe cans aren't the right form factor for it right off the bats, but it just sounds like there's going to be down the road, there's going to be so many cool opportunities. Should you be able to unlock the first part of it in the journey?

I think so. I think well funded brands will have the means to do a lot more from a logistics perspective, thinking like people ask, well, can I put my NFT on your can? And the co manufacturer that makes perfia, I'd have to have a limited quantity of cans. Someone actually asked, I was like, this is what it will cost you. They're like, Never mind. They're like, I'm not going to do that. So you got to order a certain amount of cans, a certain amount of labels have certain amount of line time. It's possible, but the person has to have the bankroll to make all of those logistics make sense.

Yeah, because you're not going to take on that yourself. When you're not invested into the equity.

Of that NFT, I'm down to support. I know there's ways to do it on a small level, but even then when I said, I think I know a way to do this, there's a resource that I have in my Rolodex that I can probably reach out to get one can made, but this is what it's going to cost you. And they're like, nope, don't want to do that either. So either way, it's very expensive to get that bespoke like, you've seen the Coke cans where it's share Coke and it has people's names. They've never had a Vasa, so I just don't buy them. I'm kidding. But yeah, there's a lot to think through when it comes to this stuff. It's months and months of time.

Where are you guys currently selling? You sell DDC you sell retail? I can't remember if I've seen you guys in Austin or where I've seen perfume, but are you guys nationwide yet or not?

Not nationwide yet. We've got a lot of interest on the East Coast. I'm from SoCal and I'm just waiting for that to happen because again, I just got access to an ice cream truck and I'm going to switch that to my personal car, I think, until I get pulled over for red and dirty. But yeah, we're in Foxtrot. We just rolled out. We landed there last week at the distributor and then it should be on shelves very soon. Haven't heard any news that it is yet. We landed at a distributor for shoprite in Jersey on Monday, so those should be on shelf pretty soon.

I would say as early as Tuesday. We're rolling out into our biggest chain that we landed at the end of middle of September. We'll be in two of those doors for a test to make sure all the barcodes are working and everything like that. And then there'll be 137 more and that will have Dr. Perfy, too. And then we have significant interest from other retailers. Just ironing out what that looks like. And I've also held until I got my 2.0 cans, the 1.0 cans.

I made a rookie mistake on the execution of the label. I just rushed through it. I was like, let's just get it out there. We'll figure it out later. In hindsight, I wouldn't change anything, but I wanted to wait for the bigger the professional big leagues for 2.0, and we're just starting to kick into high gear.

Vasa one question that I have is or one point I kind of want to backtrack to that I think is really important is you were talking about how important brand positioning is, right? Positioning not in terms of just your brand, but in terms of your content, how you develop and tell stories and all this sort of thing. Obviously the soda space is a competitive space. It's competitive to get into retailers. There's a whole bunch of startups who are creating different products in the functional soda space and competing for limited retail shelf space. So how do you think about when building the brand for Perfi? How do you think about building your brand positioning so that not only can you be competitive, but you're going to be able to really crush it compared to everyone else who's playing in the same field?

So the soda space right now, functional soda, not like the legacy soda, but the functional soda space right now reminds me of Lot when I was at Quest Nutrition. There was always a bar popping up. We're like, is that going to be the one? Because we were really looking for the Pepsi to our Coke or the Coke to our Pepsi. It's a pretty fitting analogy. And it wasn't until 1 bar came along, we're like, okay, I think that's the one that's going to be solid. So all of these sodas that are coming out, they're positioning themselves as prebiotic or probiotic. There's two main players in Gut health soda. They're great.

They've created this category, and I'm super grateful for it because they knock down the doors and I don't think anybody is positioned for brain health. There are people in other types of functional beverages that are going in that direction. I think it's great. I think it's needed. But it started at the beginning. The last thing I wanted to do was be another Ollie Popper or Poppy. I love them. I drink them, they're solid.

But I wanted to do it differently. I wanted to have a different liquid. I wanted the aldeonine to speak for itself. The ashwagandha, the turmeric. And I wanted it to be for your brain. Because, again, it was a need that I had, and I made it in a way that kids can drink it and enjoy it. Like, I was just at a friend's earlier today having a meeting, and he was every time you send it, it's gone. We have parties at our house for our kids, and they're gone.

So it's safe for kids to drink and it's safe for adults to drink. But not only that, the time of day that you can drink it is pretty much any time of day. The blood orange usually drinks almost like a nonalcoholic mimosa but way tastier, and there's no caffeine, so you could drink it at night and not worry about staying up late. So I think a lot of these things were important for me. Another thing was to be not from concentrate. When you have a concentrate juice, think of it like as you just squeezed an orange juice. Imagine extracting all of that water, freezing it, shipping it to another place, adding water back in, stirring it, and then putting it in your drink. That was a big point of difference for me, that it was part of the guardrails in my brand creative brief.

These are the things that I don't want to have. I don't want to have more than 5 grams of sugar. I don't want to have more than 30 calories. I don't want to have Y and Z. And one of those was not from concentrate, although I may consider it in the future if the drink is solid enough and I can't get it in the not from concentrate. So all of that came down to positioning. I wanted to be a brain health, and these are my guardrails.

No, I love that. And I think that just knowing that in terms of the positioning and knowing exactly where you fit into the mental fitness space, for example, it's so important. And then being able to say, I think also what you're talking about in the brand brief is all these trends. From what I'm seeing, it seems to be on trend with the way the market's sort of evolving.

Right?

Like, people want healthier alternatives, people want less sugar, less caffeine, being able to have something functional and being something that's healthy for you. So I think in terms of the directionality of that, I think that's really important. And then being able to lean into it with the brand storytelling, like you were saying. So now that we've talked about the general brand positioning, how do you characterize your how do you bring that story to life throughout your content and your other sort of materials that you're distributing?

One thing I want to add to that is that Vasa strikes me as like a category defining person, just like, based on a few things he said, like looking at other industries, mental fitness is like something I haven't heard in the beverage space. So it seems like you paved the way.

Thanks, man. I know there's other drinks that focus on. Perfect example pre workout. Who knows if that's helping you focus at the gym. All I know is that the niacin makes my skin burn. I try to stay away from that and I get way too jacked up and hyper. When I'm hyper, I'm always cracking dad jokes. It's uncomfortable for everybody, but for me, one of the biggest things, it was May of last year, as I was just formulating with R and D, there was a podcast I listened to and they said, who's going to step up and save soda? Because a lot of these beverages, if you look at their statement of identity, they'll say different things like prebiotic sparkling drink or prebiotic tonic or sparkling tonic.

And nobody was really trying to own the word soda. So in one of our taglines that's pinned on our instagram, we unfucked sodas. I'm sorry, can you cuss on this one? We unf'd soda it's because we really want to own the word soda and own it in a way where nobody else really has. And that's for brain health and mental fitness, like you said. And there was business strategy in that decision. It just happened to be one where I needed it. I didn't want to eat any more ashwagandha gummies, dude, I'll eat the whole bag. I feel like crap after.

And I wanted to drink soda, so I killed two birds with 1 st and combined those. But when you look at from a business perspective, again, I think I said this earlier, the mental fitness industry is three times the size of functional carbonated soft drink, 337,000,000,000 last year, and functional carbonated soft drink was, I think, 117,000,000,000, and they're both going to grow at plus 5% CAGR over the next five, seven years. So there's a rising need for it. And for me, the biggest thing, I didn't even get into the marketing or the branding until the liquid was done, was, how do you make this thing taste undeniable? There's people that just it's not for them, and there's going to be those people, but it was a matter of making the liquid taste good and remind people of the full sugar sodas they drank in the earlier or later. Yeah.

Vasa I think in terms of just having that clarity and also knowing what to lean into and what grain to go against and what to lean into versus what the other brands doing, that's really fascinating about the positioning. Right. Because like you were saying, there's so many beverages that are coming out like, oh, we don't want to say the word soda, we want to be something else. We want to be pop, we want to be this, we want to be that, because we don't want everything that goes with soda. Whereas as you're saying, wait, there's a lot of people that like soda, we can lean into that and take that in our own direction. And all these little nuances that you're talking about, from the branding to all these little decisions, that's what really formulates positioning. So I think this episode is really fascinating. It's like a master class in terms of thinking through how you take your product, you figure out the market trends and all the decisions that you make to land at your positioning, right?

Yeah, it was super important because I think we touched on it earlier. Beverage is competitive, but dude, everything's competitive right now. And I didn't want to do something that wasn't meaningful to me if I wanted to do something with cheap cogs and huge margins. That's why everyone creates T shirt companies. Pay $5 for it, charge 40 or whatever. And good for them. If it hits, it hits. But for me, again, I always crack the joke with people.

If I wanted this to be easy, I could have done a cheesecracker. There was a time where cheesecrackers were like, just put the word keto on it and get Thomas DeLauer to sponsor it and you're going to be a million dollar, billion dollar company. That wasn't exciting to me. What was exciting to me was the challenge of beverage. Because everyone said it's too hard. You can't do this alone, you can't break through. And I wouldn't say that I've broken through yet, but I could tell you that I'm making some noise in a good way. And that was important to me.

Do something that was meaningful. I think that in and of itself is a way to separate from the pack, is that this means everything.

Yeah, I agree with you. I think your why is so strong that it's motivating enough that when shit gets really tough and it's 11:00 p.m. At night and you get a text from your supplier, that shit is hitting the fan of whatever you need to anchor to that why, not to the fact that it's a 300 billion dollar industry? Because yes, although that's very cool, it's not going to be probably able enough to sustain you enough through those moments. I mean, like you said, there's a ton of competition everywhere. Even in software. There's like no code tools. Like anyone can just spin up a software company and if you're why, it's because it has 90% margins. Wait till shit hits the fan and we'll see.

Yeah, 100%. I would say that beverage is competitive as hell and this is probably too hot of a take, but the agency life right now is probably more competitive to me than what the beverage feels like. Because part of the why I FUD UGC creators is because, damn, it's hard to land clients these days, especially with when you create content. I'm not sure if you're feeling that too, but there's a lot of people that do what GB does. And in some ways I look back on how I positioned GB and it's a learning experience for me. I didn't evolve fast enough. I didn't hire TikTok creators fast enough. And I was posting on TikTok in 2019 like, what the hell is this thing? We even had musically when it's called musically.

We played with it at Quest and we did well on it. But positioning is everything, no matter what you do. Even as a human, you could probably create a positioning statement for yourself.

Yeah, totally.

I love that. And Voss, as we wrap up here for our listeners, where can they connect with your personally? Are you on different platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, that sort of thing? And where can Know connect with the.

Brand perfy vasamartinez on LinkedIn and Twitter? Perfy is drinkperfey.com at drinkperfey on all socials. Pretty easy to find.

Sweet.

Well, thanks for coming on the Pod today. We learned a lot and love just the insight in terms of branding, positioning, and what you're building in the space. I think you're building with a lot like, it's such a fresh take on what you're building. So we're pumped to see you continue to grow. And yeah, let us know when you make it down to Miami. Would love to run it back in the studio there. I know there's a ton of web three and crypto stuff going on down in Miami, so when you're in town, let's run it back in person.

Absolutely. And a little Easter egg for you. You'll be able to pick up Perfume Miami in about five weeks.

Oh, hell yeah.

And you'll be able to. This will be in store only fitting.

We'll look out for it and looking forward to having you on again soon.

Hey, thanks so much, guys. I appreciate it.

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