- When I made this brand, I didn't set out to be like,
"I'm going to create something
that's gonna be worth a billion dollars."
I was more like, "I wanna create something
that's gonna make my friends laugh."
Most people get the humor instantly.
We saw that all the unhealthy brands
in the world of marketing,
were doing all the coolest, funniest,
most irreverent marketing.
So we thought it would be interesting
to take the healthiest thing you can possibly drink,
which is water,
and one-up the marketing of all the unhealthy stuff.
- This is Mike Cessario
and he started Liquid Death as an experiment.
- I knew that I had to basically test the idea
to prove that it was viable.
- For less than $5,000,
he successfully launched the brand.
And within months became more popular
than billion-dollar water companies.
And he didn't even have a product yet.
- I think that's sort of when we knew,
yeah, that we tapped into something.
- You just started your dream business.
How much profit would you need
to pay your basic living expenses like rent and ramen?
This is a show on the economics of entrepreneurship
and founders turning their dreams into reality.
This is Ramen Profitable.
- Mike Cessario is an ex-creative director
for brands such as Netflix, Nestle, and Apple.
But for an ad man, he's got an unlikely opinion of the work.
- I just hate marketing. Like all of it's so terrible.
I never totally fit like the corporate advertising world.
I always wanted to do really interesting, cool things
but most clients do not want to do interesting, cool things.
- So Mike decided to create his own product.
A sustainable canned water company called Liquid Death
that would be marketed on the same level
as unhealthy beverages.
- Part of the reason it's called Liquid Death
is because we're trying to bring death to plastic bottles
because most plastic isn't actually recyclable.
So we designed a can,
we shot a $1,500 funny video
and we made a Facebook page.
Put a couple thousand dollars in paid media,
just to kind of spark the fire.
Four months later, the video's got 3 million views.
The page has more followers than Aquafina.
We did better with social media with $3,000
than how much did they spend to get to where they got?
We had something that maybe was magic.
We used all of that to then actually go raise a small round
of funding to actually make the product.
- In January of 2019,
they sold their first can online
and almost immediately they were selling out on Amazon
and their website.
But Mike realized there was a problem.
- The internet is tough in terms of business model
because beverages are heavy
and heavy stuff is expensive to ship.
It ultimately needs to go to retail.
Like when someone's thirsty,
they're not gonna log on the internet
and wait five days to get that water.
It's like, no, you wanna be able to go
into a store and buy it.
- Selling water called Liquid Death to retailers
turned out to be pretty hard.
- The name always makes people nervous,
especially like retail buyers.
"Liquid Death, like, I don't know."
They're just not used to anything that's not Coke or Pepsi.
- But one area they found success in was bars and clubs.
- There were bars that were like,
"Yeah, this is never gonna work.
I've never sold a bottle of water in here. We've tried."
Cut to a month later, they're like,
"Oh, I move through five cases a week of this."
- Whole Foods is like the first major breakthrough
for Liquid Death.
Like that's what really propelled the brand.
- They saw Liquid Death and they're like,
"We don't have anything else in our store like this."
You know, the fact that it's infinitely recyclable
and we give 10% of the profits to help clean up plastic
from the ocean.
We're getting into Target now, Publix, Albertsons, Safeway.
I mean the flood gates have sorta opened.
- And that's about it.
This is my friend, Mr. Duck. He guards the van when I leave.
He never lets up.
His eyes are actually always open too.
It's pretty impressive.
How's everything going Jerry? You good?
- In beverage, velocity
is one of the most important metrics.
And that's basically - how quickly are people pulling it
off the shelf?
- Higher velocity means more stores
and more shelf space.
- It does get capital intensive in retail
which is why it's really hard to beat the big guys
as a small upcoming brand.
But like in a category where the playing field is very level
in terms of the liquid, it's all about brand at that point.
- Join us and Liquid Death
in our mission to bring death to plastic bottles.
- What we do, it seems like, "Oh, they're just edgy."
But it's actually like, it's a very fine line
that we walk, where five degrees this way,
it's totally lame. It's not cool.
It's not funny.
Five degrees this way,
it's too distasteful,
and people just won't react to it or laugh at it.
Our only chance at survival is to be able to punch way
above our weight when it comes to like an awareness
and marketing standpoint.
If we just get our cans in people's hands,
and a couple people talk to them,
just because they're walking around with it,
that's way easier to get them as a fan
versus blowing a million dollars on a TV commercial.
To come up with truly innovative ideas,
you basically have to trick your brain
to do something that it thinks is a bad idea.
Your brain is so programmed to do the things
it's seen a million times before
that most of the ideas you come up with,
like it's already been done a million times,
or it's not actually innovative
because it makes too much sense.
Almost always, some of the best ideas
come from unexpected places.
- Liquid Death
is now the most popular water brand on social media
and its cans are now carried in 16,000 locations
throughout the U.S.
And for Mike, entrepreneurship
was giving him the creative autonomy
he had always dreamed of.
- The thing that I've always wanted to do
is just put my money where my mouth is.
In those boardrooms
where I had to try to convince big companies
to do the cool thing that they're like,
"No, we're not gonna do that."
Now it's all on me.
Like there's no one stopping us
from doing world-changing marketing.
Like we can do whatever we want.
It's up to us.
- I mean, I have people like when I'm driving
ask me to roll down my window.
"Do you have any shirts?"
I mean, ideally I would like to, you know
throw one through their window, but that's not good.
I can't be doing that.