March 19, 2026 • 43 mins
A skull-emblazoned design with a funny slogan is just not what people expect when they’re buying a healthy beverage. But that’s exactly why Liquid Death Founder and CEO Mike Cessario thought there was room for disruption. He didn’t think funny, cool, irreverent marketing should be limited to things that are bad for you. What if this approach could even help people make healthier choices? Now the healthy beverage company trying to “Murder Your Thirst” has expanded to soda-flavored sparkling water, iced tea, and energy drinks and it was valued at $1.4 billion in March 2024. Mike sits down with Bob to talk about how he got from inspiration, to concept, to funding an original order of 150,000 cans. He has great insights on both creativity and analytics, shares lessons from all the surprises and challenges he faced in becoming an entrepreneur and explains why he dislikes traditional marketing as much as most people do.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
You're listening to Math and Magic, a production of iHeart Podcasts.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
I knew that when I had the idea for Liquid Death,
no investor was going to write me a check for
the concept that, Hey, I have this idea. I want
to make a water company that looks like a beer
company and call it Liquid Death and put a skull
on the can. Nobody would write me a check. It's
like investors don't like to invest in ideas, they like
to invest in businesses.
Speaker 3 (00:32):
Welcome to Math and Magic Stories from the frontiers of marketing.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
I'm Bob Pittman.
Speaker 3 (00:36):
In each episode, we dive into the intersection of smart strategy,
the math, and the creative spark, the magic that drives
remarkable brands and businesses. Today's guest flips a simple product,
water on its head. He didn't invent water, but he
had invented a way to sell it in a category
where nearly everyone else thought there was nothing new to do.
(00:57):
It's Mike Cesario, founder and CEO of Liquid Death. Mike
grew up in Delaware, near Philadelphia. Although wildly creative, he
was good at math, the math and magic. Count of kid.
He played in bands and has a lifelong love of skateboarding.
He wound up at art school and onto a career
in advertising and then an entrepreneur with his own ideas
(01:19):
and dreams, and now he has a unicorn. Liquid Death
is a private company worth over a billion dollars. And
for all of us who love brand building, he's clearly
a master with some great lessons for us to explore.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
Mike, welcome, Thanks for having me, Bob.
Speaker 3 (01:34):
Before we jump into the really meaty stuff, I want
to do you in sixty seconds. You ready?
Speaker 2 (01:40):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (01:41):
Cats are dogs dogs Early riser or night out early Riser,
city or suburbs, suburbs Southern California, Bay Area.
Speaker 2 (01:50):
Southern California.
Speaker 3 (01:51):
Introvert or extrovert, introvert, skateboard or snowboard.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
Probably snowboard, but it's close. One energy drink or iced tea,
iced tea, punk or metal metal. Listening to music or
playing music. Ooh, probably listening as much as I love playing.
Just love listening.
Speaker 3 (02:13):
Comedy or drama, comedy, coffee or tea coffee. Super Bowl
ad or viral social media post super Bowl ad. It's
about to get a little harder. All time favorite musical
artist Slayer.
Speaker 2 (02:26):
First job being a cafeteria worker at a college cafeteria,
childhood hero. Tony Hawk. Favorite Liquid Death campaign probably the
Tony Hawk blood boards that we did a long time ago.
Most important bit of advice you ever received. Nothing is
ever as bad as it seems, and nothing's ever as
good as it seems. Very good, let's get going.
Speaker 3 (02:49):
Liquid death packaging marketing looks like the opposite of most
of the peaceful, tranquil images on other waters, and it
has a wicked sense of humor.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
Give us the origin story. Let's go back. So you know,
I was an advertising agency creative for a long time
and ended up working for a small agency in Chattanooga,
Tennessee called Humanot. There's only about nine or ten of
us that work there, and we started doing some of
the first funny, irreverent marketing for the organic industry. It
(03:24):
was more digital YouTube, kind of viral. They weren't big,
expensive TV commercials, but we were able to generate millions
of views. A lot of people were talking about it,
and for me, that kind of was the light bulb
moment of how come more healthy, better for you? Brands
are not marketing in the same funny, memorable way as
(03:44):
beer companies, junk food companies, even energy drink companies is
not really funny, but they do this big, incredible marketing,
whereas healthy things were always just marketed in this very quiet,
sort of narrow way, and there was no real purpose
for why that was the case. I thought, it's what
prevented more people from making healthier choices, because all the funnest,
(04:06):
coolest stuff is all stuff that's bad for you. So
kind of have this idea, like, hey, water is the
healthiest thing you can possibly drink. Most people don't drink
enough of it. What if we created a water company that,
from all optical and aesthetic and marketing sort of angles,
felt like a beer company. And that was kind of
(04:29):
the beginning of the thought of Liquid Death. I knew
that when I had the idea for Liquid Death that
there was nobody, no investor was going to write me
a check for the concept of Hey, I have this idea.
I want to make a water company that looks like
a beer company and call it Liquid Death and put
a skull on the camp. But nobody would write me
a check. And I think it's like a bigger entrepreneurial
(04:49):
thing in general. I think there's a lot of people
who want to be entrepreneurs and I've had people come
to me and say, Hey, I have this great idea,
how do I get investment. It's like investors don't like
to invent and ideas, they like to invest in businesses.
So if you have an idea, you need to do
something to kind of prove out that there might be potential.
(05:09):
Like you're making something small that you can make at
your house, make it out your house, go sell it
at the local farmers market and see how it does.
But with a canned beverage company, the minimum amount of
cans you can pretty much make is like one hundred
and fifty thousand, So you're talking about one hundred and
fifty thousand, two hundred thousand dollars investment just to even
start to even make a physical product. So that wasn't
(05:31):
going to happen. So what I did was, I'm like, Okay,
let me pretend this is a real company. Make a
Facebook page for it. We made a funny little sort
of internet commercial for the brand that I spent maybe
fifteen hundred bucks to produce. We use photoshop to make
what felt like a realistic photo, real canned image, and
(05:51):
we just did a couple posts on this Facebook page
for liquid dep and then we put like a few
thousand dollars in paid media like not a time, like
I think may be five six grand something like that
over a six month period. And at the end of
that six months, the video had almost three million views,
The page had almost eighty thousand followers. We had like
(06:13):
hundreds of comments from people. We had distributors actually dming
the page saying, Hey, we're the biggest non out distributor
in New York. Can we talk to a salesperson? Or Hey,
I own three seven elevens in Michigan? How do I
get this in my stores? So then I use all
of that traction to then go actually raise the first
(06:33):
sort of one hundred and fifty k round of funding
just to actually produce the first minimum run of product.
We started selling the cases online only our website and
Amazon in late January early February twenty nineteen.
Speaker 3 (06:49):
So let's jump in a little bit. You've got this
tall boy can. You're right, looks like a beer can.
What was the idea and the thought of that one.
Speaker 2 (06:59):
Thing that we knew in marketing. Marketing is so much
about sort of psychology and why do people make the
decisions they do and ninety nine percent of decisions that
people make are emotional, not rational, and we knew that
if you actually wanted teens to think something is cool,
you actually market it to people in their twenties. So
(07:20):
we said, hey, energy drinks are kind of like, you know,
bright neon colors, and they feel like teen esque. Well
if we make it look like a beer, let's make
it look like something aesthetically that they're not even allowed
to legally have, and then that will potentially create just
the fun factor of hey, look what we have. It
looks like something we're not supposed to have, but it's
(07:42):
just completely healthy water. And that's what we really saw.
It's like because of the can design itself, everybody who
got it, they were posting on social of them drinking
it because they think it's really funny. Hey look, look,
my six year old's drinking what looks like a beer.
Isn't this funny? Or hey look, I'm shotgunning a water
and it's nine in the morning. So the can was
(08:05):
such a big part of the marketing in the early days,
and we kind of knew that, like, when you're a
small brand with no real marketing budget, you have to
bake all the marketing into the product and packaging itself,
because that's the only real media that you have or
can afford. At that point, where most companies or most
CpG brands, it's like they create the packaging and brand
(08:26):
name to sort of be.
Speaker 4 (08:28):
Hey, it's okay, Like it's not incredible, it's not bad.
Like the packaging kind of looks like, you know, some
other stuff maybe in the category, looks decent. There's nothing
like shockingly interesting about it, just from a packaging standpoint.
Speaker 2 (08:42):
Then they go hire a marketing agency to build an
advertising campaign around this product to all of a sudden
make it more interesting or make it more relevant to people.
But we started with all of the marketing firepower built
into every aspect of the brand, brand name, the can,
the design, the logo, all of that was kind of
(09:05):
created with this idea of what makes this so interesting
that if someone sees us on the shelf, they have
to stop and pick it up. And if they do
pick it up, they almost have to take out their
phone and take a picture of it and share it
for free to their hundreds of followers that.
Speaker 3 (09:20):
They have tell everybody listening your slogan, murder your thirst.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
So how did you come up with that? Where did
that come from? I think people think that creative ideas
are like these light bulb moments that happen when you're
in the shower. It's like, oh, I just thought of
this genius idea and it all came to me at once.
Where it's really like ideas and concepts are like a
stone sculpture, Like you're constantly just chipping away and chipping
(09:48):
away and refining to eventually get to that perfect kind
of final thing. Like it takes time, it takes iteration.
It took a while to get to liquid Death as
the name, and then once it's liquid Death is the name,
it's like, okay, what's the opposite of what most other
people would call this thing? What's the opposite? That's a
good place to start to find truly innovative ideas. So
(10:09):
it's like, okay, we've got this really healthy spring water
company called Liquid Death. Now it's like, okay, how do
we have this make sense in a funny way? And
it's like, oh, well, water murders your thirst. Oh that's funny.
Now it all starts coming together. It's not just liquid death.
Oh why is it called liquid death? Oh? Because it
murders your thirst. Oh, that's so funny. And then after
(10:31):
that it was well, at that time, single use plastic
bottles were making their way into the news because they
weren't actually being recycled. But aluminum cans are infinitely recyclable,
and they're really the only material that's consistently getting recycled
by recycling facilities because it's economically viable to melt down
metal and then resell it at a profit, where plastic
(10:52):
and glass you can't actually do that. So then it
was like, well, we can also do death to plastic
as sort of a secondary mission of the company of Hey,
it's this fun thing, it's better for you, and maybe
you feel a little bit better that you're not buying
a plastic bottle.
Speaker 3 (11:07):
You started a branding company before Liquid Death, and then
you went the water. What did you learn from that
spirits foray that you took with you when you did
Liquid Death?
Speaker 2 (11:19):
I learned a lot from that. I mean, I was
pretty young in my career at that point. I was
only a few years out of college working for an
ad agency in San Francisco that wasn't really doing very
creative work, and I was kind of creatively miserable for
the better part of two years, and that was when
I had my own light bulb moment of Hey, I
(11:41):
can't just wait around for clients to want to do
good creative work. I need to create my own product
that I can create the type of marketing and branding
and I think brands need to do in the modern day.
When we created alcohol, I mean similar to liquid, the
strategy was, hey, how do you find a stale category
(12:04):
that you can go in and be one of the
only interesting brands in Because if you can do that,
you can stand out like a sore thumb and you
can actually take market share without having to spend a
ton of money on media and advertising. Brandy was one
of the few categories of booze that there was no
(12:24):
cool brands. Most people didn't even really know what it was.
So once I tasted it and realized, like, hey, this
is actually really similar to Bourbon, which at that time
was like the number one fastest growing spirit in America.
So it's like, clearly, this isn't a taste problem, this
is a brand problem that Brandy has. So came up
with this idea for the brand, and I think from
(12:44):
the creative side, a similar type approach of trying to
think through, hey, what's the marketing, how does this fit in?
Where's the white space? But then I had no experience
with beverage or specifically alcohol at that time. Yes, I
had this really cool brand idea, but then, actually, how
do you turn this into reality? That was a much
(13:08):
bigger leap that I had to figure out how to make.
So what I did was I literally went on LinkedIn
and I started searching for basically people that worked for
this one creative agency in Philadelphia called Quaker City Mercantile
that was behind two of the most famous Spirits brand
launches in history, which was Hendrix Jin and Sailor Jerry Rum.
(13:33):
I found two of those people on LinkedIn and literally
cold messaged them and we talked. They liked the idea,
and all of a sudden, they were down to start
this company with me. But as a young sort of
not much confidence, like I'm a little bit out of
my zone here, you know, I don't know how to
produce alcohol or do any of that. So I decided, well, hey,
(13:54):
let's just all own equal shares in the company, which
then meant these two people that worked together forever could
just outvote me on literally everything. So you know, it
was like learning like how you start a business and
how to structure it and knowing the realities of like
how decisions are made, and you know, it was basically,
you know, after probably two years of us working together,
(14:16):
we got the brand stood up. We had a warehouse
full of product in Philadelphia. They were selling it into
bars and that kind of stuff. But on the marketing concepts,
on strategy all of that, like me and my two
sort of partners in it, we were just were constantly
butting heads, like what I wanted to do was completely
different than what they wanted to do, and we just
(14:37):
could never agree. So eventually I'm just like, you know what,
you guys, just take this from here. I think I
learned a lot about one depending on the category you're in,
the realities of how hard it is to bring something
to market. Alcohol was insane, Like the amount of legal
fees because of the red tape with alcohol laws by
state and all of that was insane. And the marketing
(14:58):
laws about what you can't even market this on social
and how you do it, how you launch in a
particular state is different. The way distribution worked because of
the alcohol laws, like, it was just the most red
tape I could ever imagine. So when I kind of
got out of that and sort of thinking about what's
my next thing, definitely my head was in the space of, okay,
what has a lot less red tape than alcohol? And
(15:20):
water was probably high on that list. But then the
more I did the research on the category I was
going into, like you know, I didn't do tons of
category research when I was launching brandy or booze. I
did with water, and we really learned about well, wow,
at that time, in twenty sixteen or whatever, bottled water
had surpassed carbonated soft drinks for biggest beverage category by volume.
(15:44):
So it's like, oh wow, huge category, and it was like, hey,
all the brands look almost exactly the same, and they're
all in plastic bottles. Now, there's a lot of things
with water that were way more difficult to produce than
I ever thought. For instance, at that time, there was
not a single bottler or copacker in North America who
could put non carbonated spring water in cans. Did not exist,
(16:06):
which blew my mind at the time. I literally had
to start googling European companies and I happened to find
a bottler in Austria who had canning capabilities and they
had a natural spring source at their facility that they
could put into the cans.
Speaker 3 (16:22):
Or a creative guy, you have the remarkable math skills,
analytical skills. How do you use data and what do
you think about data and how does that fit in
the creative process of building a product.
Speaker 2 (16:36):
Yeah, I think data is interesting because it can be
a double edged sword. It's like anyone can find some
kind of data to support whatever they wanted to support.
So I think it's one what kind of data are
you pulling? How are you looking at it? But for us,
data is really just helping us figure out where's the
best place to point the bazukah of marketing. You know,
(16:57):
it's like, hey, we need to be very strategic about
like what are we trying to target, Like where are
we focused? Like you can't just say, hey, we're just
gonna target literally everybody and be all things to all people.
Like that's not a strategy. I think one of the
best pieces of marketing advice that I got was that
any razor sharp strategy has to come with sacrifice. There's
(17:21):
no such thing as a smart strategy that just tries
to please everybody. You've got to pick where should we
be focused, where's the white space, where's the value? And
to get to that, that's where you need to look
at data and get to what are real insights, what's
something that we can act on, Especially as a startup
where you've got very limited cash and capital. It's the
(17:43):
most precious resource that a startup has, and if you're
not being hyper efficient with it, you will run out
of cash before you ever get to the finish line.
And that's mostly the reason that the majority of startups fail.
It's not necessarily because the product was a complete failure.
It's because they run out of cash before they ever
(18:04):
get to the scale that they need to kind of
keep going.
Speaker 3 (18:08):
I think your advice about and your observation about running
out of money is an interesting one. We don't hear
it a lot here. You know, you're exactly right. It
is such a problem with not only startups but existing businesses.
You said you sold your first water direct to the consumer.
What did you learn what surprised you when you finally
(18:30):
sold it?
Speaker 2 (18:31):
I mean, I think the biggest thing that we didn't
think about so much was how expensive it was really
going to be the ship of thirteen pound product somebody
you can kind of estimate some of that stuff. But
you know, one of our early investors, really great guy,
Mike Lazaro. He's always said that whatever you think something's
(18:54):
going to cost as a startup, double it. However much
time you think it's going to take you double it.
Proved to be true in most scenarios, and it's not
something you think about. You can think like you crunched
all the numbers as well as you can, but somehow
it ends up being way more than you thought it was.
And there's just so many unforeseen things that you can't
think about. So yeah, as much as you know, we
(19:15):
had to start direct to consumer because at that time,
there wasn't a single retailer who would even consider putting
something called liquid death on the shelf because retailers are
highly conservative. We knew that the only way we could
eventually get into retail is we had to sell it
through our site in Amazon. First proved that there was
(19:35):
a lot of people who wanted this product and prove
that nobody was thinking, you know, this is actually going
to kill them, like they no more than they think
death by chocolate ice cream is going to kill them.
So yeah, that first year, you know, I think at
that time we were paying like thirteen dollars in shipping
for every case that went out, and we were selling
the case for twenty dollars at that time, and it
(19:57):
was costing us, you know, five bucks to make you
start looking at it like you're making nothing if maybe
your break even. So we had to do that though,
to prove out the demand and build the brand. And
then at the end of our first year it's publicly reported,
but like, we did about almost three million in revenue
our first year. That's pretty substantial for the first year
(20:19):
of a beverage company, and especially only online. So then
at that point our first retailer, Whole Foods, said hey,
we want to put you nationwide in all of our
stores and our load in date was March fifteenth, twenty twenty.
So that was a fun first retail experience.
Speaker 3 (20:34):
How much do you think your experience with ad agencies
and probably trying to sell clients on campaigns that they
didn't want to do, we're afraid to do, didn't understand
how much of that helped you sort of motivate you
to say, look now, that I'm in full control, I'm
doing X.
Speaker 2 (20:53):
I think it motivated me a ton, and I think
I learned a lot being in the ad industry world
for basically about ten years before liquid death. Most brands, like,
they don't come to ad agencies when they're doing amazingly well,
Like a lot of times, like brands come to agencies
when they've got problems and they're hoping that marketing can
(21:13):
help fix their problems or turn their business around. So
that was the cool thing about being an agency. You're
learning about so many different brands and products in different industries,
and you're learning about their problems and what's not working
and what is working. I think I was able to
kind of use all of that as I thought about
how to build my own business and maybe avoid the
(21:36):
pitfalls that other companies have done in the past, and
really just figure out what's the strongest way to do
it and then yes, like as a creative person, I
was very passionate about making advertising not pure toxic waste
that people are literally willing to spend ten dollars a
month just to not be exposed to. What we're doing
(21:59):
is we are making people laugh and basically making it
clear that we hate most marketing as much as you do,
because that's the one connective tissue. Doesn't matter whether you
like metal or whether you like the Grateful Dead or
whatever it is that you're into. People are so tired
of this soulless sales, pitchy marketing that anything that just
(22:22):
feels like oh that actually made me laugh and I
feel like maybe there's a real person behind this company
that I maybe want to go have a beer with.
That is so valuable to people, And it really stands.
Speaker 3 (22:35):
Top you're a healthy beverage company, not a water company.
What kind of products and marketing permission does that give you?
What are the products are you now doing? And what
do you have on the drawing board that you can
tell us about.
Speaker 2 (22:48):
Yeah, so we started with Mountain Spring Water in a can,
and then in twenty twenty two we launched flavored Sparkling
Water in a can, which is really more like healthy
soda because we actually use a little bit of sugar
and some sort of plant based sweetener like stevia to
kind of give it a more full soda like flavor.
(23:08):
So that again what we were seeing is like people
were trying to cut down on soda, but when they
were drinking Lacroix, which has almost no flavor, they were saying,
it's not really a soda replacement, Like, yes, it's a can,
it's carbonated, it's kind of like a soda, but it's
not really replacing my soda. So we thought there was
an interesting place, like let's give a more full flavor
(23:31):
where you could truly say I can replace this with
soda with this healthier option. That did really well for us.
Then in twenty twenty three, we launched sort of low
sugar iced tea. And the ica category was a pretty
big category, and there was really no interesting brands happening
for a long time. It's like most of the brands
people thought of there they were like thirty year old
(23:52):
brands like Arizona and Nestle and these kind of brands.
So and they're all like more sugar than soda, a
lot of them, like sixty grams of sugar in some
of these. So we launched better for You iced tea.
It also has a little bit of natural caffeine in it,
so we had a product that could actually be a
little bit of an energy product that had some function
(24:13):
to it. Whereas like water is just water, that did
even more for us year one than what we did
in flavored sparkling water. And I think that was the
moment when Tea was successful that people finally said, oh,
these guys truly are like a multi category beverage company.
We've been growing both of those brands substantially over the
last couple of years, and then now we announced our
(24:35):
first Better for You energy drink with a what we
call unextreme and sane level of caffeine because we think
the energy category has gone pretty bananas with like two
hundred and three hundred milligrams of caffeine in some of
these brands. So like plain still water is less than
twenty percent of our sales. Now we're definitely moving into
(24:57):
a flavor company, and so much of our growth is
coming from flavored things and taking the exciting liquid def
brand that we've always had. But you're kind of limited
in how much you can take that brand creativity into
the product itself, because water is just water. Now that
we can apply that brand creativity and excitement to actually flavors,
(25:17):
like we launched hot Fudge Sunday flavored sparkling water, and
bringing that fun to actual flavor, it has been a
whole new sort of frontier for us.
Speaker 3 (25:26):
You have a very funny campaign about Arizona. Will you
just tell us that for a second, that you're using
with your tea When.
Speaker 2 (25:33):
It comes to the tea category, Arizona is basically it's
the eight hundred pound gorilla. And you know, they've had
a very smart strategy, which was Arizona launched in I
think it was like nineteen ninety four at ninety nine
cents Acan. At that time gas was ninety nine cents.
But as they grew and scaled and got cost efficiencies,
(25:56):
they were able to not raise their price with inflation,
which enable them to not have to spend that much
money on marketing because they could just undercut everybody in
the category on price. Now to this day, it's still
around ninety nine cents, and it is impossible for anybody
to launch a new iced tea company now and even
(26:17):
come close to competing with them on price. They will
always be the lowest price thing. So you're not going
to compete with them on price. The only thing you
can do is compete on brand, Like is there more
function in the product? Is it just something that people
would rather walk around with and support as a more
premium offering than Arizona. So we kind of said, all right, well,
(26:38):
most people don't even know that Liquid Death makes ice tea,
so we said, okay, let's grow our brand awareness because
everyone knows Arizona. And what we said was, well, what
if we could be the official iced tea of Arizona,
and not Arizona the brand, but Arizona the small township
(26:58):
in Nebraska about two hours outside of Omaha. It's like
population of like two hundred people. We actually went there.
We talked to some people that were involved on the township,
said hey, we want to pay you to be the
official iced tea of your town. They said, yeah, this
is great, and then we threw a party in the town.
We gave everybody iced tea. We went and interviewed all
(27:20):
these awesome local people and yeah, we made this really
fun video that claims like Liquid Death is the official
iced tea of Arizona, Nebraska. It's been great, gross, it
is brilliant.
Speaker 3 (27:32):
By the way, more of Math and Magic right after
this quick break. Welcome back to Math and Magic. Let's
hear more from my conversation in the Mike Cesaria. I
want to jump a little bit. I want to go
back in time put you in context. You grew up
in Delaware, outside of Philly. Can you paint the picture
(27:55):
of that time and place.
Speaker 2 (27:57):
I was born in eighty two in Wilming, Delaware. My
earliest memory maybe three years old. I was sitting on
my cousin's skateboard in his room, and I just knew
that I wanted one of these things. So then at seven,
I got my first real skateboard and it became like
my prize possession. I had actual Thrasher magazines back then
(28:18):
because I would see the skate bags in like the
store when my mom would go in like the bookstore whatever,
and I'd say, let me have that, and I would
put some of the stuff on my wall. And I
was obsessed with skateboarding. And I was also really into drawing.
I was always a kid that was good at drawing,
So then I was drawing like the skate graphics and
skate artwork and all of that. And then my father
is a really funny guy, like he's not that serious
(28:40):
about too many things. And you know, for us, like
some people, for Christmas, they watched like a Christmas carol,
Like every Christmas, we would watch my cousin Bennie, So
there's always a lot of joking and humor in our house.
So that probably sums up a lot of what my
upbringing was like. It was about art, creativity, skateboarding, and
then humor and comedians and Rodney Dangerfield and Bill Murray
(29:04):
and all that kind of stuff. So that really shaped
my approach to creativity because even when I was drawing,
I was drawing funny cartoons that felt like Mad Magazine,
which was also another big inspiration for me that I
just thought was the greatest thing ever, like gross, funny,
like awesome artwork. And then yeah, that eventually kind of
guided me into playing in bands in that Philly, Delaware area.
(29:27):
When I was about seventh or eighth grade, you know,
got a guitar, started playing guitar. That was right when
Green Day Dookie was released, which kind of put punk
rock in every house in America pretty much, and then
that kind of started me down the rabbit hole of
like bad Religion and No Effects and all of those
punk bands and then playing in one myself throughout high
(29:49):
school and where I went to high school, it was
like rural Pennsylvania, so there wasn't a ton to do.
Except for, you know, go to our buddy's house after
school in his basement and just made music and play music.
That was kind of what it was like for me
growing up. Do you ever imagine back when you were
a kid that you'ld be a CEO one day? I
don't think so. I think I did know, you know,
(30:11):
when I was fifteen playing in bands, so like late nineties,
you know, pund hardcore DIY was like a whole part
of that community, and it was a term. It's like
do it yourself. They were these little businesses, like you
were creating your own T shirts, Like you were going
to figure out how to quote unquote raise money, whether
(30:31):
it's from other guys in the band who were working,
or maybe like your parents are willing to loan you
like fifty bucks. You pull all your money together just
so you can go into the recording studio that's in
our hometown. It charges thirty bucks an hour to go
record our album. And then we're going to go burn
CDs of our album. I'm going to go to Kinko's
(30:51):
and print little booklets and put them all together, and
then we're going to go have to go pitch ourselves
to play a show and then thankfully, we'll let us
play a show. Then we have a table and we're
selling the stuff there. And it was really like kind
of creating your own business at a really young age,
and I think I really love that. Before I knew
that graphic design was a real job that you could
(31:13):
get paid to do. When my parents were asking, well,
you know, what do you think you want to do,
like or go to college for, my generic answer was
always I don't know, like maybe something with business. I
think I just want to have my own business, whatever
that is. Now I could have thought my own business
is like a silkscreening company or a CV making company
(31:33):
or something. I think I always knew that I was
independent and probably stubborn enough that I just wanted to
like run my own thing, whatever that might have been.
Speaker 3 (31:44):
You had an interesting career in advertising, by the way.
You eventually went to college basically an art school, and
then you went into advertising. What took you into advertising?
Speaker 2 (31:54):
Yeah, so I originally went to school for graphic design,
and then about a year or so into my graphic
design education, I saw that there was another department advertising
and they were doing these really smart and funny ads
which resonated way more with me, because I was always
about being funny, whereas once you're like deep in graphic
(32:17):
design at a really good graphic design school, that's you know,
the graphic design department was run by a German guy
and it was the Bauhause sort of style design. It
got really molecular and like rigid, and that just wasn't
really me. Like, I just wanted to make silly stuff
that made people laugh. So what the advertising department was
(32:38):
doing felt way more like my speed. So then I
basically went and talked to the head of the advertising department.
Then I just went full send into sort of learning
that craft, which was very different than design design was
just about making stuff pretty. Advertising had to solve problems
and be really smart and sort of conceptual. And it
(33:00):
took a bit to kind of hone that muscle, but
ended up getting it pretty quickly and doing well pretty quickly.
Speaker 3 (33:06):
Hey, it worked out well for you. Let's talk a
minute about managing a business. What role does company culture
play and how do you build it and manage it,
and what are the core values set liquid death.
Speaker 2 (33:19):
It's tough to have the culture of a company be
dramatically different than whoever the top decision maker is like
the CEO is kind of always going to set the
tone for what the culture of the company is. So
for us, as a entertainment first, marketing led company, there's
(33:40):
almost like a hacker mentality regardless of what the department is.
Back when we had to get Liquid Death into stores
that would not ever carry the product, you can't just
go about it the normal way. Hey, let's get a meeting. Hey,
here's our brand. Do you like it? Yes? Or no?
Speaker 3 (33:57):
No?
Speaker 2 (33:58):
Okay. We had to get like really creative with like, hey,
let's go find who the CMO of this big retail
chain is. Let's get the product in front of them,
because they'll get the marketing part of it. And then
if they get it and the CMO says to the buyer, hey,
this is a cool brand. I saw, You're way higher
(34:20):
in their consideration list when their boss of bosses is
telling them that this brand might be something interesting. Whereas
if you just go right to the buyer and they
don't get it, like that's it, You're done. I think
we've always built this creative, innovatives thinking culture. I think
it's important that that kind of culture lives everywhere. If
you want to constantly be churning out that kind of
(34:43):
work product.
Speaker 3 (34:44):
Talk about your philosophy on teams and collaboration, both from
your perspective as a founder, CEO and as a former
creative in the ad agency business.
Speaker 2 (34:55):
Collaboration is really important, but I think you've got to
find the right way to do it, and every company
is different. But I think for us, our culture and
the way we've hired people is a lot of our
people they love autonomy. Some people they're happier just being
a cog in a giant machine, and it's just they're
(35:18):
told exactly what to do, like you're just going to execute.
You don't have to overthink anything. And that can work
in a giant company, but in a high growth startup
where you know, as they say, a startup is jumping
off a cliff and building a plane on the way down,
everyone can't have their handheld, like you got to have
some of that instinct to go and figure out a
problem on your own. And those types of people do
(35:40):
not like to be micro managed, you know. I think
that was like me that they've also said, like every
great entrepreneur is almost unemployable. I liked autonomy. I liked
doing stuff I did not like being told do exactly this,
do exactly this. So I think the way we've built
a lot of our teams, especially the folks in a
suite that report to me, I know where my value
(36:03):
is and where my value isn't and so much of
my value is on the brand and the marketing and
the vision and the product development where I spend most
of my time. We had to hire really really strong
CFO and really really strong cheap supply chain officer and
really really strong chief sales officer so that I can
(36:23):
sort of trust those people to run their businesses and
I don't have to be in the minutia in weeds
micromanaging them because it just wouldn't work. We really try
to empower people to act like owners. You know, hey,
everybody in our company, regardless of level, own shares in
Liquid Death, and if you can go out there and
(36:44):
help Liquid Death generate more revenue, you are directly increasing
the value of your own shares.
Speaker 3 (36:51):
Let's talk about personal level. How do you think about
either work life balance or work life integration.
Speaker 2 (36:58):
I think work life balance is really important. There's certain
companies and companies I've worked for, especially on the marketing
side where people almost think that like overwork is like
this badge to celebrate, like, oh, I was at the
office until four am last night. It's like, why are
you proud about that? Something's probably wrong if you're actually
(37:20):
having to work until four am every night, either you're
not working the right way, or there's some problem in
the company structure that you know, there's either not enough people,
something's happening that's requiring you to do that. So I
think as much as we can, even as a high growth,
kind of crazy startup company, I think we've been able
(37:41):
to have pretty good life work balance where it is
not commonplace that you know, at Liquid Deaf people are
working until wee hours in the morning. It's like a
lot of the time, you know, people are off slack
and off their stuff by six or seven o'clock. You know,
we're still able to achieve all these great things, and
we've always been, you know, a big proponent of you know,
(38:02):
work smarter, not harder. If you can finish all the
work that you need to do in two hours and
take the rest of the day off, I don't care.
You know, it's like we need to get done what
we need to get done, and let's figure out like
the most efficient way to do it, but no one's
getting points for working late nights or that kind of stuff.
You know, Let's do some advice.
Speaker 3 (38:23):
If you could go back in time, what advice would
you give your twenty one year old self.
Speaker 2 (38:28):
As cliche as it is, to be patient and stay humble,
there's always this want, Hey, you've got to figure this
out right now, and you know it's not working in
the first months, then you know, just give up on
it and go to something else. It was so, you know,
I really patience was not my thing at all. In fact,
when I was working in that San Francisco agency, I
(38:51):
ended up getting a tattoo, pretty big one on my
arm of a muskie fish which my grandfather, he lived
in northwest Pennsylvania. He caught this muskie it's like forty
eight inches long in the late seventies. He had it
on his wall in his house and he would tell
me the stories about this thing that they call it
(39:12):
the fish of ten thousand casts where people fish their
whole lives and they don't catch a muskie, and he
caught one his whole life, and for me, I got
the tattoo one, you know, as a tribute to my grandfather,
but also for me it was a huge reminder to
be patient because patience was never one of my virtues,
and I think it's something that has absolutely manifested itself.
(39:38):
Is you know, a powerful ideal to have when building
a business. You have to have some patience because if
you're too reactionary, too quickly, like you can make some
pretty bad MoES.
Speaker 3 (39:48):
So we end each episode with some shout outs. Did
podcast is called Math and Magic, so true to that,
we give one shout out to the math person, the
person who saw that analytical genius in business, and we
give one to the creative, the magic person, the magician.
Who would you give your two shout outs to?
Speaker 2 (40:07):
Can I do it on my own team? Of course
you can. The math person. I would give it to
Ben law Vitterry, our chief media officer, the way he
really thinks about media, the math equations and analytical thinking
that kind of go into how complex the new media
landscape is across digital and TV and connected TV. And
(40:30):
then I think for the magic got to give that
to our VP of Creative Andy Pearson. He's been the
backbone of all of our creative campaigns and not just
the ideas behind them, but actually executing productions and shoots
on budget for very cheap to kind of produce all
this stuff that we've done. And also just the pure
(40:52):
magician in him physically. He's the guy that runs two
hundred and fifty mile races on his feet at one time.
I don't know how that's even physically possible, So that's
kind of magic to me too. Yeah, that alone makes
a magician.
Speaker 3 (41:07):
Mike. This has been a lot of fun. You've got
an amazing story of going against the grain and building
both an amazing and totally unique brand, and building a
unicorn doesn't happen very often. It's a challenger unicorn at
that even harder. So congrats and thanks for sharing those
stories today.
Speaker 2 (41:24):
Thanks Bob.
Speaker 3 (41:27):
There are a few things I picked up from my
conversation with Mike. One, own your brand. Mike knows his
brand and his power inside and out. He baked the
branding into every aspect of his product, from the name
to the can, the design, and the logo before they
had a real marketing budget.
Speaker 2 (41:43):
Liquid Death's strong brand.
Speaker 3 (41:45):
Identity did the work for them. It made the product
so compelling that you had to pick it up. Take
a picture and share it. Two. A winning strategy comes
with sacrifice at liquid death. That is a tool to
figure out where the white space is and where it's
truly worth spending money on mark. As much as an
entrepreneur might want to sell their product, everyone is just
(42:06):
not efficient. Instead, figure out where to focus and then
work a move in the needle.
Speaker 2 (42:11):
Three.
Speaker 3 (42:12):
A creative culture is limited to creative roles. Creativity and
innovation are in liquid desks DNA. It's part of the
concept and you can see it in all their content,
but it's also crucial to their sales and supply chain teams.
The company didn't stop being creative when it came to
pitching their product to stores. They disrupted the status quo
(42:33):
every step of the way. I'm Bob Pittman. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 2 (42:39):
That's it for today's episode.
Speaker 1 (42:40):
Thanks so much for listening to Math and Magic, a
production of iHeart Podcasts. The show is created and hosted
by Bob Pittman. The Math and Magic team is Ali Perry,
Jessica Crincicch and Dylan Hoyer. Special thanks to Sydney Rosenbloom
for booking and wrangling our wonderful talent, which is no
small feat until next time.
You're listening to Math and Magic, a production of iHeart Podcasts.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
I knew that when I had the idea for Liquid Death,
no investor was going to write me a check for
the concept that, Hey, I have this idea. I want
to make a water company that looks like a beer
company and call it Liquid Death and put a skull
on the can. Nobody would write me a check. It's
like investors don't like to invest in ideas, they like
to invest in businesses.
Speaker 3 (00:32):
Welcome to Math and Magic Stories from the frontiers of marketing.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
I'm Bob Pittman.
Speaker 3 (00:36):
In each episode, we dive into the intersection of smart strategy,
the math, and the creative spark, the magic that drives
remarkable brands and businesses. Today's guest flips a simple product,
water on its head. He didn't invent water, but he
had invented a way to sell it in a category
where nearly everyone else thought there was nothing new to do.
(00:57):
It's Mike Cesario, founder and CEO of Liquid Death. Mike
grew up in Delaware, near Philadelphia. Although wildly creative, he
was good at math, the math and magic. Count of kid.
He played in bands and has a lifelong love of skateboarding.
He wound up at art school and onto a career
in advertising and then an entrepreneur with his own ideas
(01:19):
and dreams, and now he has a unicorn. Liquid Death
is a private company worth over a billion dollars. And
for all of us who love brand building, he's clearly
a master with some great lessons for us to explore.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
Mike, welcome, Thanks for having me, Bob.
Speaker 3 (01:34):
Before we jump into the really meaty stuff, I want
to do you in sixty seconds. You ready?
Speaker 2 (01:40):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (01:41):
Cats are dogs dogs Early riser or night out early Riser,
city or suburbs, suburbs Southern California, Bay Area.
Speaker 2 (01:50):
Southern California.
Speaker 3 (01:51):
Introvert or extrovert, introvert, skateboard or snowboard.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
Probably snowboard, but it's close. One energy drink or iced tea,
iced tea, punk or metal metal. Listening to music or
playing music. Ooh, probably listening as much as I love playing.
Just love listening.
Speaker 3 (02:13):
Comedy or drama, comedy, coffee or tea coffee. Super Bowl
ad or viral social media post super Bowl ad. It's
about to get a little harder. All time favorite musical
artist Slayer.
Speaker 2 (02:26):
First job being a cafeteria worker at a college cafeteria,
childhood hero. Tony Hawk. Favorite Liquid Death campaign probably the
Tony Hawk blood boards that we did a long time ago.
Most important bit of advice you ever received. Nothing is
ever as bad as it seems, and nothing's ever as
good as it seems. Very good, let's get going.
Speaker 3 (02:49):
Liquid death packaging marketing looks like the opposite of most
of the peaceful, tranquil images on other waters, and it
has a wicked sense of humor.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
Give us the origin story. Let's go back. So you know,
I was an advertising agency creative for a long time
and ended up working for a small agency in Chattanooga,
Tennessee called Humanot. There's only about nine or ten of
us that work there, and we started doing some of
the first funny, irreverent marketing for the organic industry. It
(03:24):
was more digital YouTube, kind of viral. They weren't big,
expensive TV commercials, but we were able to generate millions
of views. A lot of people were talking about it,
and for me, that kind of was the light bulb
moment of how come more healthy, better for you? Brands
are not marketing in the same funny, memorable way as
(03:44):
beer companies, junk food companies, even energy drink companies is
not really funny, but they do this big, incredible marketing,
whereas healthy things were always just marketed in this very quiet,
sort of narrow way, and there was no real purpose
for why that was the case. I thought, it's what
prevented more people from making healthier choices, because all the funnest,
(04:06):
coolest stuff is all stuff that's bad for you. So
kind of have this idea, like, hey, water is the
healthiest thing you can possibly drink. Most people don't drink
enough of it. What if we created a water company that,
from all optical and aesthetic and marketing sort of angles,
felt like a beer company. And that was kind of
(04:29):
the beginning of the thought of Liquid Death. I knew
that when I had the idea for Liquid Death that
there was nobody, no investor was going to write me
a check for the concept of Hey, I have this idea.
I want to make a water company that looks like
a beer company and call it Liquid Death and put
a skull on the camp. But nobody would write me
a check. And I think it's like a bigger entrepreneurial
(04:49):
thing in general. I think there's a lot of people
who want to be entrepreneurs and I've had people come
to me and say, Hey, I have this great idea,
how do I get investment. It's like investors don't like
to invent and ideas, they like to invest in businesses.
So if you have an idea, you need to do
something to kind of prove out that there might be potential.
(05:09):
Like you're making something small that you can make at
your house, make it out your house, go sell it
at the local farmers market and see how it does.
But with a canned beverage company, the minimum amount of
cans you can pretty much make is like one hundred
and fifty thousand, So you're talking about one hundred and
fifty thousand, two hundred thousand dollars investment just to even
start to even make a physical product. So that wasn't
(05:31):
going to happen. So what I did was, I'm like, Okay,
let me pretend this is a real company. Make a
Facebook page for it. We made a funny little sort
of internet commercial for the brand that I spent maybe
fifteen hundred bucks to produce. We use photoshop to make
what felt like a realistic photo, real canned image, and
(05:51):
we just did a couple posts on this Facebook page
for liquid dep and then we put like a few
thousand dollars in paid media like not a time, like
I think may be five six grand something like that
over a six month period. And at the end of
that six months, the video had almost three million views,
The page had almost eighty thousand followers. We had like
(06:13):
hundreds of comments from people. We had distributors actually dming
the page saying, Hey, we're the biggest non out distributor
in New York. Can we talk to a salesperson? Or Hey,
I own three seven elevens in Michigan? How do I
get this in my stores? So then I use all
of that traction to then go actually raise the first
(06:33):
sort of one hundred and fifty k round of funding
just to actually produce the first minimum run of product.
We started selling the cases online only our website and
Amazon in late January early February twenty nineteen.
Speaker 3 (06:49):
So let's jump in a little bit. You've got this
tall boy can. You're right, looks like a beer can.
What was the idea and the thought of that one.
Speaker 2 (06:59):
Thing that we knew in marketing. Marketing is so much
about sort of psychology and why do people make the
decisions they do and ninety nine percent of decisions that
people make are emotional, not rational, and we knew that
if you actually wanted teens to think something is cool,
you actually market it to people in their twenties. So
(07:20):
we said, hey, energy drinks are kind of like, you know,
bright neon colors, and they feel like teen esque. Well
if we make it look like a beer, let's make
it look like something aesthetically that they're not even allowed
to legally have, and then that will potentially create just
the fun factor of hey, look what we have. It
looks like something we're not supposed to have, but it's
(07:42):
just completely healthy water. And that's what we really saw.
It's like because of the can design itself, everybody who
got it, they were posting on social of them drinking
it because they think it's really funny. Hey look, look,
my six year old's drinking what looks like a beer.
Isn't this funny? Or hey look, I'm shotgunning a water
and it's nine in the morning. So the can was
(08:05):
such a big part of the marketing in the early days,
and we kind of knew that, like, when you're a
small brand with no real marketing budget, you have to
bake all the marketing into the product and packaging itself,
because that's the only real media that you have or
can afford. At that point, where most companies or most
CpG brands, it's like they create the packaging and brand
(08:26):
name to sort of be.
Speaker 4 (08:28):
Hey, it's okay, Like it's not incredible, it's not bad.
Like the packaging kind of looks like, you know, some
other stuff maybe in the category, looks decent. There's nothing
like shockingly interesting about it, just from a packaging standpoint.
Speaker 2 (08:42):
Then they go hire a marketing agency to build an
advertising campaign around this product to all of a sudden
make it more interesting or make it more relevant to people.
But we started with all of the marketing firepower built
into every aspect of the brand, brand name, the can,
the design, the logo, all of that was kind of
(09:05):
created with this idea of what makes this so interesting
that if someone sees us on the shelf, they have
to stop and pick it up. And if they do
pick it up, they almost have to take out their
phone and take a picture of it and share it
for free to their hundreds of followers that.
Speaker 3 (09:20):
They have tell everybody listening your slogan, murder your thirst.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
So how did you come up with that? Where did
that come from? I think people think that creative ideas
are like these light bulb moments that happen when you're
in the shower. It's like, oh, I just thought of
this genius idea and it all came to me at once.
Where it's really like ideas and concepts are like a
stone sculpture, Like you're constantly just chipping away and chipping
(09:48):
away and refining to eventually get to that perfect kind
of final thing. Like it takes time, it takes iteration.
It took a while to get to liquid Death as
the name, and then once it's liquid Death is the name,
it's like, okay, what's the opposite of what most other
people would call this thing? What's the opposite? That's a
good place to start to find truly innovative ideas. So
(10:09):
it's like, okay, we've got this really healthy spring water
company called Liquid Death. Now it's like, okay, how do
we have this make sense in a funny way? And
it's like, oh, well, water murders your thirst. Oh that's funny.
Now it all starts coming together. It's not just liquid death.
Oh why is it called liquid death? Oh? Because it
murders your thirst. Oh, that's so funny. And then after
(10:31):
that it was well, at that time, single use plastic
bottles were making their way into the news because they
weren't actually being recycled. But aluminum cans are infinitely recyclable,
and they're really the only material that's consistently getting recycled
by recycling facilities because it's economically viable to melt down
metal and then resell it at a profit, where plastic
(10:52):
and glass you can't actually do that. So then it
was like, well, we can also do death to plastic
as sort of a secondary mission of the company of Hey,
it's this fun thing, it's better for you, and maybe
you feel a little bit better that you're not buying
a plastic bottle.
Speaker 3 (11:07):
You started a branding company before Liquid Death, and then
you went the water. What did you learn from that
spirits foray that you took with you when you did
Liquid Death?
Speaker 2 (11:19):
I learned a lot from that. I mean, I was
pretty young in my career at that point. I was
only a few years out of college working for an
ad agency in San Francisco that wasn't really doing very
creative work, and I was kind of creatively miserable for
the better part of two years, and that was when
I had my own light bulb moment of Hey, I
(11:41):
can't just wait around for clients to want to do
good creative work. I need to create my own product
that I can create the type of marketing and branding
and I think brands need to do in the modern day.
When we created alcohol, I mean similar to liquid, the
strategy was, hey, how do you find a stale category
(12:04):
that you can go in and be one of the
only interesting brands in Because if you can do that,
you can stand out like a sore thumb and you
can actually take market share without having to spend a
ton of money on media and advertising. Brandy was one
of the few categories of booze that there was no
(12:24):
cool brands. Most people didn't even really know what it was.
So once I tasted it and realized, like, hey, this
is actually really similar to Bourbon, which at that time
was like the number one fastest growing spirit in America.
So it's like, clearly, this isn't a taste problem, this
is a brand problem that Brandy has. So came up
with this idea for the brand, and I think from
(12:44):
the creative side, a similar type approach of trying to
think through, hey, what's the marketing, how does this fit in?
Where's the white space? But then I had no experience
with beverage or specifically alcohol at that time. Yes, I
had this really cool brand idea, but then, actually, how
do you turn this into reality? That was a much
(13:08):
bigger leap that I had to figure out how to make.
So what I did was I literally went on LinkedIn
and I started searching for basically people that worked for
this one creative agency in Philadelphia called Quaker City Mercantile
that was behind two of the most famous Spirits brand
launches in history, which was Hendrix Jin and Sailor Jerry Rum.
(13:33):
I found two of those people on LinkedIn and literally
cold messaged them and we talked. They liked the idea,
and all of a sudden, they were down to start
this company with me. But as a young sort of
not much confidence, like I'm a little bit out of
my zone here, you know, I don't know how to
produce alcohol or do any of that. So I decided, well, hey,
(13:54):
let's just all own equal shares in the company, which
then meant these two people that worked together forever could
just outvote me on literally everything. So you know, it
was like learning like how you start a business and
how to structure it and knowing the realities of like
how decisions are made, and you know, it was basically,
you know, after probably two years of us working together,
(14:16):
we got the brand stood up. We had a warehouse
full of product in Philadelphia. They were selling it into
bars and that kind of stuff. But on the marketing concepts,
on strategy all of that, like me and my two
sort of partners in it, we were just were constantly
butting heads, like what I wanted to do was completely
different than what they wanted to do, and we just
(14:37):
could never agree. So eventually I'm just like, you know what,
you guys, just take this from here. I think I
learned a lot about one depending on the category you're in,
the realities of how hard it is to bring something
to market. Alcohol was insane, Like the amount of legal
fees because of the red tape with alcohol laws by
state and all of that was insane. And the marketing
(14:58):
laws about what you can't even market this on social
and how you do it, how you launch in a
particular state is different. The way distribution worked because of
the alcohol laws, like, it was just the most red
tape I could ever imagine. So when I kind of
got out of that and sort of thinking about what's
my next thing, definitely my head was in the space of, okay,
what has a lot less red tape than alcohol? And
(15:20):
water was probably high on that list. But then the
more I did the research on the category I was
going into, like you know, I didn't do tons of
category research when I was launching brandy or booze. I
did with water, and we really learned about well, wow,
at that time, in twenty sixteen or whatever, bottled water
had surpassed carbonated soft drinks for biggest beverage category by volume.
(15:44):
So it's like, oh wow, huge category, and it was like, hey,
all the brands look almost exactly the same, and they're
all in plastic bottles. Now, there's a lot of things
with water that were way more difficult to produce than
I ever thought. For instance, at that time, there was
not a single bottler or copacker in North America who
could put non carbonated spring water in cans. Did not exist,
(16:06):
which blew my mind at the time. I literally had
to start googling European companies and I happened to find
a bottler in Austria who had canning capabilities and they
had a natural spring source at their facility that they
could put into the cans.
Speaker 3 (16:22):
Or a creative guy, you have the remarkable math skills,
analytical skills. How do you use data and what do
you think about data and how does that fit in
the creative process of building a product.
Speaker 2 (16:36):
Yeah, I think data is interesting because it can be
a double edged sword. It's like anyone can find some
kind of data to support whatever they wanted to support.
So I think it's one what kind of data are
you pulling? How are you looking at it? But for us,
data is really just helping us figure out where's the
best place to point the bazukah of marketing. You know,
(16:57):
it's like, hey, we need to be very strategic about
like what are we trying to target, Like where are
we focused? Like you can't just say, hey, we're just
gonna target literally everybody and be all things to all people.
Like that's not a strategy. I think one of the
best pieces of marketing advice that I got was that
any razor sharp strategy has to come with sacrifice. There's
(17:21):
no such thing as a smart strategy that just tries
to please everybody. You've got to pick where should we
be focused, where's the white space, where's the value? And
to get to that, that's where you need to look
at data and get to what are real insights, what's
something that we can act on, Especially as a startup
where you've got very limited cash and capital. It's the
(17:43):
most precious resource that a startup has, and if you're
not being hyper efficient with it, you will run out
of cash before you ever get to the finish line.
And that's mostly the reason that the majority of startups fail.
It's not necessarily because the product was a complete failure.
It's because they run out of cash before they ever
(18:04):
get to the scale that they need to kind of
keep going.
Speaker 3 (18:08):
I think your advice about and your observation about running
out of money is an interesting one. We don't hear
it a lot here. You know, you're exactly right. It
is such a problem with not only startups but existing businesses.
You said you sold your first water direct to the consumer.
What did you learn what surprised you when you finally
(18:30):
sold it?
Speaker 2 (18:31):
I mean, I think the biggest thing that we didn't
think about so much was how expensive it was really
going to be the ship of thirteen pound product somebody
you can kind of estimate some of that stuff. But
you know, one of our early investors, really great guy,
Mike Lazaro. He's always said that whatever you think something's
(18:54):
going to cost as a startup, double it. However much
time you think it's going to take you double it.
Proved to be true in most scenarios, and it's not
something you think about. You can think like you crunched
all the numbers as well as you can, but somehow
it ends up being way more than you thought it was.
And there's just so many unforeseen things that you can't
think about. So yeah, as much as you know, we
(19:15):
had to start direct to consumer because at that time,
there wasn't a single retailer who would even consider putting
something called liquid death on the shelf because retailers are
highly conservative. We knew that the only way we could
eventually get into retail is we had to sell it
through our site in Amazon. First proved that there was
(19:35):
a lot of people who wanted this product and prove
that nobody was thinking, you know, this is actually going
to kill them, like they no more than they think
death by chocolate ice cream is going to kill them.
So yeah, that first year, you know, I think at
that time we were paying like thirteen dollars in shipping
for every case that went out, and we were selling
the case for twenty dollars at that time, and it
(19:57):
was costing us, you know, five bucks to make you
start looking at it like you're making nothing if maybe
your break even. So we had to do that though,
to prove out the demand and build the brand. And
then at the end of our first year it's publicly reported,
but like, we did about almost three million in revenue
our first year. That's pretty substantial for the first year
(20:19):
of a beverage company, and especially only online. So then
at that point our first retailer, Whole Foods, said hey,
we want to put you nationwide in all of our
stores and our load in date was March fifteenth, twenty twenty.
So that was a fun first retail experience.
Speaker 3 (20:34):
How much do you think your experience with ad agencies
and probably trying to sell clients on campaigns that they
didn't want to do, we're afraid to do, didn't understand
how much of that helped you sort of motivate you
to say, look now, that I'm in full control, I'm
doing X.
Speaker 2 (20:53):
I think it motivated me a ton, and I think
I learned a lot being in the ad industry world
for basically about ten years before liquid death. Most brands, like,
they don't come to ad agencies when they're doing amazingly well,
Like a lot of times, like brands come to agencies
when they've got problems and they're hoping that marketing can
(21:13):
help fix their problems or turn their business around. So
that was the cool thing about being an agency. You're
learning about so many different brands and products in different industries,
and you're learning about their problems and what's not working
and what is working. I think I was able to
kind of use all of that as I thought about
how to build my own business and maybe avoid the
(21:36):
pitfalls that other companies have done in the past, and
really just figure out what's the strongest way to do
it and then yes, like as a creative person, I
was very passionate about making advertising not pure toxic waste
that people are literally willing to spend ten dollars a
month just to not be exposed to. What we're doing
(21:59):
is we are making people laugh and basically making it
clear that we hate most marketing as much as you do,
because that's the one connective tissue. Doesn't matter whether you
like metal or whether you like the Grateful Dead or
whatever it is that you're into. People are so tired
of this soulless sales, pitchy marketing that anything that just
(22:22):
feels like oh that actually made me laugh and I
feel like maybe there's a real person behind this company
that I maybe want to go have a beer with.
That is so valuable to people, And it really stands.
Speaker 3 (22:35):
Top you're a healthy beverage company, not a water company.
What kind of products and marketing permission does that give you?
What are the products are you now doing? And what
do you have on the drawing board that you can
tell us about.
Speaker 2 (22:48):
Yeah, so we started with Mountain Spring Water in a can,
and then in twenty twenty two we launched flavored Sparkling
Water in a can, which is really more like healthy
soda because we actually use a little bit of sugar
and some sort of plant based sweetener like stevia to
kind of give it a more full soda like flavor.
(23:08):
So that again what we were seeing is like people
were trying to cut down on soda, but when they
were drinking Lacroix, which has almost no flavor, they were saying,
it's not really a soda replacement, Like, yes, it's a can,
it's carbonated, it's kind of like a soda, but it's
not really replacing my soda. So we thought there was
an interesting place, like let's give a more full flavor
(23:31):
where you could truly say I can replace this with
soda with this healthier option. That did really well for us.
Then in twenty twenty three, we launched sort of low
sugar iced tea. And the ica category was a pretty
big category, and there was really no interesting brands happening
for a long time. It's like most of the brands
people thought of there they were like thirty year old
(23:52):
brands like Arizona and Nestle and these kind of brands.
So and they're all like more sugar than soda, a
lot of them, like sixty grams of sugar in some
of these. So we launched better for You iced tea.
It also has a little bit of natural caffeine in it,
so we had a product that could actually be a
little bit of an energy product that had some function
(24:13):
to it. Whereas like water is just water, that did
even more for us year one than what we did
in flavored sparkling water. And I think that was the
moment when Tea was successful that people finally said, oh,
these guys truly are like a multi category beverage company.
We've been growing both of those brands substantially over the
last couple of years, and then now we announced our
(24:35):
first Better for You energy drink with a what we
call unextreme and sane level of caffeine because we think
the energy category has gone pretty bananas with like two
hundred and three hundred milligrams of caffeine in some of
these brands. So like plain still water is less than
twenty percent of our sales. Now we're definitely moving into
(24:57):
a flavor company, and so much of our growth is
coming from flavored things and taking the exciting liquid def
brand that we've always had. But you're kind of limited
in how much you can take that brand creativity into
the product itself, because water is just water. Now that
we can apply that brand creativity and excitement to actually flavors,
(25:17):
like we launched hot Fudge Sunday flavored sparkling water, and
bringing that fun to actual flavor, it has been a
whole new sort of frontier for us.
Speaker 3 (25:26):
You have a very funny campaign about Arizona. Will you
just tell us that for a second, that you're using
with your tea When.
Speaker 2 (25:33):
It comes to the tea category, Arizona is basically it's
the eight hundred pound gorilla. And you know, they've had
a very smart strategy, which was Arizona launched in I
think it was like nineteen ninety four at ninety nine
cents Acan. At that time gas was ninety nine cents.
But as they grew and scaled and got cost efficiencies,
(25:56):
they were able to not raise their price with inflation,
which enable them to not have to spend that much
money on marketing because they could just undercut everybody in
the category on price. Now to this day, it's still
around ninety nine cents, and it is impossible for anybody
to launch a new iced tea company now and even
(26:17):
come close to competing with them on price. They will
always be the lowest price thing. So you're not going
to compete with them on price. The only thing you
can do is compete on brand, Like is there more
function in the product? Is it just something that people
would rather walk around with and support as a more
premium offering than Arizona. So we kind of said, all right, well,
(26:38):
most people don't even know that Liquid Death makes ice tea,
so we said, okay, let's grow our brand awareness because
everyone knows Arizona. And what we said was, well, what
if we could be the official iced tea of Arizona,
and not Arizona the brand, but Arizona the small township
(26:58):
in Nebraska about two hours outside of Omaha. It's like
population of like two hundred people. We actually went there.
We talked to some people that were involved on the township,
said hey, we want to pay you to be the
official iced tea of your town. They said, yeah, this
is great, and then we threw a party in the town.
We gave everybody iced tea. We went and interviewed all
(27:20):
these awesome local people and yeah, we made this really
fun video that claims like Liquid Death is the official
iced tea of Arizona, Nebraska. It's been great, gross, it
is brilliant.
Speaker 3 (27:32):
By the way, more of Math and Magic right after
this quick break. Welcome back to Math and Magic. Let's
hear more from my conversation in the Mike Cesaria. I
want to jump a little bit. I want to go
back in time put you in context. You grew up
in Delaware, outside of Philly. Can you paint the picture
(27:55):
of that time and place.
Speaker 2 (27:57):
I was born in eighty two in Wilming, Delaware. My
earliest memory maybe three years old. I was sitting on
my cousin's skateboard in his room, and I just knew
that I wanted one of these things. So then at seven,
I got my first real skateboard and it became like
my prize possession. I had actual Thrasher magazines back then
(28:18):
because I would see the skate bags in like the
store when my mom would go in like the bookstore whatever,
and I'd say, let me have that, and I would
put some of the stuff on my wall. And I
was obsessed with skateboarding. And I was also really into drawing.
I was always a kid that was good at drawing,
So then I was drawing like the skate graphics and
skate artwork and all of that. And then my father
is a really funny guy, like he's not that serious
(28:40):
about too many things. And you know, for us, like
some people, for Christmas, they watched like a Christmas carol,
Like every Christmas, we would watch my cousin Bennie, So
there's always a lot of joking and humor in our house.
So that probably sums up a lot of what my
upbringing was like. It was about art, creativity, skateboarding, and
then humor and comedians and Rodney Dangerfield and Bill Murray
(29:04):
and all that kind of stuff. So that really shaped
my approach to creativity because even when I was drawing,
I was drawing funny cartoons that felt like Mad Magazine,
which was also another big inspiration for me that I
just thought was the greatest thing ever, like gross, funny,
like awesome artwork. And then yeah, that eventually kind of
guided me into playing in bands in that Philly, Delaware area.
(29:27):
When I was about seventh or eighth grade, you know,
got a guitar, started playing guitar. That was right when
Green Day Dookie was released, which kind of put punk
rock in every house in America pretty much, and then
that kind of started me down the rabbit hole of
like bad Religion and No Effects and all of those
punk bands and then playing in one myself throughout high
(29:49):
school and where I went to high school, it was
like rural Pennsylvania, so there wasn't a ton to do.
Except for, you know, go to our buddy's house after
school in his basement and just made music and play music.
That was kind of what it was like for me
growing up. Do you ever imagine back when you were
a kid that you'ld be a CEO one day? I
don't think so. I think I did know, you know,
(30:11):
when I was fifteen playing in bands, so like late nineties,
you know, pund hardcore DIY was like a whole part
of that community, and it was a term. It's like
do it yourself. They were these little businesses, like you
were creating your own T shirts, Like you were going
to figure out how to quote unquote raise money, whether
(30:31):
it's from other guys in the band who were working,
or maybe like your parents are willing to loan you
like fifty bucks. You pull all your money together just
so you can go into the recording studio that's in
our hometown. It charges thirty bucks an hour to go
record our album. And then we're going to go burn
CDs of our album. I'm going to go to Kinko's
(30:51):
and print little booklets and put them all together, and
then we're going to go have to go pitch ourselves
to play a show and then thankfully, we'll let us
play a show. Then we have a table and we're
selling the stuff there. And it was really like kind
of creating your own business at a really young age,
and I think I really love that. Before I knew
that graphic design was a real job that you could
(31:13):
get paid to do. When my parents were asking, well,
you know, what do you think you want to do,
like or go to college for, my generic answer was
always I don't know, like maybe something with business. I
think I just want to have my own business, whatever
that is. Now I could have thought my own business
is like a silkscreening company or a CV making company
(31:33):
or something. I think I always knew that I was
independent and probably stubborn enough that I just wanted to
like run my own thing, whatever that might have been.
Speaker 3 (31:44):
You had an interesting career in advertising, by the way.
You eventually went to college basically an art school, and
then you went into advertising. What took you into advertising?
Speaker 2 (31:54):
Yeah, so I originally went to school for graphic design,
and then about a year or so into my graphic
design education, I saw that there was another department advertising
and they were doing these really smart and funny ads
which resonated way more with me, because I was always
about being funny, whereas once you're like deep in graphic
(32:17):
design at a really good graphic design school, that's you know,
the graphic design department was run by a German guy
and it was the Bauhause sort of style design. It
got really molecular and like rigid, and that just wasn't
really me. Like, I just wanted to make silly stuff
that made people laugh. So what the advertising department was
(32:38):
doing felt way more like my speed. So then I
basically went and talked to the head of the advertising department.
Then I just went full send into sort of learning
that craft, which was very different than design design was
just about making stuff pretty. Advertising had to solve problems
and be really smart and sort of conceptual. And it
(33:00):
took a bit to kind of hone that muscle, but
ended up getting it pretty quickly and doing well pretty quickly.
Speaker 3 (33:06):
Hey, it worked out well for you. Let's talk a
minute about managing a business. What role does company culture
play and how do you build it and manage it,
and what are the core values set liquid death.
Speaker 2 (33:19):
It's tough to have the culture of a company be
dramatically different than whoever the top decision maker is like
the CEO is kind of always going to set the
tone for what the culture of the company is. So
for us, as a entertainment first, marketing led company, there's
(33:40):
almost like a hacker mentality regardless of what the department is.
Back when we had to get Liquid Death into stores
that would not ever carry the product, you can't just
go about it the normal way. Hey, let's get a meeting. Hey,
here's our brand. Do you like it? Yes? Or no?
Speaker 3 (33:57):
No?
Speaker 2 (33:58):
Okay. We had to get like really creative with like, hey,
let's go find who the CMO of this big retail
chain is. Let's get the product in front of them,
because they'll get the marketing part of it. And then
if they get it and the CMO says to the buyer, hey,
this is a cool brand. I saw, You're way higher
(34:20):
in their consideration list when their boss of bosses is
telling them that this brand might be something interesting. Whereas
if you just go right to the buyer and they
don't get it, like that's it, You're done. I think
we've always built this creative, innovatives thinking culture. I think
it's important that that kind of culture lives everywhere. If
you want to constantly be churning out that kind of
(34:43):
work product.
Speaker 3 (34:44):
Talk about your philosophy on teams and collaboration, both from
your perspective as a founder, CEO and as a former
creative in the ad agency business.
Speaker 2 (34:55):
Collaboration is really important, but I think you've got to
find the right way to do it, and every company
is different. But I think for us, our culture and
the way we've hired people is a lot of our
people they love autonomy. Some people they're happier just being
a cog in a giant machine, and it's just they're
(35:18):
told exactly what to do, like you're just going to execute.
You don't have to overthink anything. And that can work
in a giant company, but in a high growth startup
where you know, as they say, a startup is jumping
off a cliff and building a plane on the way down,
everyone can't have their handheld, like you got to have
some of that instinct to go and figure out a
problem on your own. And those types of people do
(35:40):
not like to be micro managed, you know. I think
that was like me that they've also said, like every
great entrepreneur is almost unemployable. I liked autonomy. I liked
doing stuff I did not like being told do exactly this,
do exactly this. So I think the way we've built
a lot of our teams, especially the folks in a
suite that report to me, I know where my value
(36:03):
is and where my value isn't and so much of
my value is on the brand and the marketing and
the vision and the product development where I spend most
of my time. We had to hire really really strong
CFO and really really strong cheap supply chain officer and
really really strong chief sales officer so that I can
(36:23):
sort of trust those people to run their businesses and
I don't have to be in the minutia in weeds
micromanaging them because it just wouldn't work. We really try
to empower people to act like owners. You know, hey,
everybody in our company, regardless of level, own shares in
Liquid Death, and if you can go out there and
(36:44):
help Liquid Death generate more revenue, you are directly increasing
the value of your own shares.
Speaker 3 (36:51):
Let's talk about personal level. How do you think about
either work life balance or work life integration.
Speaker 2 (36:58):
I think work life balance is really important. There's certain
companies and companies I've worked for, especially on the marketing
side where people almost think that like overwork is like
this badge to celebrate, like, oh, I was at the
office until four am last night. It's like, why are
you proud about that? Something's probably wrong if you're actually
(37:20):
having to work until four am every night, either you're
not working the right way, or there's some problem in
the company structure that you know, there's either not enough people,
something's happening that's requiring you to do that. So I
think as much as we can, even as a high growth,
kind of crazy startup company, I think we've been able
(37:41):
to have pretty good life work balance where it is
not commonplace that you know, at Liquid Deaf people are
working until wee hours in the morning. It's like a
lot of the time, you know, people are off slack
and off their stuff by six or seven o'clock. You know,
we're still able to achieve all these great things, and
we've always been, you know, a big proponent of you know,
(38:02):
work smarter, not harder. If you can finish all the
work that you need to do in two hours and
take the rest of the day off, I don't care.
You know, it's like we need to get done what
we need to get done, and let's figure out like
the most efficient way to do it, but no one's
getting points for working late nights or that kind of stuff.
You know, Let's do some advice.
Speaker 3 (38:23):
If you could go back in time, what advice would
you give your twenty one year old self.
Speaker 2 (38:28):
As cliche as it is, to be patient and stay humble,
there's always this want, Hey, you've got to figure this
out right now, and you know it's not working in
the first months, then you know, just give up on
it and go to something else. It was so, you know,
I really patience was not my thing at all. In fact,
when I was working in that San Francisco agency, I
(38:51):
ended up getting a tattoo, pretty big one on my
arm of a muskie fish which my grandfather, he lived
in northwest Pennsylvania. He caught this muskie it's like forty
eight inches long in the late seventies. He had it
on his wall in his house and he would tell
me the stories about this thing that they call it
(39:12):
the fish of ten thousand casts where people fish their
whole lives and they don't catch a muskie, and he
caught one his whole life, and for me, I got
the tattoo one, you know, as a tribute to my grandfather,
but also for me it was a huge reminder to
be patient because patience was never one of my virtues,
and I think it's something that has absolutely manifested itself.
(39:38):
Is you know, a powerful ideal to have when building
a business. You have to have some patience because if
you're too reactionary, too quickly, like you can make some
pretty bad MoES.
Speaker 3 (39:48):
So we end each episode with some shout outs. Did
podcast is called Math and Magic, so true to that,
we give one shout out to the math person, the
person who saw that analytical genius in business, and we
give one to the creative, the magic person, the magician.
Who would you give your two shout outs to?
Speaker 2 (40:07):
Can I do it on my own team? Of course
you can. The math person. I would give it to
Ben law Vitterry, our chief media officer, the way he
really thinks about media, the math equations and analytical thinking
that kind of go into how complex the new media
landscape is across digital and TV and connected TV. And
(40:30):
then I think for the magic got to give that
to our VP of Creative Andy Pearson. He's been the
backbone of all of our creative campaigns and not just
the ideas behind them, but actually executing productions and shoots
on budget for very cheap to kind of produce all
this stuff that we've done. And also just the pure
(40:52):
magician in him physically. He's the guy that runs two
hundred and fifty mile races on his feet at one time.
I don't know how that's even physically possible, So that's
kind of magic to me too. Yeah, that alone makes
a magician.
Speaker 3 (41:07):
Mike. This has been a lot of fun. You've got
an amazing story of going against the grain and building
both an amazing and totally unique brand, and building a
unicorn doesn't happen very often. It's a challenger unicorn at
that even harder. So congrats and thanks for sharing those
stories today.
Speaker 2 (41:24):
Thanks Bob.
Speaker 3 (41:27):
There are a few things I picked up from my
conversation with Mike. One, own your brand. Mike knows his
brand and his power inside and out. He baked the
branding into every aspect of his product, from the name
to the can, the design, and the logo before they
had a real marketing budget.
Speaker 2 (41:43):
Liquid Death's strong brand.
Speaker 3 (41:45):
Identity did the work for them. It made the product
so compelling that you had to pick it up. Take
a picture and share it. Two. A winning strategy comes
with sacrifice at liquid death. That is a tool to
figure out where the white space is and where it's
truly worth spending money on mark. As much as an
entrepreneur might want to sell their product, everyone is just
(42:06):
not efficient. Instead, figure out where to focus and then
work a move in the needle.
Speaker 2 (42:11):
Three.
Speaker 3 (42:12):
A creative culture is limited to creative roles. Creativity and
innovation are in liquid desks DNA. It's part of the
concept and you can see it in all their content,
but it's also crucial to their sales and supply chain teams.
The company didn't stop being creative when it came to
pitching their product to stores. They disrupted the status quo
(42:33):
every step of the way. I'm Bob Pittman. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 2 (42:39):
That's it for today's episode.
Speaker 1 (42:40):
Thanks so much for listening to Math and Magic, a
production of iHeart Podcasts. The show is created and hosted
by Bob Pittman. The Math and Magic team is Ali Perry,
Jessica Crincicch and Dylan Hoyer. Special thanks to Sydney Rosenbloom
for booking and wrangling our wonderful talent, which is no
small feat until next time.
Host
Bob Pittman
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Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
The MeatEater Podcast
Building on the belief that a deeper understanding of the natural world enriches all of our lives, host Steven Rinella brings an in-depth and relevant look at all outdoor topics including hunting, fishing, nature, conservation, and wild foods. Filled with humor, irreverence, and things that will surprise the hell out of you, each episode welcomes a diverse group of guests who add their own expertise to the vast world of the outdoors. Part of The MeatEater Podcast Network.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by Audiochuck Media Company.