Liquid Deaths Thirst for Success and Rise to the Top

Liquid Death has experienced remarkable financial growth pretty much right from its conception. Despite operating in a competitive market, the company has shown resilience and innovation, leading to steady revenue growth and increasing market share. Let's dive in and take a closer look at how Liquid Death's financial journey unfolded.

The Conception of Liquid Death

The name “Liquid Death” was trademarked back in 2017 and they didn’t officially launch until 2019. Mike Cessario, the founder of Liquid Death, was once a creative director at Netflix. This idea of Liquid Death was first conceptualized back in 2009 while he was working the “Warped Tour”, he started noticing how most of the performers were drinking water out of “Monster Energy Drinks” cans.

Cessario then started thinking about how he could make water more enjoyable since mainly all the water brands at the time were bland. He also saw the health risks of energy drinks and alcohol, which drew him to create something more healthy.

Cessario and his team were also concerned with the pollution of plastic water bottles. Since roughly 80% of all single-use plastic bottles become “litter” and take around 450 years to decompose, Aluminum is the next best thing. Aluminum is the most recyclable material and can be back on the shelves within as little as 6 weeks according to roadrunnerwm and contains about 73% recycled content according to aluminum.org.

Nothing Can Stop Liquid Death From Fizzing Over

In 2018 Cessario created an ad for $1.5K that ended up going viral and accumulating around 3 million views within 4 months. He had no product created at the time when he launched this ad, just an idea and a 3D rendering of a concept product.

After running this ad he got investors attention. He ended up acquiring $150,000 in initial funding and then created the product, offering a small batch test run of Liquid Death.

Since then, the brand ended up making around $2.8 million in 2019, in 2020 when the brand was placed into “Whole Foods” stores that number jumped to around $10 million. As of writing this it’s now available in more than 60,000 stores and is currently valued at $1.4 billion while doing $263 million in sales, which is double its 2022 valuation.

How Liquid Death Popped and Became So Successful

Cessario and his team didn’t market in ways that were considered normal, instead, they decided to mix edgy and funny into their marketing and branding strategy.

With their unorthodox way of branding the product, such as making dark humor content for ads and including imagery of skulls on their products with the tagline “Murder Your Thirst”, they nailed their target audience and were able to grow a loyal following by being authentic to themselves. The audience Liquid Death appeals to is Gen Z and millennials as its main consumers.

They also use every aspect of social media to their advantage. Using Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Facebook, they can stay in touch with their community and make engaging content that intrigues their target audience.

As of today, Liquid Death has around 287K followers on Facebook, more than 3 million followers on Instagram, around 5 million followers on TikTok, and 30K followers on YouTube.

While Liquid Death continues to innovate and grow, they seem to have plans to expand their product offerings, further their sustainability efforts, and deepen their engagement with consumers. The company is positioned for continued growth in the years to come.

The only question now is who will be next to rise to the top and take on Coca-Cola Company and PepsiCo.

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