Transcript

[Harry] Mike, I am so excited for this. I've been such a fan of the liquid death journey for quite a while now. So thank you so much for joining me today.

[Mike] Thanks for having me up.

[Harry] Not at all. But I want to start with a little bit of context. So how did Rockstar's hydration problems, which is what I heard was the origin, lead to the founding of liquid death?

[Mike] So that wasn't really the origin. It's funny, it's like you said, you're not a journalist and I feel like to the early days of liquid death, this story was shaped by journalists who didn't fully get it. A lot of people didn't get it in the early days. The science, some of our early VCs, they understood it, but a lot of VCs, investors, they didn't get it. They were like, ah, canned water, yeah, what's that gonna do? Most people, when they Google stuff, they see the old press articles and there's everything from saying that I used to work at Netflix, which I never did. Where that came from was Monster Energy used to sponsor an alternative music tour in the late 90s and early 2000s called the Warp Tour. And this was the early energy drink days. I think Monster launched in 2002 and energy drinks were basically buying up all of the alternative lifestyle culture because nobody was giving money to punk bands and skateboarders and snowboarders and those kinds of people back then. Energy drinks did, but bands who were on the tour, they didn't like drinking energy drinks. They're on tour, you're outside playing, wanna drink water, they don't wanna drink energy drinks. So obviously, you're this growing brand and you're sponsoring this thing. It doesn't help you if the brand is drinking bottled water on stage. The coolest guys in the place are not drinking your product. They found that was not gonna be helpful to them. So what they did was they made cans of Monster that looked exactly like Monster, but it just had water. And they would give that to the band to drink. It was not for sale. But when all the kids in the crowd were watching the band, it looked like the bands were drinking Monster as a marketing thing. And I was friends with some of these bands and was hanging out with backstage with them. I remember just thinking, man, that's some sneaky marketing. That was the first thing that planted the seed in my brain of how come healthy product don't market in the same fun, irreverent way as unhealthy products? What are the brands that really invest a lot of money in used culture, humor, explosions, fun? It's alcohol, soda, candy, fast food, Bud Light, Cheetos, Snickers, Skittles. All the junk food does all the fun marketing. Healthy stuff is very quiet.

They more market to an older demographic. They don't do anything fun. But the reality was a lot of these guys that played in bands or people that you think are alternative culture, and all they do, all these guys do is drink Monster energy and eat bacon. No, these guys don't drink any of that. They care about health. Half of them are vegan. Huge percentage of them are sober, don't drink alcohol. But it's been these brands that kind of still use them and own them from a marketing standpoint. And that was more what sparked my thinking of Liquid Death because I was into health at the time. My friends who were playing in these bands, they were into being healthy. And I think that was more of the scene, not so much like a rock star hydration problem. It was, oh yeah, how come there's not more healthy brands that have just as much fun with marketing as these unhealthy brands? It didn't make any sense to me.

[Harry] You mentioned people thinking canned water. When you speak to founders today, what do you advise founders when they're told that's a silly idea or why would you do that? What do you advise them when they're told that like you were for so many years?

[Mike] I think you have to be careful. Out of every thousand ideas, 998 of them are bad and two are actually probably good. You have to be careful that you're open to feedback and understanding what's happening and not just using the crutch of, oh, just because no one thinks this is smart that is smart. It's easy to just lean on no one else gets this but me, but who cares? I'm just gonna keep going down this road. You have to know what are you measuring to know if this is good or not? Because even though people were telling us, oh, this doesn't make any sense, we had mountains of data showing that it did. A lot of these people were not privy to that data. Just on the surface it was, oh, this doesn't make any sense. But when you could see, oh, without even having a real product, in four months we have more social followers than AquaFina. Look how many people are sharing images of a beverage product. Who shares an image of a beverage and how often on social media? Not too often.

So we had all this data, which I think to folks that understood the digital world more, like science and some of the more tech side of things, I think they understood the power of that. When we talk to more investor types on the traditional CPG side, they don't typically understand the digital social world as strongly. So they didn't know how to value some of this stuff as much as maybe the tech world did in the early days.

[Harry] We're gonna discuss the marketing. It's one of my favorite topics to discuss. I do find this really revealing of one's character though, which is I believe that we're all this kind of function of our histories. And so when you think about that, what are you running from first, Mike?

[Mike] So I grew up outside Newark, Delaware, where public school districts were the worst, at that time were ranked the worst in the United States. They had this crazy system where they had like inner city schools. And then there was the kids that lived in the suburbs. I lived in the suburbs. They would bus the suburbs kids for elementary school into the inner city school. And then for middle school, the inner city kids would get bused from the inner city out to the suburbs school. Growing up, going to elementary school, I went to a school where recess would be canceled for shootings. We would find heroin needles on the ground in the playground. There'd be like fights all over the place. I found a bullet on the ground in sixth grade. It was crazy. So then my parents were, okay, you're going to school in Pennsylvania, which was 20 minutes away, completely different worlds. And then I grew up in late middle school and high school in this more rural place. I got to experience all different facets, I think, of culture and to your point, different levels of prosperity from the low end to the high end. I think that probably has an impact on just even how I approach marketing, how I think about things. I know what the bottom looks like and I definitely did not want to be there. And I was never the kid that totally fit in. And so then I ended up in this big corporate ad agency world doing marketing for giant brands, but I never totally fit in and I couldn't play the game as well. When you worked on an account, like let's say Toyota, you had to be obsessed with Toyota and know that Toyota was the best brand in the world. If you're working on this account, you better go buy a Toyota and not be driving around in a Honda. And if the client comes, we can't have any non Toyota cars parked out front. It was just this weird thing. I didn't get it. I was always looking for my way out. I was always looking for, hey, eventually I want to create my own product that I believe in the product and that I can do all the creative, cool marketing things for something I actually care about. And that was always, I guess what I was chasing is, hey, I had a good paycheck, but I really didn't like the things I was doing it for. So then it was like, how do I find this perfect dream job balance that's it's all the creative stuff I want to do. And it's for something that actually matters and that I care about. And it took a long time to figure that out, but I think finally I'm pretty close.

[Harry] Do you mention music quite a lot there? And I think music and business are aligned in the way that performance is everything. When I say high performance to you, what do those words mean?

[Mike] High performance, something that is operating very efficiently, something that is able to do a lot with a little. You think about a high performance athlete could be the same exact body size, weight, height, all of that, but one can run faster. They're more efficient. Even though they're the same size, one can go further, go faster.

[Harry] Speaking of going further, going faster, being the best, I think, and I hope I'm not bastardizing this, but I think the thing that Liquid Death is so hailed for and appreciated for is the brand that you've built being so strong. I'm sure you've thought about this a lot and I'm sorry for the meta question, but what does a truly great brand mean to you?

[Mike] Strong brands mean more to people than the product itself. So if you're a strong brand, the love for your brand transcends the functional benefit of whatever your product.

Use fashion as a really easy way for most people to understand brand because it's been around forever and it's purely brand. What's the difference between a $700 Gucci T-shirt and a $20 Target T-shirt? Same functional benefit, same exact material, cotton, covers your torso, but the brand of Gucci is way more valuable and people love it way more than just the functional benefit of what the shirt is made out of or what the function of the shirt is. It goes beyond that.

[Harry] Why do you think they love it? Do you think it's not status? It's social statuses. I have enough money to wear Gucci. I am worthy of being a Gucci customer.

[Mike] For high-end fashion, I think yes, but every brand has different reasons that people are gravitating towards it, but they're almost always emotional and not rational. There's not a rational reason why you would buy a Gucci T-shirt over something else, but yeah, for Gucci, I would think it's more of a status to some people.

[Harry] Why don't you sit down in a meeting with the team? What are the reasons why liquid death resonates from a brand with people that buy liquid death?

[Mike] There's a bunch of different reasons for different people why they gravitate towards the brand. I think there's folks who grew up listening to punk rock music and now they're moms or have families. They just instantly identify with it. It gives them a little piece of rebellion. I use the example of the motorcycle brand Harley Davidson. Has a very rebellious biker brand to it, but when Harley is doing their marketing, they're not targeting biker gangs. They're marketing to dentists, people that can afford a $25,000 motorcycle, and yes, they make it feel it's this biker rebellious thing because the dentist guy who's not a biker wants that little piece of rebellion in his life where he gets to kind of feel he's not a dentist or whatever that there's something interesting in it. I think it's the same thing with liquid death. There were tons of different brands. Even Monster, I don't have access to their marketing data, but from folks I know, the core Monster customer who buys the most Monster are not skateboarders and action sports athletes and all these people that you see in their marketing. It's an overweight guy outside of Riverside who drives a truck. It's marketed in this way where that is maybe entertaining to a certain type of person that's not a part of that and that's enough to make them be into the brand. People think, oh liquid death, it seems like such a niche thing. It's only for a small group of heavy metal guy, but when you back away from beverage and you look at entertainment as a whole, entertainment is way broader. If you think about a horror movie, Jordan Peele, he released a horror movie last summer called NOPE that outperformed a Disney Pixar movie. Horror, which is blood, violence, aggression, craziness, all of that, that's not a massive summer movie because it's a bunch of heavy metal guys going to the movies. There's all kinds of people that are entertained by that. Soccer moms, dudes, different races, different ages. I think that's what marketers forget is look at what people are entertained by. The biggest genre of entertainment for women is true crime. Shows about serial killers and death and blood is the number one genre for women, but nobody thinks about that from a marketing standpoint of, oh, why would women like liquid death?

[Harry] You're totally right. You look at podcast shots, it's all true crime. Did you ever worry though about brand alienation? I know I get completely what you're saying, but liquid death, it's a great brand because you feel, or regardless, if you like it or you don't like it, but you definitely feel, but did you ever worry about brand alienation, which is people who otherwise might have liked it might have been put off by a skull? Did you worry about that brand alienation?

[Mike] No, and again, to bring back the entertainment thing, same reason that whatever movie studio releases a blockbuster horror movie, how much do they worry about brand alienation? A, is this kill scene in here gonna turn off some people who would really like the movie? Like, on the extreme end, you have to be careful with that. What we do is not easy, which is why a lot of other people don't do it. If you go a few degrees this way, it could be very distasteful when you have a problem. You go a few degrees this way, it's just not funny, it's lame, and no one cares. So it is hard to find that right target where it's provocative enough that you have a ton of people who love it, think it's the greatest thing ever, but you always have a healthy amount of people who are like, how could this be? This is the worst thing ever. If there are people who truly love something, there has to be people who truly hate it. It is not possible to make something that everybody loves. All that's possible is to make something that everybody doesn't really give a shit about one way or the other. That's possible. No one really cares about you. They don't love you, they don't hate you, you're just there. That's really the only option. And that's the worst.

[Harry] What do you think are the biggest mistakes that founders make with brands today? You see many founders, I'm sure you get many founders asking you for advice. What are the big brand mistakes founders make?

[Mike] Not being honest with themselves about what their true differentiation really, and it's not just founders, I think it's people at most companies, is you're so close to your own product. You've spent night and day formulating whatever it is, designing the bottle, and all that stuff, and you've thought through everything, and you think this thing is so unique and special, and all you need to do is just tell people about the stuff you put in it, and it's gonna sell. It almost never does. It's when you back away from your own product. Okay, here's my product. Let me put it next to all the other products I'm gonna see, and then take somebody who doesn't work in marketing or branding and doesn't know anything about your product, put them in front of all those products, and what is their perception of your brand and all those other brands? I guarantee you it's nothing close to what you think in it. To truly stand out or to truly own something, it is hard, and it's not what you think it is. Brands will say, oh, our brand is differentiated because we have this ingredient that's new, and nobody has it. That can be a differentiating thing for a few moments, but the minute you have any success, any other brand can put the same ingredient in there, and if they're a bigger company, they can charge less for it, and they've got a more expensive marketing theme, so their bottle can maybe look a little bit better than yours, and then you're gonna lose because you can't own an ingredient. You can't own a lot of different things that people think is their differentiated thing. That's why with Liquid Death, we always focused on brand. Even though we're watering a can, people were like, why don't you guys just talk about why aluminum is infinitely recyclable and death of plastic? That's what you should be talking about, not funny, heavy metal stuff, but we can't own aluminum cans, so if I spent all my marketing dollars telling people, aluminum is infinitely recyclable, and there's four other can water brands, I'm just telling people why my competitors are good. The thing that you can't replicate or other people can't replicate is easy and that you can own is your unique brand, and that's what Liquid Death is. Our tone of voice, our style of marketing, all those things we do that make up the brand, that is almost impossible for the big guys to replicate in their huge corporate systems of approvals and focus groups and that kind of thing. Liquid Death would have never made it through a focus group at Coca-Cola. People would have been like, God, I would never buy this, this is stupid. I would never give this to my kids. It would never work, but that's how those companies are built. They can't get out of their own way, but they can get cheaper cans. They can get distribution. They can get the same ingredients, but the brand is what you can truly own, and that really is your moat, more so than most brands think it is.

They think their moat is an ingredient. Anybody can replicate your formula. It's your brand is really your moat.

[Harry] What's the difference between brand and storytelling?

[Mike] I hear that word storytelling all the time, and I think maybe it's a little too highbrow for what we really do. Storytelling is something that's done by movies and TV shows. Even those, how many of those stories are actually good stories that people want to watch? Very few. There's very few hit TV shows. Even the people that do this for a living, it's hard for them to land on a great piece of storytelling that resonates with mass culture. That's really storytelling. Marketing is not storytelling, really. I think it's a lower form of it. It's more about communication, which I think is a little different than storytelling. How do you communicate something about your product to somebody very quickly? You want them to take away something from them. You're not telling a whole story. You just want them to have a feeling, and what is that feeling? When someone sees a liquid death commercial, we don't go into that thinking, we want their takeaway to be, I need to be more properly hydrated. That's not what we want the takeaway to be. We want the takeaway to be, oh my God, that was probably the funniest thing I've seen today, and it came from a water company? That's what we want the takeaway to be, because if we get that, we are way further down the brand affinity path than these other brands that are just marketing with functional benefits. Oh, less calories, less grams of sugar, better tasting, all of those things, they don't actually resonate brand affinity. It's these more emotional things. You just gave me something of value. You just made me laugh, and it was the funniest thing I've seen today.

[Harry] Thank you, brand. You did a brilliant video. I saw it on Twitter the other day where you got two random people, and they basically said the liquid death was the worst water ever, or whatever it was, and then you did a blind taste test, and you tasered them, and you gave them, I think, $1,000 or whatever. Blondie, it was probably the funniest thing I'd seen in a day. My point is, you said before, everyone hates your marketing, and I thought about that, and I was like, huh, I thought, what did you mean? Why does everyone hate your marketing?

[Mike] Look at the data. 90 plus percent of people just hate marketing. We will pay a premium for ad-free services. My wife, when we're watching sports, she's a big sports person, she gets mad if I don't mute the commercials when they come on, because it just annoys her to hear commercial. People are so over toxic waste marketing that has just been around for decades, and it's even getting worse. You're seeing less funny commercials. You're seeing more shouting, hard-selling things, where what we're really doing as a brand is we're making fun of marketing,

and I think that's what people really identify with. It doesn't matter if you like heavy metal or skull. If you think us putting a skull on a can and calling it liquid death is funny because we're making fun of all this marketing bullshit, you can identify with that and be all for it. Oh, I'm not a skull person, but this is funny. I see what these guys are doing, and I'm all about that, because I hate marketing also. That's how we approach stuff. A lot of the commercials we do are doing parodies on these types of ads that are so bad, and people have just known they were bad for years, and marketing will always be bad, so there's almost this constant fodder for ideas of just making fun of marketing.

[Harry] Why do you think it's getting worse, specifically ads? I think we all agree, actually, that the creativity behind ads are getting worse. When you look back at the 90s, though, Mike, maybe I'm speaking from a UK and European perspective, but ads used to actually be quite creative, quite witty, and now they're not. Why?

[Mike] I think a big part of it is two things. The current state of data, people are trying to make too many decisions based on data rather than human insight of what's funny. It used to be people in an agency were saying, oh, this is funny, we should make this. Now it's let's run this through a bunch of testing and see at what point do people's eyeballs go to this thing, and then, hey, data shows that if we show the pizza in the first three seconds, people's feelings towards hunger are higher. It's letting data shape these things, and it's losing some of that human spirit that I think is what makes things clever or funny. So things just become very artificial. They're overly functional. They're trying so hard to function on every level. I think that's one. And then I think the other part of it is the current state of social media, the fact that if one person doesn't like your commercial, they can go make a bunch of noise on your brand's social page about it, and now the brand is, oh, two people said they hate our commercial, what do we do? Should we take the commercial down? That never used to be a thing. If Budweiser launched a hilarious commercial in the 90s and they heard through the grapevine that two people somewhere didn't like it, would they really care? No, but now that people can publicly post their opinion, brands, they have this irrational fear now. We can't make anybody upset at all, so they try to be so safe and try to do something that could not possibly offend or anger anybody, and then that takes all the creativity out of it as well, I think, so I think that those two things together just create this world of stuff that no one really cares about.

[Harry] Does the criticism grind you? Does it hurt you? When I get criticism for whatever happens often, it hurts me, I'm sad. Does it hurt you, and how do you develop that thicker skin to respond and reflect it in a bluntly continuous positive way?

[Mike] You're right, it's hard. Like anything, we're human beings. We work hard on things, and when you see that somebody totally shits on your idea or your product or whatever, you have this initial emotional reaction to it. What we've had to do and what I've even had to help train our marketing team on is being able to take a step back and look at everything in context. We post something, and we have 10,000 likes on it, and in the comments, there's five negative comments. 10,000 people said, this is awesome. Five people said they did it. 10,000 to five is a pretty good ratio, no matter how you strike it. Imagine you're a football team in a giant stadium. There's 50,000 people, and they're all screaming and chanting your name, and their faces are painted. They love your team, but then there's a small little section that doesn't like your team. How much should that actually affect the team on the field? You don't care about them. Look, you have a whole stadium of people. This is their whole livelihood. They love you. You're not gonna ever please anybody, so I think in social, you're in this very small thing where you just see a number, and you see these comments, and because the way social typically works, it's like most of us are not actively commenting in social media. The extremes are the ones who take the time to comment or even leave happy things. Not everybody is, everything I see on the internet, I don't say, oh, wow, that was great.

[Harry] Yeah, I watched your video. I think it's great. Respectfully, I like it, but I don't go, ha ha, this is the highlight of my day.

[Mike] I think most mainstream people, that's where we fall. We observe the internet. We laugh, but we don't comment to say, oh, we thought that was funny, or if we see something we don't like, we don't say, oh, fuck this. We're just observers, but these small fringe folks on either side are the ones that make all the noise, and you just have to be able to realize what's actually happening. Don't put too much stock in the couple people.

[Harry] I love ones that are really pernickety, which, Mike, that would never happen. That's very unrealistic. And you're like, fuck off, ha ha, I'm totally with you. You understand content and marketing in a way that I think so few people do. When you think about innovation of social channel in particular, and we look back to your spending $1,500, I think it was on the first video, and then $3,000 on Facebook ads, now we live in a world of blunting where short form is bigger than ever. TikTok has created this rise that's been unprecedented, but it's parallel with YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels. How do you guys sit internally and think about marketing strategy with the rise of different social channels, where you're gonna place your emphasis, where you're gonna place budget? How do you think about that in changing content landscapes?

[Mike] Because we're a startup, and especially in beverage, it's one of the few industries where four or five big players literally own 98% of the market, between Coke, Pepsi, Anheuser-Busch, Molson Coors. That is 98% of the beverages on the shelf. We are up against a massive behemoth. So the only way we can really survive is we have to be ultra-efficient. For every dollar we spend with marketing, we need to generate X amount of dollars in awareness.

We're very much an earned media approach to market. If we post a TikTok video, or if we post an Instagram video, we need that video to be shared without us paying people to share it. It's gotta be that interesting. People are sharing it, or that way more people are commenting on it, because it's so funny. It actually gets a couple of the real people that don't typically comment. It's actually enough for them to be like, this is fucking amazing, which generates the algorithms for the social to show it to more people for free. Or it's so interesting that press has to write about it. Forbes says, hey, did you see the TikTok that Liquid Death just did with Martha Stewart or whatever? That's all free eyeballs, free awareness that we're not paying for, because the idea was so interesting that people have to talk about it. So that's always our strategy. These social platforms are really just vehicles for how these ideas get out there. And those vehicles might change. Right now, it's Instagram and TikTok. That's most of social now, that's where we focus. If TikTok goes away, there'll be another platform that comes up, and that'll be the platform, and we'll use that. These platforms are really just vehicles to get in front of people, because that's where they are. People are not watching broadcast television. They're scrolling Instagram, they're scrolling TikTok. That's where they are. So you have to find a way to just be where they are to get your funny ideas out there.

[Harry] Two things from that. Idea generation, you have very creative and unique ideas, tasering water drinkers. So how do you think about idea generation in teams? Is it the responsibility of everyone? Is it the responsibility of a few? First, let's start that.

[Mike] We think about our marketing team more like we are Saturday Night Live. Saturday Night Live has a group of professional writers, comedians, who are writing these funny skits day in and day out. They have celebrity guests that come in. You have to write funny skits for this particular celebrity that's interesting. If you think about, hey, Saturday Night Live, where do you get your funny ideas from? They don't say, oh, we ask everybody in every department from accounting to, it's like, no. We rely on the professional funny people to figure out what's gonna be funny and what's gonna work. And I think we take that approach too. Creativity, we hold at a very high level because we're trying to make entertainment. We're not trying to make marketing. We're trying to make actual entertainment that is in service of a brand. And when we're talking about actual entertainment, that's way harder to do. If you ask somebody, hey, do you think you could come up with a cool idea for a commercial? Most people would probably say, ah, I think I could do that. If you ask most people, could you write a hit television show and sell it to Netflix? They'd be like, no fucking way. Marketing is easy in people's minds because most marketing is so bad. But when you're actually trying to make entertainment, it's much, much harder and you really need experts who know how to execute that. An idea might come from somewhere. Oh, it's so funny. I love giving liquid death to my kid when he goes to school because everyone thinks that the teachers think he's drinking beer and I think it's funny. That's an idea. Okay, how do you execute that idea into a commercial? And then that's where our professional team was, oh, let's do a typical beer commercial, but do it with kids and water. How do you execute that and write that and shoot it and direct it and light it and do all those kinds of things to make the final piece?

[Harry] You mentioned efficiency of dollars there. Okay, let's take that idea. We think it's great. Kids in beer commercial style, ha, we're sitting there in liquid death's office. This is funny. We put a lot of budget behind it. It doesn't work. You don't want to be a gaming studio in that kind of capital concentration way. Do you split test and do like 10 ideas, minimal budget and then double down on what works? Do you concentrate budget to strong ideas that you just really like internally? How do you think about that kind of strategy?

[Mike] We don't do any big budget thing. Even the Super Bowl commercial that we did, that was the beer commercial with the kids, all in, we spent a hundred grand on that commercial. When other companies are spending millions, we're able to do that, one, because we have a really strong creative team. So it's, oh, we don't even necessarily need some big fancy director for this thing. We just need someone who knows how to shoot this and help arrange it. And then our creative guys have the power to direct this thing. And it's, oh, we know how to creatively cut corners. Oh, if we film it like this, it's going to be way cheaper than if we try to film it like this, reduce things very cheaply so that we're very rarely making big bets. We've never produced a single piece of content that is a million dollars. We've never done something like that. We might not ever do that. When you have a really good idea, you could film it with an iPhone sometimes and it'll actually still be good. But when you have an idea that's not very good, you have to start throwing all this production value at it to have something that people care about.

[Harry] How many of your content bets work versus don't? What's the ratio? Is it like the classic, oh, 10% work and 90% don't?

[Mike] No, I think we have a really healthy track record. We call big thing has essentially hit. And I think that's just because of our approach to how we, for instance, that Super Bowl commercial with the kids drinking beer, we didn't just come up with that out of the blue. It was, we were singing on social. Tons of people were posting photos of their kids with liquid death, thinking that it's funny. Hundreds of them. Oh, this is a thing that people think is funny. Let's just turn it into something else funny and it's gonna work because you're basing it on something that you know to be true versus just, hey, I wonder if people would think it's funny that kids are drinking liquid death. That's different.

[Harry] Final one before we do a quick fire. Someone said this on Twitter, actually. They said, you're often praised for the brand build that you've done with liquid death. What other than the brand build do you think liquid death doesn't get enough credit for?

[Mike] It would be execution of building a beverage brand in the insane beverage market. Our sales team is top notch. We hired some of the best people. We invested in tons of bodies that are going into stores. The marketing and brand makes people love the product. That's just the beginning. When a store orders product, we need more liquid death. They order liquid death. A distributor comes, drops cases off in the back of the store. Store employees are busy with all kinds of other things. The shelves of liquid death might be sitting empty. For days, for a week. Because the product's just sitting in the back of the store because no one gives a shit. Unless you have a sales team where somebody is going into that target once a week to make sure, oh, what the fuck, guys? There's no more liquid death on the shelf. Oh, it's in the back. And you have someone actually come put it on the shelf. Or you have other beverage companies and competitors. They'll come and literally move your stuff out of the way. And if you don't have somebody going in there to make sure your stuff looks good, you'll be like, oh, how come we have no sales at this store for the last month? There's even things where competitors, there's these tags that let's say a retailer will stick onto your case so that their clerks come by and scan it and it'll say what their inventory is. Beverage competitors were coming and pulling those stickers off their competitors' cases. So when the guy came over to try to scan it, he couldn't scan it, he's got a lot of shit to do. He's not gonna go all the way to the back. He's just gonna keep going doing the rest of his job and you're not gonna get a reorder of your product because he didn't scan it. That's the stuff that goes on in beverage that is what makes it really hard to succeed.

[Harry] What's the craziest thing that's happened in the beverage industry?

[Mike] Oh man, there's just all kinds of things. There was, I won't say the brand, but there was stories of a well-known energy brand with a CEO that people thought was pretty crazy where they would have these company meetings and the guy made his employees chant his name before he would come out on stage to speak with them. And they had other people being like, chant louder, chant louder or he's not gonna come out. That shit actually goes on in beverage and it's crazy.

[Harry] Tell me, I wanna move into a quick fire. So I say a short statement. You give me your immediate thoughts. What book has currently almost recently captured your heart or piece of content? We've talked about entertainment. It could be book, it could be TV show, movie, I don't care. What's caught your love?

[Mike] A movie I just saw last week was something that stood out. I hadn't seen anything like it. I thought it was so great, so funny. That new movie on HBO called The Menu. It's like a horror movie, but a dark comedy. It's not supposed to be scary. It's horror, but it's supposed to be funny. And it's basically taking the piss out of high cuisine culture. Fancy pairings and multi-course meals and like this high society dining culture. It uses that to make this really funny horror movie. I just thought it was so funny, so creative. And the fact that it's super successful. I think it's got like a 98% on Rotten Tomatoes and people are talking. And it's not a high budget thing either. You could tell this was all filmed in one location. They probably did not spend a ton of money on it. And then the main star of it, I forget the actor's name. He's the British guy who plays Voldemort in Harry Potter. He plays like the main chef and he's incredible.

[Harry] That is hilarious. I'm looking at it now. I haven't seen this. Budget, $30 million.

[Mike] There you go. It's not a jump change, but yeah, it's that $100 million movie, that's for sure.

[Harry] It is not. What have you changed your mind on in the last 12 months?

[Mike] We dramatically changed our approach to content and moving more from the Netflix approach to the HBO approach. Meaning Netflix, they produce tons and tons of series of stuff like cheap things, expensive things. They make all these things. So you're making a ton of bets and you hope that a couple of them hit, which is the VC realm of things, right? It's you bet on all these things, then one thing takes off and that's supposed to pay for kind of the rest of them. And I think a lot of brands have been doing that in the social space where social is about always on. You need to post something every day. It's all about just getting lots of content out there. And I think we took that approach as well. Hey, let's just put tons of little things out there and we'll see what works and what doesn't. But the reality is doing a little thing often takes as much time and headache and even budget sometimes is a big thing. You have all these things to manage and it's sucking everybody's time up. And by design, most of it's not gonna be a home run. And you're like, wait, do we need to hire more people so that we can make more stuff? But then what are we getting? And then we started taking a look back. We're like, hey, when we do these big pieces of content with Bert Kreischer, a comedian, or we do the Tony Hawk skateboard or the Martha Stewart thing, that one video gets billions of impressions. And we don't spend a ton of money to produce those either. A lot of these celebrities we work with, they're investors in the company, we have relationships with, we come up with really provocative ideas that we wrap around these things. So it's, oh, maybe it's a lot easier to focus on less big moments rather than trying to spread ourselves too thin trying to be always on. And it's like, rather than someone seeing Liquid Death every day in their feed and not everything is great, maybe they only see Liquid Death in their feed every two weeks, but they know when they see something, it's gonna be really good. Oh shit, Liquid Death posted again. This is gonna be fucking great. I gotta watch it. Versus just kind of people getting used to scrolling by it regardless of what it is.

[Harry] What's your lessons been in terms of making celebrity investors work? Do they have to share? Is it discounted sharing for them? What's the lesson in terms of making celebrity investors work? It's finding folks that truly love the brand and understand the humor and wanna be a part of that. And that's why they invest because they truly believe in the brand. They're like, hey, I love this. This is hilarious. They wanna be a part of it. We don't have one celebrity that we try to make the spokesperson or face of Liquid Death. We have all these different celebrities and they come into our weird world and we make this funny, weird thing with them that they wouldn't typically make and then people talk about it and share it because it's interesting. Like Tony Hawk, for example. If we would've just posted a video of Tony Hawk doing a crazy skate trick, it would've gotten no engagement on our social. But we found a funny way to use him where we take his blood and mix it into ink that we printed limited edition skateboards with and filmed it all. To film him taking blood and showing us silk screening skateboards, that cost like $10,000 to shoot that. It was nothing. But the idea was so provocative, every media outlet covered it. Everybody shared it. Everybody talked about it. That's how we approach celebrity. It's not how do we do the funny Liquid Death thing with this person and that they're on board to do it as well.

[Harry] I think that's what people misunderstand is the importance of the amplification on other outlets, which is, as you said, Forbes write about the crazy thing you did or Buzzfeed write about that, and it's more their reinforcement which really gets the matter. Which brand do you most respect and admire? Not Liquid Death. Which brand do you most respect?

[Mike] I say this one a lot and I like it because I think it's one of the most underrated brands of all time, which is Trader Joe's. Do you know that brand?

[Harry] Yeah, I've been to the States. I know Trader Joe's, sure.

[Mike] Okay, people here love Trader Joe's. Like during the pandemic, there was like lines around the block of people. Even though they could only have a certain number of people in the store, people were still willing to wait in line an hour just to still get their fucking Trader Joe's. And Trader Joe's is the first home, a grocery store. All the products in the grocery store are Trader Joe's brand. So it's Trader Joe's butter, Trader Joe's soda, Trader Joe's candy, Trader Joe's frozen pizzas. And they found a way to make a store brand where all these things are similar design feel. They have quirky names. It shows that, oh, when people just believe in this brand where they'll buy Trader Joe's, why? Because when people see Trader Joe's, they've established in people's minds, oh, when it's Trader Joe's, it's gonna be healthier type ingredients, not a bunch of artificial stuff. It's gonna be really good tasting and it's gonna be really good value, pretty cheap in the grand scheme of things. And they have a quirky sort of fun design vibe too. So as long as people believe those things about the brand, you can make all kinds of things like that. Even Whole Foods, one of the top grocery brands, they have their own store brand called 365. And no one really cares about that. Most private label store brand stuff in the US, no one cares about. It's just literally, oh, it's cheaper, so I'll buy it. But Trader Joe's, I think they did it in a way that nobody has ever really been able to do it.

[Harry] If you want my take on what I want for 20VC brand is that you trust 20V so much, regardless of if you know the guest, you don't know the guest, you will listen because you trust that we will curate for you as my goal. Penultimate one, you can go back to the early days of liquid death. You're sitting down with Mike Jr. What do you advise Mike at the founding of liquid death, knowing all you know now?

[Mike] Really understanding how much you're going to have to always raise. You get excited, oh yeah, we're gonna raise. Then it's just like, you're almost constantly raising as a startup, especially in beverage that's very capital intensive. Like you have to get to a certain level before a beverage company can become profitable, unless you're selling a $9 can of something that's got 80% margins on it, which no one's doing. Being smart about how you do that and when you do that and all of that, I didn't know much about any of that going into it. In the early days, you have to lean on other folks that you trust to make the right decisions there. I think we made a lot of the right ones, very few of the wrong ones. Most people going into that don't know much about that, and I think the more you know about that going into it, the better position you'll be. But plenty of companies I've talked to who have brought the complete wrong investors on board that ended up becoming nightmares and almost tanking the company. Luckily, we've had nothing like that. We've been very lucky. We've been able to keep really great investors and great relationships in the company, but I know it's a problem for a lot of folks.

[Harry] Final one is 2028. Where's Liquid Death then, Mike, five years out?

[Mike] Not that far off from Monster or Red Bull, just a much bigger brand known for blurring the lines between being an entertainment company and a beverage brand. Look at Red Bull. They have a very specific genre of action sports entertainment, but most people you think of Red Bull, you think of both the entertainment side and the beverage side, and I think that's ultimately what our goal is. How can we become a multi-billion dollar beverage company that is also in service of creating really great entertainment that people would consume even if they didn't consume the beverage? They're like, oh, but we're going after comedy. Red Bull's not funny. That's action sports. We're all about being funny and comedy and irreverence and all that. I think there's a lot of room for that kind of entertainment.

[Harry] Mike, I love these shows. I so appreciate you being so open. Thank you so much for joining me today, and I really appreciate your flexibility on the schedule.

[Mike] Yeah, no worries. Thanks, Harry. I appreciate it.

[Harry] I told you, a masterclass in storytelling and branding.