The canned water brand Liquid Death just raised $75 million in a new Series C funding round to provide people with mountain water from the Alps. This is the startup that promises to “murder your thirst.” The latest raise for the Santa Monica-based Liquid Death gives the company a valuation of $525 million.
Liquid Death co-founder and CEO Mike Cessario told TechCrunch that his firm is going to do what it can to make it in an already flooded market and without the kind of money that the big corporations have.
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Well, the bottled, or canned, water industry has really gotten out of hand, hasn’t it? Is water from the Alps any better than water from a more local source? At a time of concern over climate change does the world really need yet another company wasting energy by sucking natural water from the ground and putting it into cans or bottles that will do even more harm to the environment?
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Well, apparently marketing really works well for some businesses and so investors see a future in this. Maybe it’s the name? If it’s just about the branding then who cares where the water even comes from? Just fill up the cans from a local faucet somewhere.
“We’re just a funny water company who hates corporate marketing as much as you do. Our evil mission is to make people laugh and get more of them to drink more water more often, all while helping to kill plastic pollution.”
“I don’t know what other water brands spend, but we’re not going to have Coca-Cola or Pepsi-like budgets to spend,” said Cessario. “We don’t have $300 million to throw at something, so every piece of marketing that we make has to be interesting or entertaining so that people organically spread it.”
He said that Liquid Deth will offer new selections with names like Berry It Alive, Severed Lime and Mango Chainsaw. The company sound kind of like it plans to become the Ben & Jerry’s of water.
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Name another water brand where customers take the time to make their own commercials for it. We’ll wait. #BetterThanPoolWater https://t.co/BP1NfBTYBd
— Liquid Death Mountain Water (@LiquidDeath) January 2, 2022
Liquid Death is now carried in more than 29,000 locations across the U.S. It can be found at large chain stores like Whole Foods, Target, Safeway and 7-Eleven. The company’s revenues were close to $45 million in 2021, after it only brought in $3 million in all of 2019.
“When you’re launching a new brand, if you don’t have millions and millions of dollars to push it out there with [advertising], your only chance of survival is the product itself has to be insanely shareable,” Cessario said after a previous fundraise. “You’re going to have a hard enough time funding production. You’re not going to have the money to compete with the Cokes and the Pepsis, so the only way get it out there is if people organically want to share it because of the funny, irreverent marketing.”