Steve Manet founded Liquid Death in 2019 with Austrian mountain water, but retailers rejected it as too risky. The brand grew through Amazon and direct sales by leaning into humor and user-generated videos, positioning water as something actually fun to drink.
Hi, we're here with Steve Manet of Liquid Death. So Steve, tell me a little bit about the origin of the company. Why was it started? When was it started?
So Liquid Death was started, first product landed in 2019, January. No retailers wanted to take us because they thought it was too much of a risk. So we sold on Amazon and D2C. Liquid Death is an Austrian mountain water. Our goal is just to make health and sustainability 50 times more fun. Demographic that we service is anybody that has a sense of humor. Yeah, this is just mostly fan videos that people send in. We do contests called Crack Open a Water. Most recently, we just launched a Super Bowl commercial. Super Bowl commercial was all about don't be scared, it's just water. People look at this, they think it's beer, they think it's energy. It's just water. It's supposed to be the healthiest thing you're supposed to drink in the world, and we make it cool.
