Sam Parr explores whether quirky brand extensions like Liquid Death's metal yoga studio or limited vinyl records can profitably replace traditional ads. A vinyl album costs $12k to produce versus $500k for an Oscar commercial, and Elon Musk's $700 flamethrower sold millions by matching the brand's identity.
heavy metal yoga studios, you know, where it's like, I think about all these other places where there could be innovation that tied to our general mission of like health. That's like, do we like, what if Liquid Death creates like a chain of heavy metal yoga studios? You know, where it's like people who want to do yoga but they don't want to listen to Yanni when they're doing it. Like, is there some room for like some kind of cool— like, how do you make it a totally new— you could do like this experience.
You could do like tough guy multivitamins if you needed to, right? You could take a healthy product, multivitamins, and be like, okay, cool.
It's kind of interesting actually, you know, rainbows and Care Bears.
Like, maybe we could just make this form factor a little different, brand a little different, right, to speak to a different audience who's, you know.
So you guys have raised, let's say 10, I forget the number, $10 or $12 million. You're not huge yet. You're definitely still getting going. How do you decide? So like at my company, we have a brand that people know and people just, if we make stuff, people will buy it. But in my head, I'm always like, I don't want to make other stuff. Let's just like focus on what we're doing and kick ass at that. And then maybe eventually expand. Whereas you've done these little experiments like the vinyl record and maybe you're also trying to, uh, maybe you weren't joking with your heavy metal yoga thing. In my head I'm like, no, no, no, fuck that. Focus. What, uh, do you have like a, like logistically, how do you decide where to throw a budget at and throw money at in order to—
So let me ask you this. So this, this is what I mean. All these other products that we could potentially make that actually sell or actually succeed. They double as marketing for the water, you know?
Yeah, it's just marketing that's profitable.
It's profitable, exactly. It's like, we made a vinyl record. I can't tell you how many eyeballs that got Liquid Death on from people reposting the album, sharing the album, talking about it. And that album, for us to execute, including printing the vinyl, cost us $12,000. Oh, and we've already made all of our money back, right? And more.
How much staff did you have work on that?
What's that?
How much stat— who worked on it? Like, did you—
we hired a guy that we knew that was a friend of a friend who's an incredible metal musician who wrote the whole album. His name's Gus Rios. He wrote and recorded the whole album. His buddy mixed the whole album, and his buddy mixed stuff for Justin Bieber and all these other guys. So we got the whole album recorded. We made a commercial for it. Maybe $2,000 on stock footage, and my wife edited the video. So it was like, you know, that's all we launched with. It was a little launch video made with stock footage, and we pressed records and sold the records in our merch store. And it's like, all that stuff adds together. That's why it's like, what would it cost to start, let's call it a chain of 5, look, small heavy metal yoga studios in LA, like small little studios, not a lot going on. You find some, you know, some instructors, like maybe you could actually build that out for, call it, $500 grand, let's just say. Like, you could make— you could build a 5-chain yoga studio, heavy metal yoga studio chain, for $500 grand. What does $500 grand buy you if you try to run one TV spot right, during the fucking Oscars. Like, maybe you get a 30-second spot. And what's gonna see more lift and brand evangelism for your brand, running one $500,000 commercial during the Oscars, or building a chain of 5 heavy metal yoga studios in LA that gets talked about by every publication? Heavy metal yoga studio launches in LA, people actually go to it, everyone who goes takes photos and shares and talks about it. It's like, that's a way smarter way to spend your money and you might actually make some of it back if it's a good enough business model.
This is like Elon selling flamethrowers, right?
Right, yeah.
He is the sort of Iron Man trying to be a badass, rockets and drilling into underground and electric sports cars. So he comes out with a flamethrower for $700, I think it was, and he sold, I think he sold like millions of dollars.
A shit ton.
A shit ton.
I think it was $10 million worth.
And the whole thing is basically just being like, you know, feeding the evangelism, like you said, of the cult of Elon, of, yeah, life should be a little more badass. We need a little more fire, a little more speed, and a little more, like, you know, rocketry in our lives. And so it fits the brand.
