How a 41-year-old former ad man birthed a $1.4 billion beverage unicorn by putting water in a can: ‘There’s no reason that only beer can have that kind of cool look and feel’

Liquid Death CEO Mike Cessario is like a lot of 41-year-old guys who used to work in advertising. He likes whisky, bourbon, and Italian spirits, and has a sense of humor that leans toward the satirical. But they didn’t create Liquid Death, a hardcore beverage brand— fresh off a massive $67 million funding round—selling one of the most banal products possible: water.

Now valued at $1.4 billion, a rare unicorn in the age of unicorpses, Liquid Death is a paradox at once simple and profound. How could water in an aluminum can be so valuable? Cessario tells Fortune that it knows something others don’t.

“Liquid Death is a funny brand,” Cessario told Fortune. “We don't actually take ourselves seriously. We don't think we're extreme. We're kind of making fun of all that extreme marketing.”

Cessario’s success with the brand emerged from his distaste for self-serious branding, and really emerged from his past in advertising. In 2014, a public service advertising client asked him to work on a project about the health hazards of sugary drinks. He had an idea to create canned water “just geared as a stunt to poke fun at energy drinks,” he told CNBC.

The client rejected the idea, but it stuck with Cessario for years. Along with collaborators J.R. Riggins, Pat Cook, and Will Carsola, Cessario trademarked Liquid Death in 2017, which he initially dubbed the “dumbest possible name.”

But there’s a lot of method to this intentional dumbness, Cessario explained to Fortune. The trick is that the brand essentially markets itself. “We needed to bake all the marketing and shareability into the product itself, versus something that is just reasonably interesting, and then you have to build this whole marketing campaign around it to make it actually interesting.”

Cessario had a thesis on how younger customers, especially Gen Zers, would react to a self-aware, photogenic brand. He said a successful brand has to have a high likelihood of a user taking a photo of it, “then post it on social for free to all of their followers to spread the awareness of Liquid Death without us having to pay for the awareness.” Such is the stuff of unicorns in 2024.

Punk rockers have to drink water, too

Cessario knew he needed to make a statement with Liquid Death that would immediately draw in customers. He stuck screaming skulls on tallboy cans of water promising to “murder your thirst,” hoping the drink would catch the eye of Gen Z consumers eager to spread anything cool around online.

He also asked himself: What would I want to be seen carrying around a party?

Liquid Death had to be so cool, Cessario hoped, that walking around a club with a can of water would be just as appealing as walking around with a beer. “It looks more like something that fits into a party environment. So it's actually fun to walk around with versus, you know, a crinkly plastic bottle,” he told Fortune. The brand took notes from the overcrowded beer market, where over-the-top designs catch the eye of overwhelmed customers.

“There's no reason that only beer can have that kind of cool look and feel,” he said.

The company was also inspired by a 2009 trip to traveling rock music festival Vans Warped Tour where Cessario watched some friends play a set. After the band members drained their cans of Monster Energy, they’d refill them with water. The dramatic green-and-black energy drink fit the vibe of a rock band, but the water fulfilled a need.

Cessario experiences the same issue hanging out at bars, only wanting to drink one whisky, but needing to hold a drink in his hands for the duration of the outing to blend in. Liquid Death’s party-drink look solved the problem.

“I just don't think there's many healthy brands that are marketing in the same fun sort of use,” Cessario said. “They're even slightly more male-driven humor that you typically only see from unhealthy brands like candy, junk food, fast food—like that's where all the funny, irreverent, cool marketing is.”

Cessario has come full-circle from his pop-punk-inspired lightbulb moment: Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker was featured in an April 2023 TikTok ad for Liquid Death’s limited edition—and very real—“Enema of the State” collectible enema kit. The video has over 4.7 million views and is only one example of the success Liquid Death has over social media, with a following of over almost 8 million across Instagram and TikTok.

Liquid Death’s irreverent online presence is a big part of what helped it reach unicorn status, Cessario said. He didn’t wait long to see success. The company doubled its valuation since 2022 and tripled its revenue in the same period, per Cessario. It sold $263 million in scanned sales in 2023 across 113,000 retailers in the U.S. and UK. These numbers attracted a cadre of star-powered investors including Dune actor Josh Brolin, Tennessee Titans wide receiver DeAndre Hopkins, and Live Nation Entertainment Inc.

Liquid Death still isn’t taking itself too seriously. It expanded its products to agave-sweetened seltzers and iced tea. “Death Dust” electrolyte powders, with flavors like “Severed Lime” and “Mango Chainsaw,” is its next frontier, a chance to make a bigger splash in a smaller market.

“It's a small category, but it's also very fast growing, and not a ton of super interesting brands in the space,” Cessario said. “So us being one of the only funny, sort of irreverent brands in there, we can still sort of have our own little place in it.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com