Liquid Death CEO Mike Cessario made water cool by targeting Gen Z consumers

Liquid Death, the water and iced tea company easily recognizable by its skeleton-stamped tallboy cans, has been around since 2017, but its recent funding round of $67 million has rocketed it to unicorn status with a $1.4 billion valuation. It swelled to make up 10% of the entire $13 billion low- and no-alcohol beverage industry. 

CEO Mike Cessario told Fortune that he had Gen Z’s love of social media in mind—specifically their proclivity for sharing shocking and meme-able content online—when creating the distinctive brand. 

“If someone sees this on the shelf, do they have to pick it up?” Cessario said. “And then when they do pick it up, is it a high likelihood they have to take a photo of it, and 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?”

Mimicking the colorful cans of brews preferred by concert and club goers, Liquid Death defies the packaging status quo of its “crinkly plastic bottle” competitors. In a crowded market, beer has relied on novel branding to stand out. In a growing beverage industry, why can’t water do the same?

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

Like Jesus turning water into wine, Cessario is the beverage messiah for the Gen Z masses, turning water into beer—creating a beverage for a party but without the hangover—with the help of the TikTok generation’s love of internet absurdity.

Gen Z loves irony, not beer

Fed up on booze, Gen Z and millennials are looking for alternatives, with three in four saying they want a drink with some sort of health benefits, and 59% reporting the need for a non-alcoholic drink for socializing, according to a Material survey of 1,000 Americans aged 18-42. They seemed to have found what they were looking for in Liquid Death. Gen Z and millennials make up over 70% of the company’s customers.

Liquid Death has planted itself right where younger consumers are: It’s the third most-followed beverage brand—between both alcoholic and non-alcoholic brands—on Instagram and TikTok, with a combined following of almost 8 million. 

The brand has flirted with internet virality since its 2017 inception. Before it was a beverage company, Liquid Death was nothing more than an irreverent idea from Cessario and partners J.R. Riggins, Pat Cook, and Will Carsola. Cessario, a graphic designer for advertising agencies at the time, brainstormed the “dumbest name possible” for a healthy drink product and settled on Liquid Death, an ironic moniker for the elixir of life. Cessario and partners trademarked the name two years before products hit shelves in 2019. A teaser video months before Liquid Death launched its first products got over 3 million views. 

Liquid Death’s rise has been meteoric since then. Across 113,000 retailers in the U.S. and UK, it sold $263 million in retail sales in 2023. It expanded the product lineup to lightly-sweetened seltzers and iced tea, as well as electrolyte powders dubbed “Death Dust” and enlisted a star-powered team of investors, including Dune actor Josh Brolin, Tennessee Titans wide receiver DeAndre Hopkins, and Live Nation Entertainment Inc.

The branding elicits millennial nostalgia, with Jackass mainstay Steve-O promoting Liquid Death’s agave-sweetened seltzers (as well as a now sold-out doll stuffed with his real hair). But it’s also shown a knack for capturing a distinctly Gen Z flair for the absurd: A May 2023 TikTok shows someone wrapping a can of Liquid Death in ground beef and baking it into “an edible meat mug.” 

Liquid Death’s marketing strategy is part of the well-established canon of the postmodern advertising that emerged in the “Mad-Men” era of the 1960s, in which advertisements mirrored and conversed with consumer culture, increasingly leading to campaigns that were ironic or self-referential. As Gen Z creates TikToks that embrace the chaotic and absurd, brands are responding with equal levels of disruptive content. 

As Cessario explains to Fortune, Liquid Death’s entire brand identity is poking fun at self-serious brands.

“Liquid Death is a funny brand,” he said. “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.”

By breaking the branding mold, Liquid Death is able to reach beyond its obvious Gen Z audience. Its distinctly punk packaging leans masculine, confounding health food packaging’s reputation of marketing towards its traditional audience of health nuts and women. Cessario envisions a future where not only Gen Z club-goers are drinking Liquid Death: He wants construction workers in a 7-Eleven to grab a Liquid Death off shelves instead of a Monster Energy or Red Bull.

“We’re making healthy products for people that no one really makes healthy products for,” he said.