Last summer, a new beverage brand hit the market. Accompanying the product release was a two-minute promotional video with some eye-catching details: a man in a skull mask cracking open a cold one to some death metal, a bikini-clad woman emerging from a lagoon in front of an industrial plant, and some seemingly intoxicated shenanigans in a kiddie pool. But the commercial wasn’t advertising beer, or liquor, or even hard seltzer. It was a campaign for Bloody Water, a canned water brand.
Perhaps more surprising than the Bloody Water ad is the fact that its unhinged marketing has become commonplace amongst the new but growing segment of canned water. Plenty of other brands—including Liquid Death and its legions of unaffiliated spin-offs, and other companies like Not Beer and Natural Spirit—are leaning into a gritty, alcohol-inspired aesthetic to grab consumers’ attention. Over the past several months, water startups have been embracing everything from tallboy cans to sexy promotional materials to retro Americana-inspired branding.
These converging trends leads us to an inevitable and important question: What the hell is happening to water?
Revisiting the Wild West of canned water
The gritty new era of water might seem like a wild pivot from water’s health-conscious branding of the recent past, but the water-sphere has actually been primed for disruption for several years. Andrea Hernández, author of the food and beverage trends newsletter Snaxshot, has studied the past few decades of the bottled and canned water business. She says that context for this latest branding fad can be traced back to the 1980s, when LaCroix first hit the scene and snagged customers from upscale sparkling water brands like Perrier.
“It sounds ridiculous, but LaCroix debuted with an intentionally bad design because they were the anti-stuffy, anti-European, anti-snobby water,” Hernández says. “That’s something that led to their success.”
LaCroix’s original appeal came from marketing itself toward the middle class consumer, which offered a refreshing reprieve from a water aisle designed to exude luxury. In fact, many of the brand’s first fans were Midwestern moms. But that low profile didn’t last forever. By the early 2010s, seltzer was seeing a huge surge in interest, with LaCroix at the forefront. Between 2010 and 2014, LaCroix’s parent company saw its market share within water’s segment of the beverage industry jump by 67%. In 2016, bottled water sales outpaced soda by sales volume for the first year ever—a trend that’s continued every year since.
Soon, other companies started to catch on to LaCroix’s success, and the water industry entered a rapid state of flux. In 2019, LaCroix experienced a near-catastrophic plunge in sales as its sparkling water competitors multiplied. Big beverage companies took their own swings at the sparkling water category, with Coca-Cola buying Topo Chico and launching AHA and Pepsi launching Bubly. Hernández says these launches were designed to capture Gen Z’s attention through pretty packaging and aesthetic marketing campaigns.
But while younger consumers may have helped to usher in the explosion of water brands, they’ve quickly grown tired of the same monotonous options on grocery store shelves. The oversaturation of “millenial pastels” in water branding have become another form of status signaling, just as Perrier’s green bottle once served as a symbol of the “snobby” water drinker. Now, the pendulum is swinging back in the opposite direction.
“Why is Liquid Death such a Gen Z drink of choice? Because it’s sustainable and it has this rebelliousness about it—it’s a very unorthodox way of going about a canned water,” Hernández says.
Canned water goes punk
Since Liquid Death’s launch in 2019, the company has shown that flipping mainstream marketing narratives can make for major profits. Liquid Death’s edgy messaging is the antithesis of millennial pastels—at least in its early days, it’s what sets it apart from the crowd. In 2022, Liquid Death CEO Mike Cessario told Fast Company that the product is “a brand more than [a] water company.” After the company’s most recent funding round closed in March, its valuation soared to $1.4 billion.
“How do you hedge against someone like Pepsi or Coca-Cola? You do something that they could never: something grotesque,” Hernández says. “Branding became their moat, because there’s no way Coca-Cola or Pepsi could even touch that with a 10-foot pole.”
Liquid Death’s counterintuitive strategy isn’t going unnoticed. Other startups are catching on to what Hernández calls Gen Z’s aversion to “boring water,” and they’re putting their own spin on the edgy water concept. Dillon Dandurand, founder of the startup Not Beer, first began thinking about his sparking water brand after he saw a billboard for Bud Light Next, a zero-carb, nonalcoholic beer.
“I said to my friend, ‘What are we doing here?’” Dandurand says. “There’s no carbs, which is what beer is made from. There’s no alcohol, which is why we drink beer. At what point is this no longer a beer? What if we just remove the flavor, and it’s sparkling water, and we call it Not Beer?”
The idea sparked some riffing and a few laughs at first. But a few months later, after he tried a Liquid Death at a music festival, Dandurand started to feel like he might actually be onto something. With its bold design, tallboy can, and subtle fizz, he says the drink “played this psychological trick” that made him feel like he was drinking a beer.
“[Alcohol companies] sell us fun, relaxation, confidence, inclusion,” Dandurand says. “They sell us this fantasy world when we drink their products, where the party is better, the people are hotter, and the jokes are funnier. When I was drinking that Liquid Death, I felt like I was a part of that fantasy world.”
Designing a beer-ified water
There are several reasons why consumers might be looking to find a “fantasy world” experience without alcohol. According to a 2023 report from the beverage market analysis company IWSR, moderation, health, and wellness are driving more consumers toward a no- and low-alcohol lifestyle.
The category grew by 29% from 2022 to 2023, reaching a valuation of over $1.8 billion by year-end. Susie Goldspink, the IWSR’s head of no- and low-alcohol insights, says that young adult consumers are increasingly looking for a drink to substitute alcohol at home or in a social setting. Products like no-alcohol beer, alcohol adjacent products, and water marketed like beer all fit into that niche.
Dandurand wanted Not Beer, which is a lightly carbonated electrolyte water, to allow people to blend in at a bar or party where others might be drinking alcohol. So, alongside freelance designers Phillip Nessen and Josh Kaplan, he started combing through the visual identities of legacy beer brands like Pabst and Miller Lite for design inspiration.
The resulting product is a tallboy rendered in bright red, white, and blue. Stylized cursive fonts bring a retro feel to the can, while the rooster logo is meant to reflect feelings of confidence and pride. Not Beer’s slogan, “Never a bad time,” is a riff on the common beer tagline, “Cheers to a good time.” And their marketing materials on social media evoke an all-American summer by the beach. It’s heavy on the patriotism, to an almost satirical degree.
A vice-like canned water
The duo behind Natural Spirit, another beer-ified water startup, took a similar design approach to their product. Cofounders Evan Slagle and Joe Soriero came from backgrounds in natural wine and craft beer brewing, respectively. While working in the industry, they began to hear from bartending peers about an increased demand for nonalcoholic beverages. So they decided to design a beer-inspired water.
“We both love dive bar culture and retro vibes, so the design really flows from that idea,” Soriero says.
Using his background in design, Slagle created the can’s branding himself. It features a red and white base with black accents, paired with a slanted serif font and a detailed crest logo. It looks like a pack of Marlboro Reds in a can.
Natural Spirit was originally intended as a one-off release, but the response from customers and industry professionals was so strong that Soriero and Slagle decided to build it into a real company. Part of the brand’s appeal, Soriero says, is that it taps into a growing interest in the Americana aesthetic, a trend that’s extending beyond the beverage industry to music (think Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter) and fashion (i.e. Pharrell Williams’s Western collaboration with Louis Vuitton).
Natural Spirit and Not Beer both source their water from the U.S., and Liquid Death faced criticism for shipping water in from the Alps before beginning to source its U.S. product domestically in late 2022. Using local water is a strategic reversal from the days of Perrier and Fiji, whose overseas sourcing “used to be what made them alluring,” according to Hernández. Today that strategy has fallen out of fashion.
“If I go into [a bar] and they have like San Pellegrino—I mean, I’m half Italian, I love San Pellegrino—but I’m like, ‘Hey, like why do you have this Italian water shipped in from Europe when you can have this one right in your backyard?’” Soriero says.
What’s next for the water-verse?
Brands like Liquid Death, Bloody Water, Natural Spirit, and Not Beer occupy a niche that established brands are unable to encroach on. Still, as canned water rises in popularity and consumers become more interested in ditching plastic for more sustainable materials, some major water companies are dipping their toes into the beer-ified water space.
This April, Smartwater—owned by Coca-Cola—debuted a sleek canned version of their product to accompany the original bottles. The cans have a slim profile and come in minimal blue and black. While they don’t quite resemble beer cans, they do look closer to a hard seltzer than a plain water. Sadie Ellison, Smartwater’s senior brand manager, noted that “expanding the occasion for Smartwater” was top of mind with the new design: “Whether that’s at a party, the beach, or a bar, we’ve got you covered with a pure, crisp hydration option,” Ellison wrote in an email to Fast Company.
It’s safe to say that cans are coming out on top of plastic bottles for the foreseeable future of water branding. But whether the beer-inspired branding lasts is another story entirely. The water fad cycle has always been fast, but it seems that the rate of turnover has become more frantic in recent years. And while Liquid Death and other avant-garde startups are at the top for now, the pendulum never stays put for long.