Poppi

“Yeah, so you and your husband are one of the fathers of poppi, which sold for two billion dollars. And I would have to say, you probably win the award for brand glow up because one of my favorite things to watch is this old Shark Tank video of you guys.”

“Yeah, what was it called originally? Mothers or something? Oh, so embarrassing. You had to say it out loud. Mother Beverage. And yes, I think it was a globe of the century, the best of all time.”

“And then we decided to launch poppi March 3rd, 2020, the first week of COVID. And it was like the first time everyone's thinking about their health and wellness. It's the first time people are looking at labels and wanting to understand what they're putting into your body and how can I boost my immune system”

“And so for us, it was one of those things that like we'd been doing it for a bit. Mother Beverage at the time, we had done about 500,000 in revenue. And it was that point of like, if we don't get investment, we can't sustain this, right? We were working 80 hours a week.”

“And she's the one that did all the rebrand with us from mother to poppi. So, being able to bring that to life really early on allowed us to then focus on the brand. So, what I mean is when we're in mother, we were so focused on putting caps on bottles, I couldn't even have thought about what the marketing strategy was.”

“They were like, Oh, there's sparkling water, or better for you, this. After the Super Bowl, we said we were soda 17 times in that Super Bowl ad. Afterwards, everyone calls it a soda. So, there was a lot of intentional motion behind why we did that, and it was breakthrough for us.”

“And so, what happened is we done a bunch of brain work. We put together a creative campaign on how we're the future of the soda or future of soda is now called poppi. And we brought this creative to life and we saw it.”

“in all of human existence, things have been done a certain way and soda's been done a certain way. This is poppi. poppi looks like soda. It tastes like soda, but and then it has the differentiator at the end of it. And so like, I kind of dig that. Like, the, I think positioning is super underrated.”

“You know, and I think it's, it's this ever-breathing document. So when we first launched, it was apple cider vinegar, prebiotics, like super simple gut health. We knew we were going after soda.”

“We knew we were going after soda. No, it goes back to nobody believed us. We didn't even know, but hey, we're going to try. This is a huge category. And kombucha was on the decline.”

“So we knew all of those things are the facts that we know. And what we knew is once we launched, people were starting to have this use occasion where they were drinking poppi in the same occasion as soda. And so it was, we got more data points along the way.”

“We're like, wait, people don't really care about that that much. We changed it to soda's back better than ever. We were constantly tweaking and changing as the consumer was changing in the use occasion of what people were saying about us online, what we were listening to our consumers.”

“And we had root beer and it was brown. And I was like, oh, but such a core soda flavor. And so I was like, okay, we got to figure out how to do this. And our consumers telling us it tasted horrible. And we were like, maybe we should listen to them.”

“Or what do you want to do next? Or like, what's the hottest thing? The beauty of poppi is we figured it out before everybody else. So for example, protein is so hot right now. Everyone's trying to figure out how to put protein in from ice cream to drinks to, you know, you see what David is doing with the protein bar and all of this.”

“Because I think every entrepreneur on their second act, their third act, they get to decide. So what's crazy is obviously we exited the company and then Pepsi gave everybody jobs that were poppi employees, but you don't sell your company. Then they're like, hey, here's your employee badge.”

“But as an advisor, you have to take a step back from the day-to-day of the business. And I still like adore poppi and I'm just so happy for everything that's happening there. But I have a lot more time on my hands. And I'm just really intense. I'm really hyper. I love chaos.”

“So I think a lot of people with starting a company, they try to get a little bit too niche. And apple cider vinegar mother beverage was really niche. That's a great example. It was for people that, you know, my grandma told me I should drink that or like, yeah, that does help my tummy.”

“You know, and I've never been sick from it, but is what happened is, you know, I worked for 10 years at poppi. I think I went to the doctor like once. You know, you're just like on this build mode. But I was like, oh, wait, okay, I need to get my life together on like the wellness front.”

“So you tap into emotion and you make something that they grew up with just a little bit better, right? That's what we did at poppi. We have cola, we have root beer, we have cream soda, we have all of these flavors that people grew up, and we're just better, right? And so, instead of being like, hey, we're poppi, we also have ashwagandha and lion's mane, and we have 38 other ingredients”

“And that's what I mean, that 10 to 15% better. By the way, I started drinking poppi so much more when the pre-biot or probiotic messaging was a little bit different. Before, when I used to see, I used to see it at Royal Blue grocery store, and I was like, Is this supposed to be like a health, a health drink?”

“supposed to be like a health, a health drink? I was like, What is this? And there was an evolution of that bee got happy, but get healthy to soda. We found people didn't care, and you're like, That's a perfect example. And we got that from the consumer, and so we just started leaning into our consumer journey.”

“Apple, Nike. They even wanted Pepsi because they wanted poppi, like all this stuff. I mean, those all sound like great buys. They were great. But we give them $5,000 to invest, you know, and you come back and some were down, some were up, depending on what they were doing.”

“And now we have access to so many more things than we did before. For example, we were the official soda of the Lakers and could not be sold in the stadium because it was a coat contract. We can't be at Madison Square Garden. We can't be at Taco Bell Subway.”

“But they offered 100% of the company. So it was a great deal. They offered to give all of the poppi people that wanted jobs jobs. So we knew that that was going to be incredible for the workforce. 99.9% of every employee had equity.”

“soda company is buying a soda company and there's no monopoly there. And we passed the 30-day mark and we signed the paperwork. So it was actually a shorter process than most people go through.”

“So it's like all these people talk about hating their jobs and stuff. Like, oh, that's such a toxic environment. I think it's like how we operated even at poppi was it was fun. You know, the ability to put myself out there fully, awkwardly, authentically, like online and crazy dances. Like it was the culture within poppi too.”

“And I was like, you got to get out there. People need to hear from you. He is so smart. We did very different things at poppi. I ran our creative brand, like all the fun stuff that you get to see. And yet he ran our entire innovation team and supply chain and all this stuff.”

“what is it really? Right. Cause when he, when he talked about this poppi thing, it was like, I think when they started, it was like apple cider vinegar as a, as a drink supplement. And he was called like mother's miracle or something. He was like, we need to make clean soda.”