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Liquid Death
Don’t be scared. It’s just water.
Liquid Death is a canned-water company founded by Mike Cessario with a tagline "murder your thirst". Water is canned by the Austrian beverage company Starzinger in the Upper Austrian town of Frankenmarkt. It was lunched in 2019. In addition there are three flavoured variants, including Mango Chainsaw, Severed Lime, and Berry It Alive. It is also a producer of NFTs, called Murder Head Death Club.
Mike Cessario is a graphic designer, and a former Netflix creative director, who was inspired to create Liquid Death after watching a Vans Warped Tour in 2009, in which concert goers would drink water out of Monster Energy cans to stay hydrated. Cessario said he wondered why no one had marketed water in a manner similar to Monster.
The company started out with Cessario and three other partners, including a bartender and an artist. Before he and his partners chose the name Liquid Death, they thought over different names for the company such as “Southern Thunder”.
Cessario filed a trademark application for the term “Liquid Death” in 2017 and produced a video advertisement to gauge market interest in the product, which received three million views before the water was available to consumers for purchase. Within a few months of release, the company had over 100,000 “likes” on Facebook, more than brands such as Aquafina had generated in their history.
In 2019, Cessario said the company’s plan was to expand to bars, tattoo parlors, and certain barber shops in Los Angeles and Philadelphia as a “lifestyle play”. His idea was that the brand was initially marketed towards straight edge adherents and fans of heavy metal music and punk rock. The drink began selling online, direct to consumers in 2019.
In 2020, the brand expanded into Whole Foods Market in USA where according to Eater it became “the fastest-selling water brand on its shelves”. It then expanded into two hundred 7-Eleven stores in the Los Angeles and San Diego markets as part of a trial run.
A year later gained funding from Live Nation, the stadium events organiser, who said they would sell the drink exclusively in their events and venues for a period of time. In 2021 the company’s revenue rose to $45 million, and in 2022 it was valued at $525 million.
Liquid Death also released Greatest Hates, an album of death metal music created with lyrics from hate comments the company received online; a second album of hate comments, described as “punk rock”, was released. In 2022, during Super Bowl LVI, the company released an advertisement featuring children enjoying the beverage with Judas Priest’s song “Breaking the Law”. Parodying advertisements for alcoholic beverages, the advertisement ends with the tagline – “Don’t be scared, it’s just water”.