Brian Becker (00:05.806)
Hey, what's up everybody? Welcome to another episode of Y Brands Work. We're here with Will as usual. How's it going, Will? What's up? Excited to jump into this one. Yeah, today we are going to be covering athletic brewing, which funnily enough, I've been consistently writing athletic greens when I've been doing research for this just because we're doing two athletics back to back. -huh. Yeah. But, you know, I guess we should be referring to it as AG1. But today we're going from the health powder into

healthy beer almost is almost how you could categorize it. Yeah. Yeah. It's funny you say that. I do the same thing. Like I'll say athletic greens, but then I'm like, it's athletic brewing or I'll do vice versa. So yeah. Yeah. But I mean, honestly, that's kind of an interesting place to start is, you know, the word athletic is very intentional here. You know, the, the idea of like, athletic greens is obviously it's built for athletes. It's people that care about their health.

Similarly here, athletic brewing is built from that same, you know, solving the founder's need of being able to have a drink that they can, you know, beer, they like beer, they want to be able to keep drinking it, but feeling like it's not impacting their performance as, you know, in business and life, being able to work out things like that. And so there's a lot of parallels here that, you know, how mixing in habits or replacing habits with things that are just slightly healthier for you.

which I think is really indicative of a overall kind of macro trend that we'll get into here in a little bit of like why this is working so well and what's going on and why this brand works. So first off, let's start talking about it. Do you want to give us a quick intro on Athletic Brewing, what the brand is, what they're doing? Right, so Athletic Brewing is a non -alcoholic beer brand. And, or in a beer,

and as some people call it and they're really like non - they lead with you know like Heineken has Heineken Zero but they also still have you know all these other beers or Sam Adams has a non -alcoholic beer they still have all these alcoholic beers so their whole brand is centered around being non -alcoholic and so yeah so they you know think about any beer that you would drink like an IPA or

Brian Becker (02:29.07)
Pilsner or something like that. You can get that in non -alcoholic form through athletic brewing. And they are the market leader in this category. And actually, first to market, even compared to Heineken Zero, Sam Adams Zero, I think there's now a Corona Zero and a Guinness Zero. All of those beers came after, it kind of seems like athletic brewing almost pioneered

this market in a way. They're the market leader. You know, obviously, there's been what's it Odell's, you know, I think Odell's have been around for forever. Yeah, that's yeah. I think that says a non alcoholic as well. But yeah, I think one of the things that you really hit on there that's super important about this product is that, you know, Odell's or, you know, whatever. No, it's not a does it's a duals. Yeah, a duals. They're just like a flavorless lager.

You know, and they have, you know, this is something that the co -founder has talked about quite a bit, or the founder, is that previously, you know, non -alcoholic beer was actually born out of the prohibition. You know, it was a solution to still being able to serve up a drink, you know, and have it be beer, but it's non -alcoholic. And the process for creating that was just burning off all the alcohol. So you would brew the beer and then just boil off the alcohol, which also boils off the alcohol.

the flavor. And so, you know, for someone that likes IPA or, you know, even like a hazy IPA or a porter or something like that, you know, that was never an option for non alcoholic beer until athletic brewing came around and actually did a lot of intense research and, you know, R &D into being able to create beer flavors without the alcohol. It's a totally different process of

very, very fine tuning, very refined process of exactly the right temperature to maintain the quality of the hops and all this kind of stuff. And I think that was something really interesting that I learned about this is just that the reason that non -alcoholic beer has been so flavorless for so long is that there really wasn't a process for making flavorful non -alcoholic beer until Athletic Brewing came up with it. Yeah. I mean, like I said, were they actually the...

Brian Becker (04:52.174)
first ones, I never knew that. I knew they were like the category leader by far, but I didn't know that they were like actually the ones that first, I mean, like you said, O'Doul's been around in Bex and that they were brewing, they were sort of like boiling off the alcohol, but I did not know that. Yeah, I think that they really kind of pioneered the NA movement here around beer, specifically craft beer. That's really what it comes down to. They pioneered NA craft beer. Cause that's something just, let me just.

real fast. His name is Bill Schufeldt. Let's stop talking about him as the founder or whatever. Bill is a self -proclaimed love food, love drinks, and he worked at a hedge fund, actually. And so, you know, very high demand job. It was all, it's Steve Cohen's hedge fund, which have you heard of them? Did you know who Steve Cohen is? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Steve Cohen, he owns the Mets, the Panthers. Right, yeah.

Yeah, I had to look him up. To be honest, I was not sure who he was. But I also found out in my research, apparently the show Billions, have you seen that show at all? Yeah. It's like the Yellowstone of hedge fund or like the Game of Thrones for hedge fund people. Apparently Billions is based off of this hedge fund. Yeah. That's like the rumor. And so he worked at this incredibly high octane, crazy level, you know, everybody in the room is

the smartest person from the best school and they all work at this insane hedge fund, right? And in New York, half of the job is being there at 6 a and then working until 5 p But the second half of the job is then being out from 5 p to 11 p every night. You know, going out with clients, drinking, talking to people. You know, there's a big social element to it. And you just can't survive without having like a drink in your hand all the time.

And so that's really what kind of spread this on for Bill is that he wanted to be able to have, you know, there were no good options out there. You can't go and there was nothing that you could drink that felt, you know, like you were still enjoying yourself and was actually a pleasure to drink. It's just you're going out there and, you know, either opting out, which is kind of like a social faux pas in a way. We know when you're out there, you feel weird about it. We talked about this with liquid death before where, you know, drinking water out of a liquid death can feels like you're drinking.

Brian Becker (07:11.661)
at an event instead of, it's like almost a beer replacement. And so I thought that was super, you know, again, we see this over and over again, the best brands are always driven by people that have a direct need for it and can kind of scratch their own itch, solve their own problem. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that is like a, you know, we've talked about that playbook scratch your own itch, solve your own problem. And that, that is true with this brand for sure. You know, the founder was in a very

Yeah, you touched on it like a very demanding position, demanding job where, yeah, alcohol can really impact your sleep schedule and stuff like that, your performance. And yeah, so he definitely scratched his own itch on that. Yeah, and arguably at the perfect time, you know, because we're talking about a fair the market leader, I think he started working on this idea in like 2014. Yeah.

It's almost a decade ago before the Andrew Huberman podcast that everyone has listened to about like how bad alcohol is for you. You know, back then it was like alcohol was still, I mean, alcohol still is, you know, a big part of people's lives, but there was this whole movement. If you remember, like even within the biohacking community where this is kind of the basement to where it was like, drink two glasses of wine at night. I don't know if you remember Tim Ferriss talking.

yeah, and the four hour body, 100%. That was like a thing, you know, like I drink wine now, you know, and people were doing that. But then it was, yeah, this was pre Dr. Peter Atiya and Andrew Heberman, the whole sort of anti -alcohol trend we're on right now. Yeah, yeah. Which we've seen a ton of this pop up, you know, there's so many NA cocktail brands and things like that now too, like non -alcoholic spirits.

Then there's also a big uptick in the amount of CBD kind of replacement or like adaptogen drinks and things. And the market is just drinking this up. Gen Z apparently has like the lowest level of drinking, alcohol consumption across the board of penetration in the market. And it's obviously, it's a great place for us to be moving towards at the end of the day. Because alcohol is terrible for us, but.

Brian Becker (09:33.709)
you know, at the end of the day, you and I have had beers together. We enjoy it. It's fun to go out and have a couple drinks and whatnot. But the thing is, it really is terrible for you. And it's nice to have some alternatives. Which brings me to one more point on this is that he's apparently 80 % of athletic brewing customers still consume alcohol. I did not know that. I could see that. Like it's like a new behavior almost.

exactly. Where like, cause I've noticed this too, like I was, this was funny. I went on like a hiking trip a few weeks ago and we went to Chipotle afterwards and there was all these bikers there, like not like road bikers and they got Chipotle and then they brought in a six pack of athletic brew and we're just sitting there drinking it. Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, because it's that it's

I've been thinking about it because we're recording this right now, end of June. Next week is 4th of July. We're flying back to the East Coast to hang out with the family. We're going to go to the beach together. And that's always typically a drinking situation. Going to have beers on the beach and play cornhole and hang out. But I'm thinking about it now because you couldn't order it to Georgia. So you sent it to me.

when we bought it for the podcast. And it's amazing. It's so good. I had had it before, but I drank like, I've been kind of limiting myself. I'm like, I wanna keep some of these. I even made bratwurst with it last week. Like I beer boiled the brats in it to kind of try that too. It turned out great. Yeah. Yeah. And so, but with this and having it, it made me realize, this is such a good replacement behavior. I can go to the beach.

That doesn't mean I'm not gonna drink at the beach, you know when we're there for the 4th of July, but you know, maybe Switch off back and forth, you know have a beer and then have an athletic brew and then have it go back to an alcoholic beer and then have an athletic brew because it just It creates a habit where I feel a little bit healthier I'm gonna feel a little bit better the next day Maybe you know that the day will feel a little bit longer because you don't get into that haze of where you've just had too many beers And so it's a really interesting way to kind of work

Brian Becker (11:52.333)
work through the drinking culture that we live in because it's so hard to socialize sometimes or so hard to be in those social situations without having a drink in your hand. Yeah. So it's good for pacing. This is a good behavior. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. No, exactly. Yeah, it really does. I mean, this trend, this macro trend is so crazy. I didn't really know about it until we started looking into it. I mean, I'd heard of Heineken's room.

and athletic brewing and I had tried it and you know, I don't really drink that much myself. I hardly ever drink. So I was somewhat not maybe necessarily adopting it, but it wasn't until we did Liquid Death where I realized this whole crazy subculture within, I'm not even talking about people that are drinking non -alcoholic beers. I'm talking about the subculture of brands popping up that are non -alcoholic.

I started connecting with all these different people on LinkedIn. It's not just beer companies. It's a lot of like gin, replacements, rum, whiskey, all sorts of like elixirs. Like there's this whole scene. There was one guy I connected with started this whole new store. It was like, he's trying to be like the Amazon of non -alcohol is wild. It is a very, very fast growing trend. Yeah. Yeah. I think there's just a lot more consciousness around the health implications of alcohol.

you know, but we see that we see that it looks macro to us. It's still only I think 1 .5 % of beer consumed in the U. S. Is non alcoholic beer though. so it's a very small, small group that has adopted it so far. But I think that in a, you know, as more and more Gen Z or, you know, Gen Z kind of develops and that that most whole word and even Gen alpha gets to

drinking age, I think that that's we're going to see an even even higher uptick in adoption of this. But yeah, the market is expanding so quickly. And you know, I think it just comes back to that every, you know, there's, I wouldn't consider myself a heavy drinker, I would say I'm a regular drinker, though. I, I let you know, going out to dinner, I love to have like a beer, you know, that's, that's a go to for me. But the it's more the ritual about it, you know, I want to go and sit down and just have

Brian Becker (14:19.181)
have kind of that placebo effect almost of just having something in your hand, you're sitting down, it's a little different than just like having water with your meal because I don't really drink soda. And so, you know, switching to that, it's like, okay, well, there's, this is the treat that I'm going to have with my meal. And so just being able to have, I'd love to be able to have a draft athletic brew option where I can still kind of get that, that feeling of having a drink.

but I'm not, you know, the alcohol, it's not about the alcohol for me. I think the relaxing thing is the ritual. It's the like sitting down, having something, the taste of the flavor is a little bit different and you know, it feels just like, hey, it's the weekend or you know, it's the end of the day and I'm winding down. And I think that's why so many of these, you know, I think the best word is like the elixirs, because that's how they kind of.

brand themselves all the time with these botanicals and adaptogens and all this stuff or whatever to kind of make you feel good or heighten your feelings. Or even some of them going as far as having THC in them is such an interesting development in the market. Yeah, it's crazy trends. Probably one of the I mean, I think you're right, like we're, we're like really on top of like the early adopters. And we're just assuming this is a macro trend, but

It's maybe it's a micro trend, I guess, technically, you zoom out, but it is probably one of the faster ones I've seen. Definitely. Okay. So we've kind of been waffling backwards, back and forth between like the product itself and the team. is there anything else, you know, that you want to say specifically about, the product and you know, the flavors or anything that you, that you see right now that you feel like is a standout kind of reason that

this product specifically works? Yeah, I mean, I think for me, like I do like as someone who has always been like, and at least in the past 10 years, like I would drink and then I wouldn't. And so I've like waffle back and forth lately. Now, like for the past two years, I haven't really been drinking. But it always felt like something was missing. But now that I can get these non alcoholic beers like

Brian Becker (16:34.541)
Heineken zero or I could or I'll bring like a six pack of athletic brew. I brought that to a party a few weeks ago And it's like totally replaced it for me. It's like now kind of like what you're talking about that placebo It's not even about the alcohol itself. It's just like I need personally some people don't like beer but I actually do like the taste of like an IPA or something like that and it's it's not like

100 % but it is like it checks the box, you know where I can get like the IPA with the meal and it's like I feel good and I don't get that alcohol feeling afterwards, which if you're if you've ever quit for a long time and you come back to it like you'll notice it you'll just there's like this fog that develops I get kind of red sometimes now if I just have a beer and then obviously it affects my sleep too.

It'll also cause other weird things to trigger like, like now I want that dessert or now let's have another beer, you know? And it's like, it's, it kind of avoids all those vices that would get triggered after you had a beer or two. But you still get the upside of just enjoying it. Totally. Yeah. No, it's a, it's a huge, I think the market is right for it in terms of the product itself. And then for me, you know, as we kind of mentioned already, it's the innovation on the space in terms.

Like, you know, something that the founder said in one of the podcasts I listened to was that it had not been innovated on since Prohibition. You know, nobody had thought about making beer in a way that made non -alcoholic beer great. And so there's a there's just a period of time that the only option was a duals and it was stigmatized, you know, and Budweiser and Coors, they had no interest in

kind of developing NA beers or pushing that or anything like that, because most of their market is people who consume alcohol already. And it's losing that stigma of, it's somebody in recovery. They're drinking non -alcoholic beer because they still have the habit, but they can't have alcohol or anything like that. And it's just becoming more of a lifestyle choice. Cool. Well, let's talk about, so we've already touched on

Brian Becker (18:53.997)
on Bill a little bit. We touched on his background. He's in finance. And one day at dinner, apparently his wife just said, hey, I think that you should run with this. I think you should really tackle this. And he quit his job. He kind of had it rolling in the background already. But he just quit his job at the hedge fund and went full in on this and just started researching all the brewing techniques and things like that.

just looking for a master brewer, somebody that could come in and help them actually, you know, co -found this and, and work. Cause he didn't have a product yet. He just had the idea. He had kind of the learnings, the trends that he's already seen from, from working in finance. I think that's another big portion of it is that while he's scratching his own itch, he also is very good at analyzing ideas and analyzing companies. That's what he did for a living. So being able to look at market trends and say, Hey, this is, there's potential here. I think probably also.

spurred him and gave him and his wife kind of the confidence of him to quit this, you know, that's a career, career made job. You know, you can be at that hedge fund and, you know, retire in your sixties with millions and millions and millions of dollars. So what does it take to kind of jump off and do something else? And something he mentioned is that he wanted to do something that was interesting and also something that would help other people, you know, cause he, he, he sees athletic brewing as a way to.

affect many people's lives and bring more positive into the world. And so like I said, he was on this journey to find another co -founder, someone to work with on this. And he was apparently going into pitches saying, listen, don't hang up yet, but I want to make non -alcoholic beer. And he was just getting totally shut down by people left and right because nobody really wanted to focus on this until he found his co -founder. His name is...

John Walker, I believe, was the second. He's like an award -winning brewmaster, I forget the word here. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, he obviously came from like a very, like a very big background in brewing, like award -winning craft brews. And yeah, I mean, I think you summed it up like what I heard, like he was calling around all these people and probably getting rejected a lot.

Brian Becker (21:16.333)
and I think he, it took him a long time to find that, that co -founder. but he really found the right guy because it makes the quality of the beer. And you can tell that like, they put a lot into it. I think I was reading something where it took them like 30 times to get like the first batch right. Maybe I forget where I read that. so yeah, it's, it's, it, it's like, again, a very good co -founding team here.

You get someone that really understands the product and then you get somebody who really understands, you know, the market. Not only that, but just like we hit the background coming from a hedge fund. And I think we'll talk about it a little bit more, like the level of a performer you need to be to work there. And just tactically, this company does things very, very well. I've seen athletic.

athletic brewing do it like they just execute very, very well. And I would imagine like that comes from just years working on Wall Street, working in those high positions, working with some very talented and smart people. And you can see that kind of in the execution of the brand. Yeah. Yep. Being a great operator solves most things at the end of the day. Yeah. They've got a great.

Operation, that's a good way to put it, just like operationally they are very sound. Yeah, I think now they have like three different breweries, like locations, or they have two and they're building the third or three and they're building the fourth. The first one they built during COVID, you know, and all of that out of necessity actually, because nobody would brew for them. They were having a hard time finding like a, you know, a co -packer, co -manufacturer.

to actually brew their beer for them. And so they went out and had to just build their own. And that's a lot of what they put their seed money and their investment into is actually building their own breweries. One other kind of interesting thing about the, because we talk about, their skill sets are really work well together and this person does this and this person does that and they're like kind of co -founder relationship but.

Brian Becker (23:41.325)
I think even more importantly, and you and I know this quite well because we knew each other before kind of as friends from Vietnam. And then, and so we had a very culturally similar background in terms of what our values are around, you know, like having a remote company and prioritizing that kind of like work life balance for us and our team and that kind of thing, right? Apparently they're both from Connecticut.

And so even though John, who was the brewer, was in Santa Fe or New Mexico, it was actually an opportunity for John to be able to move back to Connecticut because he had just started a family and have his kids be near their family. So that's, you know, it's just like those kind of little luck, serendipitous things are also so incredibly important in like a co -founder relationship because of how much, you know, he's like, we had never met each other. And then we.

bought a warehouse and we're working together eight hours a day doing hundreds of tests on like beer cultures, you know? And so you have to kind of have those little like, and then, and we found out by the way, we have kind of complimentary skill sets that we never would, that we didn't really look for initially. It was just like, okay, this is the relationship started and now we're going to do it. And so that's another kind of little thing that I think really makes, can sometimes make or break a business, you know, like,

If you and I had a different relationship where we didn't feel like we could work as well together as we do, Flow Candy would have been done two or three years ago. And so you kind of get lucky or you don't with some of those things. And this is definitely one of those situations where they had some cultural relevance. And maybe there's a benefit of John getting to boot back to the East Coast that I think is kind of sometimes people overlook in like what makes a brand work.

Yeah, I think that's interesting. I didn't realize that in my research. And, you know, I did think that at the time it's like, man, like you have a guy coming from a hedge fund that is again, and we talked about it, like being on Wall Street is demanding. All right. Hedge funds, you know, I don't know if you know much about, I don't know a little bit about it. It's like you started a Vesa bank and you have to eventually work your way to where you start out working for a hedge fund. You have to have some experience.

Brian Becker (25:55.629)
And then you work at this one hedge fund that's notorious, you know, the show Billions is made off of apparently. And, you know, it's like, it's like that culture is crazy. And then the beer culture, you know, is, you know, there's some pros and negatives to it, but blending that, you know, from a co -founder perspective from Wall Street, it's interesting that they were able to thread that needle. Yeah, yeah, no, I totally agree.

And maybe it's the cultural relevance of being from the same area, seeing the vision, understanding the vision. There could be a lot of that in there. But yeah, it's very much a classic story of got to have the right drive to solve this problem, preferably for yourself.

When it comes to brands that work for founders, it's just that we've seen it over and over and over again. And this is just just one of those those that happens to be and then having the right co founder partner, you know, finding somebody that you work well with together. And then third, which you mentioned is like, there's got to be you know, he's dialed in if he was able to get himself to a career at, you know, Steve Cohen's hedge fund.

And so he's obviously an incredible operator. And so, and he's mentioned in other podcasts and stuff that he he's on the grind, but he loves the grind too. You know, he's a really, he's a family oriented guy where he'll spend a few hours in the morning with his kids. They go off to school. He works for X amount of time, spends a few hours with them again, and then he works again. He does like two work days per day basically. and so obviously he's just really, he's, he's pinpoint dialed in on the

on the operations side that's what you need to run a huge, huge company like this. Cool, well let's pivot over to the marketing stuff and start talking about how this, because this was a great idea. They started putting stuff together, but a lot of ideas just stay at that phase. You might even get a product together. I'm sure we have many listeners and brand owners we know and stuff like that that kind of feel that they're in that stage where they have a great idea.

Brian Becker (28:08.813)
and they have a really good product, but their problem is just getting into the hands of the people that are going to be their customers or their advocates. So why don't you start, what's kind of standing out for you around athletic brewing and their marketing and how they actually started to get athletic into customers' hands? Yeah, I mean, I think what originally stands out is this category is exploding right now. I think I saw that

It grew like 32 % in 2023. And so that's like really, really interesting. So you talked about this before, like a high tide raises all boats. Tight mantra here where it's like part of their success is just this category is booming. Part of liquid death success. I mean, liquid death crosses over a couple of different categories, but part of their success was this too.

So that sticks out to me from the marketing perspective. Another thing that sticks out to me is their, and this comes back to how they initially launched. I think that they initially, they're an omnichannel and multichannel brand and they originally, I think got distribution in Whole Foods a little bit. And now it's like.

portal, like, because you could go into Whole Foods and if you're local, this was probably back in the day, they probably still do this. But you know, they would allow local vendors to sort of, you know, merchandise their brand or sample their brand. So I think they initially probably got some distribution in the Connecticut area, I'm assuming, through Whole Foods. But now they are the number one selling beer of any kind, alcoholic or non alcoholic in Whole Foods.

So which very crosses over into their sort of target market a little bit.

Brian Becker (30:12.045)
athletes, people who care more about their body. And, you know, in, you know, sticking on that, like they just do distribution so well. They're very, very well distributed nationwide. We can talk about the DDC store too, the marketing there, but I think that one thing that originally sticks out to me is like just how like deep their distribution is.

Yeah, I mean, Whole Foods is a great first step for that. And from one of the stories I've heard or read, apparently, you know, it ties in with a lot of their early kind of marketing strategy, if you will, which was Bill waking up at two in the morning and driving six hours to be at a marathon or a triathlon or an Ironman competition or whatever. And just being at the finish line,

handing out athletic brews, trying to get people to try it, trying to, you know, not leading with this is non -alcoholic beer, but just like having people try it and then being like, this is non -alcoholic and then being like, wait, what? Like, you know, I could have this like on a work lunch and not have that afternoon slumber. I could have this, you know, any night of the week, even if I'm not trying to, you know, drink that day or whatever. And so that actually played into the story he told about

Whole Foods was that he did the same tactic. He actually just went and befriended the manager at Whole Foods or some of the employees and got them to try it. And they started advocating for Athletic Group and got him in connection with the regional manager of Whole Foods, which then springboarded them into being able to get into the store. And then obviously, I think retail has a very, you get one and then you can get everyone type.

type feeling where if you have a big name like Whole Foods, it makes it a lot, not you can just automatically, but it makes it a lot easier to get that other distribution when you can say, hey, these other people are carrying us already. And so I think that's probably where he kind of springboarded into being able to get that huge distribution that you're talking about. Yeah. And one thing about the passing out the beers at the events.

Brian Becker (32:34.445)
One thing they do well too in their marketing is have you seen this community hub that they do? They have. yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So they like, you know, I know you hear a lot about community, community. This is like the fastest growing or this is like some trending topic that you'll hear a lot in a DSE e -commerce thing. I help you build your community or something like that, you know? but like no one really does it that well. No service providers do it that well or agencies.

I'm like, how can you as an agency, can you even like help grow a community? But I will say what athletic Brewing's community hub or community page on their website is really, really good. They've basically been able to leverage what Bill was doing. And, and now it's like, they have events like every day they're at, you know, whether it's like triathlon, or races or stuff, and they're just like really building a community there. Yeah, yeah, I know. It's huge. I think

just they're really able to tap into something that is becoming really important to a certain subsect of the market. And being able to couple that with a great product is always going to be a great playbook and a successful playbook. And even let's say the community to another level, they are also taking a page out of the, what I think we've kind of been calling the Terrence Riley playbook.

the Stanley, now CEO, former Crocs CMO of Find Your Organic Influencers. So this is another thing that they're going out and they even have a beer that is named after Walker Hayes. It's like the Walker Hayes -y IPA. And Walker Hayes, I don't know if you're familiar, he's a country singer. I didn't know who he was, not gonna lie. I didn't know who Walker Hayes was, but.

Apparently he was already drinking athletic brew. They saw that they reached out to him. They collaborated, you know, JJ, JJ, JJ watt is another one as well. and then actually one of our former customers, David Chang, I saw that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So they're, again, a very organic adoption of it where, you know, they,

Brian Becker (34:57.581)
They sit down with David Chang to talk about, you know, because all of the Momofuku restaurants and carry athletic brew as a drink option. And so they're able to, you know, how that all came along is they're sitting down, they have a discussion. And it was after like the first sip that David Chang was just like bought it. You know, he drank, he was like, this is actually good. I've never not liked non -alcoholic beer because of it not having alcohol. I didn't like it because it didn't.

taste good. And so being a chef, being endorsed by a celebrity chef, and then then becoming an investor is even bigger of that. Find your audience and your distribution where it already exists of people that love it for the reason that you're trying to connect with your audience to begin with. Because those are your customers. And if your customers have a platform, it can have so much easier of a time to actually genuinely tap into that market. Yeah.

I know. Yeah, it's similar to where, yeah, they like sell the influencer first almost type. Type five, I think we, we had talked about that, with athletic greens and, yeah, I mean, that's like what, and they noticed that they noticed somebody already using, I think that's a problem. That's like one of the misnomers about influencer marketing is that, I got to go out and get all these influencers. But what we're seeing is a lot of these big brands is

they find influences that are already using their product, that are already bought in. Whether that's Terrence Riley with Crocs, a noticing Post Malone, or whether it's the two stories you just told about athletic grains, I mean, athletic growing, or with athletic grains, it's, you know, I just - Tim Ferriss. Tim Ferriss, yeah. Tim Ferriss or Andrew Huberman. Yeah.

or eventually with why brands work and me with Celsius, they're gonna be like, we need to get Brian, you know, because he's always drinking a Celsius on the podcast. So, you know, it's such a good playbook. And I, you know, it brings me to the question. I'm like, okay, business idea, how do we go out there and find, you know, influencers and what products they're already using? You know, how do you jump into these lives and tap into exactly like, okay,

Brian Becker (37:13.197)
this person is using this, this person is using this, and then kind of make those connections. I don't know, that's a super viable business idea, but if somebody wants to run with it, go for it. But it's such a proven thing right now, and that's really where we're seeing all of the, every bit of explosive growth right now is kind of coming through those channels. I don't know if you saw today, Liquid Death released an Ozzy Osborne

commercial for their new powders. Yeah, where it's like, it's not drugs, it's a drink powder. And because Ozzy Osbourne is saying, don't snort it. Don't try to free base it, just powder. And it's such a perfect brand fit that I'm sure Ozzy Osbourne was already into Liquid Death, or they had a very easy time in connecting with them because the brands are so aligned already. And so yeah, I think that that's a huge thing.

And then one other marketing thing I want to touch on before we jump over to our top threes is they had a huge distinct advantage in digital marketing because being a non -alcoholic beverage means that they can traditionally advertise. There's a lot less restrictions because you can't be a beer brand or whatever and just do Facebook ads. There's a very specific targeting that you're allowed to do.

It's very, very limited in what their options are. Alcohol, THC, CBD, all of these kind of no -no words. They weren't restricted by any of that. So they could run all of this guerrilla marketing that they're doing, but also run the traditional ad playbook where they're finding audiences on Instagram, converting them through ads. I don't know about you, but I'm getting athletic brew ads 24 -7 now. I'm just constantly getting athletic brew ads. They're top -challenged, Pete.

Yeah, yeah, so yeah, exactly. Because yeah, because they're not an alcoholic and I don't even saw this too. They have a an app that they use. I'm not sure how much this drives growth per se, but it's in within that trend. It's like a app like an iPhone app that tracks like how many days you're dry from not drinking.

Brian Becker (39:40.071)
Again, like you can't do like if you if you're Sam Adams or you're Budweiser. Yeah You can't do that. You can't do that, right? I know but because they're leading with non -alcoholic You're right unlocks all these different things like a whole blue ocean Yeah, yeah agreed cool. Well, let's jump into Top threes for what you think the the biggest reasons are that this brand works. I'm gonna close it out from here So why don't you go first? I want you to

You go first. I was going to go first. I don't want to take away your ideas. Yeah, okay. It's my turn to go first. Cool. So first and foremost, it is the product innovation, like tasty, non -alcoholic beer. The fact that I can go grab a New England IPA, you know, and it's non -alcoholic is so different from me trying to, even if it's just like a Heineken Zero or a Corona Zero or whatever, you know, I prefer

hazy IPA's and those kind of things, something with a little bit more flavor. And so being able to drink that in a non -alcoholic format and them having so many different, you know, styles and flavors and things like that is, I think, one of the reasons that they're finding so much success because it's not just Sam Adams drinkers or Heineken drinkers that now have like an option for non -alcoholic. I think the second is definitely going to be for me, the Influencer Playbook.

this Terrence Riley playbook that we keep talking about that if this to me is just becoming the overarching unlock for growth as we do more and more of these is being able to, whether it's through unfair advantages, if you're Kim Kardashian and have a ton of celebrities in your contacts that you can just text, or if you are really, you know, you really have your finger on the pulse of the market and can identify people that are already using your product that have a massive audience.

That is the key to explosive growth right now because being able to borrow reputation or borrow fame and use somebody else's audience to propel your growth is just second to none and being able to actually create a tension around your product. And then lastly, I think I will probably go with the, you know, I think a lot of it comes down to

Brian Becker (42:03.751)
just how driven around this problem Bill is, how much he's kind of scratching his own itch and then had, you know, just the ability to tackle it, the operations and tactical ability to move this from, this is me scratching my own itch to actually operating a, you know, how much are they worth now? It's $500 million. That's what they're valued at. Yeah.

So to be able to go from idea to actually operating a $500 million company, you know, to me, I, there's a, there's a different person for a start, you know, there's a different person to run a startup. There's a different person to run a, you know, 10 to $50 million company. There's a different person to run a $200 million company. And there's a different person to run a $500 million company, but apparently he's the right guy to go from idea all the way to 500 million. And that's a very unique, very huge advantage that he's.

that smart, that good, that capable, that much of an operator. So yeah, from my three. Yeah, I mean, that's that to me was stuck out operational excellence. Did you coin that or tactical excellence? It's just like, you know, and I saw this when I did the final breakdown there, they leave no stone unchurned. You know, like I'll go look at skims or liquid death or, you know, athletic greens is pretty well.

Run, but this you know, there's a lot of like still low -hanging fruit sometimes with those brands like these guys have everything dialed in Even like they're you know, what I'll give an example is like I'll often look at like their Transactional emails, you know something that we know the order received stuff like that and you can always tell like who who's down in on how like how well thought out their transactional emails are

And I think brewing's are so dialed in, you know? And that's just true of every single channel. Every single touch point in every channel is really well thought out. I would say so the operational excellence, I'd say another thing is sort of the brick and mortar distribution I think is really dialed into, for example, like 67 % of their traffic goes to their, what is it? The actual page called the, where to find us.

Brian Becker (44:27.495)
not their homepage. So a lot of people are just landing on their like, where can I go? and buy in a retail store. And that is probably, you know, I've seen that in other brands too. That's probably intentional and they are probably driving a lot of traffic to the retail partners too. And that creates probably a flywheel to some, to some extent. And that probably just keeps their revenue high. And you know, I bet that they're.

Would say probably by to guess that channel is probably the leading channel for them You know we saw that when we looked at black rifle and when I looked at their investor relations document like their their retail distribution channel was their highest percentage of sales Yeah, so that that's like and I thought that these guys were one of the most dialed in I've ever seen So those are those are two and I think the third one is

is just the ability to shift a category. We've done a couple of these brands where like Liquid Death, we brought up one. Jolie the Showerhead was one where they sort of looked at the beauty industry and brought it into like, merged it with sort of the showerhead market. Like their keyword gets more traffic, like Jolie Showerhead gets more traffic than the actual keyword showerhead.

And I'm getting similar vibes here with athletic brewing. When we find these crazy stats, like that they are the number one selling beer in Whole Foods, whether it's non -alcoholic or alcohol, or the stat that you shared about how, what was it around? Was it 80 % of their target market still drinks alcohol? Yeah. So it's this like,

This X factor of like totally being out in front of this new sort of shaping of a category, it really to me sticks out on why this brand works. Because I think that's where you get these like monumental valuations.

Brian Becker (46:43.591)
Yeah, yeah, if you're able to attach your product to a cultural shift that's going on, or a new problem or a new, you know, something that is top of mind for people, you're always going to end up winning there, especially if you're the first mover like athletic brewing is, or you're the innovator in the category as well. So yeah, I think it's huge. And they're an incredible brand, incredible beer, probably going to jump off this call and

order some for the beach for next weekend to have it shipped straight to the house. I want to go down to Whole Foods to get a six pack right now, man. Yeah, pick some up and meet us in New Jersey for a beach weekend next week and we'll all hang out. But awesome. Well, thank you everybody who joined us today for the athletic brewing episode of Y Brands Work. As normal, we have a bunch of resources for you that you can download. The brand breakdown, I actually don't have any emails this time. I couldn't find any of their emails. That was very difficult.

They're not on mills. They're not any. I checked a bunch of different sites to try and find them. So if you have a lead on the emails, let me know. I'd love to take a look at a big swipe file of them. And then obviously we run down their traffic. We run down all the apps and things that they're using and the entire funnel that they have put together. So if you want to grab that, download it. It's on our page. You know, float candy, white brands work. Go to the athletic brewing page. And otherwise, is there anything else you want to shout out this week, Will? No.

Cool. All right, everybody. Thanks again for watching. Yep, absolutely. And we'll see you next time. Have a good one.