From Local Markets to a National Spotlight
From Local Markets to a National Spotlight
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In this week's discussion, Emily delves into the journey of OLIPOP with Steven Vigilante, the brand's Director of Growth and Partnerships. Steven provides an insider's view of OLIPOP's humble beginnings, from its local market learning experiences at demos and events to its current expansive presence in over 30,000 stores, and its collaborations with high-profile brands and celebrities like Barbie, country artist, Kane Brown, and Nascar driver, John Hunter Nemechek. This episode offers a rare glimpse into the marketing playbook of the better-for-you soda brand, revealing the strategic moves that are propelling OLIPOP to the forefront of the beverage industry.
Tune in for topics like:
00:38 Steven’s background and the launch of OLIPOP
6:34 Initial vision for OLIPOP
8:21 Starting locally and learning from your first markets
11:01 What you can learn from demoing
12:58 Transitioning to an e-commerce offering
14:38 Expansion model for consumer brands
16:16 Shifting your marketing mindset from a local focus to national
19:56 OLIPOP’s city blitz initiatives
22:43 Approach to collaborations and partnering with Barbie
27:45 Finding strategic partners to align with your brand
29:49 The right marketing mix of celebrity voices & everyday people
34:18 Big or small, your brand should be doing this
Listen to this week’s Local Marketing School conversation!
Other episodes you'll enjoy if you enjoyed Steven’s episode:
#5: Staying Authentic while Scaling a CPG Brand | Nola Morris, Thelma’s Treats
#6: Aligning Values & Leveraging Creativity in Partnerships | Catherine Baxter, Nettie
Don't hesitate to reach out! We'd love to hear from you on Instagram and find out which episodes you're enjoying the most. Your feedback is so important to us! Please take a moment to rate the show and leave a review - it supports our ongoing Local Marketing School journey and helps us develop more content that addresses what you’re hoping to learn more about!
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This podcast is produced by Hummingbirds. Learn more about Hummingbirds at hummingbirds.com.
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Emily Steele (00:14)
All right, all right. We are back with another episode of Local Marketing School. My name is Emily Steele. I'm your host. And today I have Steven Vigilante with me from OLIPOP to talk all things marketing and some of his, his maybe feisty opinions around things related to advertising, marketing, influencers, and all sorts of things. So Steven, welcome to the podcast.
Steven Vigilante (00:34)
Thank you for having me.
Emily Steele (00:35)
Yeah, so tell me about yourself and tell me about OLIPOP Whatever one comes first.
Steven Vigilante (00:40)
Yeah, they're obviously quite intertwined at this point, but I kind of cut my teeth in the venture capital world within the consumer product space. I was at an early stage venture fund in San Francisco for three years from 2014 to 2017. And it was kind of, I feel like the first vintage of like consumer startups that sort of were starting to scale and some of the early M&A activity that was starting to sprout up at the time was like Crave Jerky selling to Hershey's back in the day and then like Justin sold to Hormel and it was this era where you could kind of get a brand to like 30, 40 million of revenue and sell it for a couple hundred million dollars to the big CPG guys. And I was just kind of like watching all this unfold and kind of built a thesis around, an investing thesis around kind of like better for you junk foods being like the most interesting and you know, it's very hard to change consumer behavior and get them to adopt a completely new product category, but giving them something that they were familiar with or that they maybe grew up on and giving them a better version of it where it was where we were seeing a lot of activity as well as in like the plant based space. That's another conversation. And so we had invested in brands like Halo Top, which was like better for you junk food and Simple Mills, which had done kind of blew up doing better for you Cheez -Its. And then you saw like Banza going after pasta and Smart Sweets and candy. And it just became pretty obvious, at least to me at the time, that that was like the future of the consumer product space. And so after three years there, I wanted to get some operating experience. I felt like a little bit of a fraud sitting in the investing world, not having ever done the thing that we were investing in, which is...very common in the investing world, sadly. And so I left and moved down from San Francisco to Los Angeles in 2017 to take a job at a food tech company that sadly kind of imploded and learned a lot there in a year and watched like 50 million in investor capital evaporate, which was a wild ride. And then I actually started a consulting business to help early stage brands kind of get off the ground, be it fundraising or kind of initial distribution, just kind of like general industry connectivity via my network. And I met Ben and Dave who were, you know, kind of just getting OLIPOP the ground. They had samples and a soda stream and some packaging done and needed to raise some money to really launch the business. And so I came on as an advisor really and helped raise the original round of funding, which was led by the founders of RX bar, who had just sold their company to Kellogg's. And we launched the brand in September of 2018. And now we're here in May of 2024. And I'm still here and kind of wear a bunch of hats here. I've been heavily involved in a lot of our fundraising efforts over the last five years. And we've raised north of nine figures of capital for the business and have also led a lot of our strategic marketing efforts between kind of partnerships and celebrity and sports and music and entertainment. And that includes kind of all things influencer as well.
So it's very fun. I always tell people I think I have one of the coolest jobs in the world right now.
Emily Steele (03:53)
Yeah. Yeah, I agree with that. So you come on as an advisor and somehow, are you just like, you guys want me on your team? Like, how did that conversation go?
Steven Vigilante (04:10)
I mean, the real story was just like, in the early days, you just need bodies, right? And so I was, you know, I was and still am based here in Los Angeles and David and Ben were up in the Bay. And there's, you know, this trendy grocery store here in LA called Erewon Market, which has gotten much more famous since we launched there. But I literally walked some samples into their office in West Hollywood and told them we were talking to Whole Foods and they like to get products before Whole Foods. So they said, don't go to Whole Foods, like, you know, give us exclusive. And we weren't even talking to Whole Foods at the time, but, you know, just playing a little bit of a reverse negotiation there. And we launched it at Erewon back in September of 2018. And I was here in LA and I was the only person really at the time. Actually, that's not true. We had another, you know, kind of a social media manager and then like a chief of staff here also in LA. And so, yeah, we launched it at Erewon. It's just sort of like, took off pretty quickly, honestly. And, you know, I was doing like demos in stores and things like that and helped organize. We did a pop -up retail store at this like food hall in downtown LA in our first year, which was, I would say like the best worst thing I've ever done. Like I would never ever want to do it again, but. And as the business has grown, I feel like I've just kind of like evolved with it and kind of keep pushing the business in new directions, whether like launching our e-commerce arm right before COVID, which then kind of blew up overnight.
Steven Vigilante (05:36)
And we had to figure that out, which kind of got me into the world of influencer marketing and podcast advertising. And so it's, I've kind of had this like jack of all trades role. I feel like that slices across marketing and sales and investor relations and you know, have kind of launched a couple of things that really hit here, including TikTok. I launched our TikTok account a couple of years ago. So I just talked to a lot of people and I feel like I have a good sense of like where the business needs to go and like what we need to do to get there. And so.
Steven Vigilante (06:06)
I'll often like launch something and then if it works, we'll bring people in or move people around to help, you know, manage whatever it is. So, hard to explain sometimes to people, but it's fun. Every day is different.
Emily Steele (06:14)
Yeah. Did you, when you were initially talking to the guys, were you like, did they have a, the like, we're going to raise a lot of money and become this like national global brand vision? Or did you help kind of foster that based on everything you had seen kind of in the VC space?
Steven Vigilante (06:36)
Ben's vision and mission has really always been around human health and the fact that less than 1 % of consumer product brands actually do any sort of like research or science around whether their products actually work or not. And I know I'll never forget like my first conversation with Ben, he had this like vision of landing like a New York Times story about the research on our product and the efficacy of it. And I thought that was really neat. Like I had met thousands of founders at that point who didn't think like that and we're, you know, there's so many brands and products that are like riding category trends and we'll just let a throw an ingredient in that's like trendy at the time. And Ben was like really formulating our products from a place of like research and science and working with like, you know, some of the best, you know, gut health scientists in the world are on our formulation and, and input from Justin Sonnenberg at Stanford, who's like a big name in the gut health arena. And he just like had such.
He did have, he's always had a huge vision for it. And I was just always really attached to like the mission for it. But from the beginning, we, you know, we had a lot of investors tell us, no, it took us six months to raise the first seed round. People were confused around how do you put fiber in a soda? Why would you do that? You know, or just that people aren't drinking soda anymore and the world is moving away from that. Why would you want to go after that space when it's kind of, you know, completely dominated by three major players? And so, you know, It was like a lot of no's at the beginning, but for me, I grew up on soda and I knew the gut health thing was like starting to percolate. We were seeing a lot of gut health stuff in the venture capital world. And I was like, if you can make a root beer that's like actually good for you, not just like a little less bad for you. Like it was very clear to me, like that could change the world. And you know, it's, it feels like we're on the right path or at least at this point.
Emily Steele (08:04)
Yeah, yeah. So launching in kind of LA and California, it's probably easiest to really think about concentrating efforts, like, yeah, geographically, right? And like really building penetration in that area. Is that, was that strategic or was it like, hey, we're here, like, let's just like, see if we can build awareness and like, try a little bit of everything or how did you really think about it in those early days?
Steven Vigilante (08:45)
No, that was definitely strategic, I think, especially as a beverage brand. And for us kind of wading into the soda space, no one had done functional soda before. We actually called the product on package was called a sparkling tonic originally, because we didn't think people like an Erewon one would pick up anything that said the word soda on it. And so, yeah, we really spent 18 months just selling product in San Francisco and Los Angeles. We didn't sell a can outside of California, the first 18 months of the business. And it was critical in retrospect, because we had to learn a lot. We didn't understand why people, who was buying it, why they were buying it. Were they soda drinkers? Were they kombucha drinkers? Were they sparkling water drinkers? Did people know it's sparkling tonic? We actually launched our first of three flavors when we launched one, one of which was cinnamon cola. And it became super clear in like six months of doing events and demos that like 35 % of consumers hate cinnamon and wouldn't even try it. And the question I would always get was like, is this really spicy? Does it taste like fireball whiskey as an example? And it doesn't obviously, cinnamon is just like one of the multiple ingredients in there. And so we had to repackage it as vintage cola, change the can from brown to silver to just get that notion out of people's heads that this was gonna be some spicy cola flavor. And it went from our worst seller to our best seller within three months of making that packaging change. And that's something if you had launched nationally at a Whole Foods or a Walmart or something, would have been so much more difficult to change at that point in time. And then we also learned that like sparkling tonic doesn't really mean anything to anyone. It doesn't invoke, you know, something that tastes really good. I think people think tonic and they think like bitter and, you know, so we actually ended up changing that to say a new kind of soda. And those are all lessons we got from just like going really deep in our core markets for 18 months, honestly. And it's the biggest mistake I feel like I see early stage brands make is they get that initial inkling of interest from a big national retailer. But these retailers are not like, they're looking out for their own interests and they want new and trendy brands and all that, but they don't totally understand like when the right time is for the brand to be going into their shelves because they don't have that much information on each of these businesses. And so especially a lot of first time entrepreneurs will take, we're launching at Walmart like day one and it's like, Why would you ever do that? No one knows who you are yet. How are you gonna support it? And it can be like a death sentence if you do that too early.
Emily Steele (11:03)
Yeah, it's massive. Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm. You find that it was doing the demos, like getting people to try the products that was like, did that build behavior then to like come back? Could you track that or was it like the feedback that was more important at that stage or like a mix of things? Like what are you learning from demos that people could take a run with?
Steven Vigilante (11:26)
Yeah, it's a good question. I think in the early days, it's more just that one -to -one feedback that's the most important. Obviously, you do what you can to measure lift from demos. We were really only in Erewon, LA. It was four stores at the time. You could try to measure, but the business was also very early stages and was just growing a lot month over month anyway. A little bit harder to measure, I would say, from like a sales lift perspective, but the lessons and learnings and feedback we got from people. We also learned like 15 % of people hate stevia, which I think is a little bit more common knowledge now and to some extent, but I have personally like the cilantro thing where I think cilantro tastes like soap, which also affects 15 % of people in the country. And I'm like privy to it. And I know, you know, I don't like it, but my fiance loves it. So like, it is what it is. And stevia is kind of the same way. There's like 15 % of people that like absolutely hate it. And then 80 kind of 5 % of people who are okay with it and stevia haters are loud, right? And so that was another thing we kind of like, you know, played with a little bit at the beginning. And we've kept stevia, it's like the most studied zero calorie sweetener in terms of, you know, not having a negative impact on the gut, which is really important to us. But you know, those are all things we learned in that first year.
Emily Steele (12:20)
Yeah. in the trenches and then you have an inkling like the brand needs to go beyond just local to e -commerce as well as this. This is before COVID. So you're already going to plan on this and then because of, you know, everything shutting down, it's like very advantageous for you to be online as well. So talk a little bit about that addition, transition.
Steven Vigilante (13:03)
Yeah, I mean, 18 months in, it was very clear there was like real consumer demand for this product. And, you know, we had, you know, maybe one to two competitors that had jumped in at that point. And I just had some really good friends in the e-commerce space. And we're like, you guys need to be selling this thing online. Like you can only buy it in California. There's like serious demand for it on social. And so, you know, we spent like three or four months like standing up a Shopify site.
Steven Vigilante (13:29)
I think we flipped it on like February, 2020, literally a month before COVID hit. And that was just, you know, it's like any other business, right? You look back, you know, you look in the rearview mirror and you're like, yeah, we definitely have made a bunch of like strategic decisions at the exact right time that happened to be really good decisions for the business. And that was definitely one of those. And, you know, it went from, I think we did like 10 grand in sales our first month. So like two months later, April of COVID doing like a quarter of a million dollars in sales. And it was like at the time probably half our business. And it also coincided with the Sprouts launch. So we did go nationwide in Sprouts, I think April of 2020, which was super dicey during COVID. But it kind of worked out because it was in enough retailers where people can find it. And if they tried it, they could come online and try other flavors or whatever. And so yeah, there wasn't like, it was kind of blind luck that we launched it right before COVID.
Emily Steele (13:56)
Yeah, yeah. So you are about two years in like from 2018 to 2020 going into sprouts. Any anything around that kind of strategy like what work to get into that national presence from being in four stores in the California area.
Steven Vigilante (14:41)
Yeah, I mean, building a consumer brand, I feel like you, the model, at least that I subscribe to is like start locally, learn a lot, don't go too wide too fast, go really deep, really figure out who the true customer is, and then work to get, you know, in most cases, you know, it's either like a Whole Foods or a Sprouts. I think that's changing a little bit now, it's like the way that Target and Walmart have kind of shifted how they're operating. But, you know, at least the way I see it is most brands, once they kind of figure it out and have a proof of concept locally will then either go national or multi -regional with one of the two of those. And I think in a lot of cases, they are played against each other to some extent. I think Sprouts has done a really good job of moving quickly. And ever since the Whole Foods Amazon tie up, they've just changed their strategy a bit there. And it's a little bit more centralized. It's a little bit less focused on the regional forager programs that they used to have. And Sprouts has done a really good job being like a really good home base for early stage brands now and their buyers are very forward thinking and they're moving things in and out of there pretty quickly. So yeah, we got, I think we were in a couple of Whole Foods regions and we got all sprouts and then we ended up getting all Whole Foods and that was like the bulk of what we did then for the next, call it year and a half until we went into Kroger in 2021.
Emily Steele (15:43)
Mm -hmm. Okay. Mm -hmm. So as you start going more national, a little bit of your marketing approach changes, right? Like in how you get consumers to think about OLIPOP in those regions where Sprouts is and other of these retailers. So how did your team shift from a strategy standpoint, from going local to growing?
Steven Vigilante (16:18)
Yeah, I think the playbook that you'd run now is probably different than it was at that point in time, just because demos and events were kind of off the table. And we, during COVID, I kind of took it upon myself to be like, OK, now that we all we can do is this digital thing, let's learn how it works. Let's look into doing paid ads and podcast advertising and influencer marketing and call a bunch of friends who work at brands that I kind of love you know, was looking up to at the time that I thought we're doing a really good job with influencer marketing and podcast advertising. And so we just kind of dove in and it was peak, you know, I think we did our first influencer campaign like August or September of 2020. And it was like peak, everyone locked up, everyone on their phone, you know, and we did like a little test and it like crushed it. It was like, you put money in, you get money out. And I was like, my gosh, this like works really well. And so by the time we launched in Kroger, we had, you know, the, you know, not that we were like amazing at it, but we were getting pretty good at the digital stuff. And so that was really the strategy was just, you know, continuing to drive top of funnel with digital. And we didn't have any of these like drive to retail influencer platforms and things like hummingbirds that we do now so it was really just focused on how do we generate awareness with this thing on, you know, with influencers and we had a couple like very lucky podcast ads that like crushed for us as well.
Steven Vigilante(17:41)
We had an ad read on Pod Save America, August of 2020, when Joe Biden happened to be the guest and it was right before the election. And it was like an incredible ad read. He like went way off script and went three minutes about how amazing OLIPOP was. And it did like, it was our biggest sales day ever at the time. I think it broke like 50K in sales in a day. So, you know, some of those things just got a little bit lucky on, but yeah.
Steven Vigilante (18:07)
We didn't have some really cohesive plan for Kroger. It was like, let's just go into Kroger and figure it out. Whereas now when we launch a retailer, there's a full on 360 campaign that gets attached to it. But we weren't there yet at that time.
Emily Steele (18:12)
Totally. Yeah, and so when you were first doing the influencer marketing and partnerships, where you focused mostly on driving the online behavior as you were kind of starting to expand to other retailers.
Steven Vigilante (18:32)
Yeah, all we did influencer wise for like the first 18 months of doing influencer marketing was your super transactional, you know, three to six frames, discount code swipe up. It worked incredibly well. I know the swipe up days, which are no more now they're link clicks, but you know, that's that world. I think it's still performs really well for certain brands, but for where we're at as a business today. And a lot of this shifted for us in 2022. In 2022, we went national at a five month time span. We went nationwide at Target, and then Publix, and then HEB, and then Walmart. And so that was like a jump from 8,000 to 20,000 stores. And honestly, a massive shift in who we were trying to reach and what the messaging was. Because the further you get away from the whole vision of Sprouts, the less it makes sense to really lean into health messaging, and the more it makes sense to lean into you know, flavor, nostalgia, taste, and like low sugar, right? And so we really had to like infer all of our kind of learnings to that point, because it was a completely different customer we were going after.
Emily Steele (19:28)
Yeah, yeah. Something I really loved following from the TikToks of the world is your city blitzes and how you approach some of this like, hey, we're in Miami. What you did in Miami was so cool to witness from the outside. Can you share a little bit about that experience and what some of the pieces of that were and what we can learn from it?
Steven Vigilante (19:58)
Yeah, so right around now last year, like middle of 2023, we started like really crunching some numbers and, you know, in an attempt to figure out markets that we wanted to invest in based on how we were performing versus peers, how much distribution we have and how much kind of total soda consumption there was in that market. And so, you know, looking at all those metrics, we kind of identified call it six markets where we felt we were under index versus where we should be and kind of built these city blitzes to tackle each of them across a different month here in 2024. And so those blitzes kind of manifest themselves in out of home. So billboards or we've done like subway ads, we've done murals. But I think where a lot of brands falter with that stuff is they just like pick six billboards and say, here, hey, hey, LA or hey, DC and like, that's the campaign and we, you know, We've got a really good team here. We've been in other brands. We've done things like that. And we're like, hey, that doesn't really work. You need like more of a 360 approach to it. And so we do big billboard buys. We had like 62 billboards in Chicago when we were there. I think we had probably 40 in Miami. We want it to feel like you can't really go anywhere in town without seeing one. And then we couple it with retailer execution, right? So we're now going to retailers three months in advance of these and saying, hey, we're coming into your market this month. You know, we're going to spend X, you know, we want additional placements, we want to put fridges in, we want to run promotions, so you make sure you're pairing in with those things. I think that's super critical. And then we always try to do like a big influencer event and maybe try to come up with something interesting from a PR perspective and kind of tie all of that in together. And now here we are in May and we've got like a bunch of music artists we're working with. And so we're looking at tying one of them into our campaign we're doing in Texas later this year. And there's like all these interesting different ways that these things can continue to build. And I'm excited to even look at it for next year when we're in a whole other level of awareness and have bigger partners and things like that. But yeah, we really try to come in and like really blow it out for a month. And we're obviously measuring things. We're doing brand lift studies after the fact, we're measuring velocity lifts before and after, do they sustain?
Steven Vigilante (22:13)
Yeah, the early results from Chicago and Miami have been extremely positive. And it's also one of those just like, we're trying to be a mass brand at this point, right? And that's not to say we're going to change our ingredients or sacrifice, you know, any of the things that got us here, but we want to start really, you know, playing in the places that, you know, the Cokes and the Pepsi's have owned forever, right? And that's, you know, whether it's out of home or in stadiums and arenas or movie theaters or airlines, you know, those are all things where we're looking at as like next places to level up.
Emily Steele (22:45)
It's just crazy how much like Barbie just launched for example, like can you talk a little bit about that? Like that's an example of like a collaboration of partnership that you know reaches their audience and like what is what has that done for you guys so far? Have you noticed anything? without collaboration yet
Steven Vigilante (23:02)
Yeah, Barbie. Barbie story is a good one. We did a Minions partnership two years ago. That was our first ever collaboration. We did it with the Minions movie in 2022. It was a very heavy lift. It was a unique flavor. We launched Banana Cream with them and we honestly, you know, didn't think it would be as popular as it was. It's kind of a weird flavor and bananas were kind of polarizing and we only sold that online, interestingly. So we made like three months of product and it sold out in three weeks. And that was kind of like, we did all this work for like a month of sales basically. And so as we were thinking about wanting to do another one of these, we were like, let's think bigger. Let's put this in front of retailers way in advance and try to get as much distribution on it as possible and run it as like a seasonal in and out instead of just an online only thing. And so, yeah, that was kind of the criteria we were thinking about when we were considering what we wanted to do. And the way the development timelines work and all the marketing stuff like, we kinda can't do this more than every other year, is sorta how it pencils. It's a lot of work. There's like a year of work that goes into each of them. Plus finding the right partner and negotiating the right partnership, et cetera. And so last year in June, we released, well, we had a product placement in the Nicki Minaj Ice Vice Barbie World music video. And that was all done actually through the record label and the production company was making the video. It was not actually a direct partnership with Barbie at all.
Steven Vigilante (24:30)
But it put us into that like Barbie media cycle and the video like killed it I think it's at 160 or 70 million views on on YouTube Nikki even feed posted the clip with us in it, which was very cool because that was not something that we paid for it just was a really good product placement and three days later the Barbie team reached out to me on LinkedIn and I was like, yeah I'd love to chat with you guys and be cool, you know here what you're up to and so they You know, the movie was obviously very good for them, but it was also like, you know, it was Warner Brothers doing it, right? It wasn't Mattel. And Mattel was already working on their own campaign for 2024 for Barbie's 65th birthday. So this is that campaign and kind of hopped on with them and they pitched me like a birthday cake flavor. And I was like, we're trying to stay in the soda lane. I don't know if that makes sense. And then they mentioned that they were re -releasing a bunch of, or kind of updated, you know, modernized versions of new Barbies from throughout the decades. And so they had a peaches and cream Barbie, which was their top selling Barbie in 1985. And they mentioned they were re-releasing that or a revamped version of that and asked if we could do a peaches and cream flavor for that. And interestingly enough, it's the only flavor we ever formalized and actually almost commercialized and had never launched. And that was only because we launched a bunch of other stuff and it just kind of got deprioritized. So we were just sitting on the formula, which is the only one we were sitting on at the time. And so.
Emily Steele (25:29)
It's crazy.
Steven Vigilante (25:55)
You know, light bulb goes off in my head. And that was June of last year, and we just launched it here in May of 2024. So it's been out in market. It actually hit Sprouts a little earlier than we expected. It was kind of interesting. We got some posts like end of March when we were shooting for like May 1. And there was a little bit of a panic originally because we didn't have a lot of stuff ready yet still. And you know, it ended up becoming a bit of like a treasure hunt on social and got a lot of attention. And, you know, we just stayed silent on it honestly for like a month, which was kind of interesting. And then we launched it to like some pretty solid fanfare. And we had that, we got a text from our Sprouts buyer that for a couple of days, a few weeks ago, the Barbie flavor had actually, that's actually outselling eggs, which they'd never had a beverage. I know it was a kind of a crazy little data point. But yeah, it's been nuts.
Emily Steele (26:27)
I saw this on food and wine.
Steven Vigilante (26:50)
I knew I had a hunch this would do well, but you know, it was also like, was last year Barbie year, is people gonna care? And it's like, and almost the mystery around that, I almost think helped us because people are like, why are they doing this? But I'm gonna buy it anyway.
Emily Steele (26:56)
Mm -hmm. Like, what's the story here? And the packaging is just so fun, right? Like, yeah.
Steven Vigilante (27:06)
Packaging's fun. The creative, our team crushed the creative. It was really good. Mattel also surprised us. Literally this morning, they posted a TikTok of like, they actually made like a Barbie ad with actual Barbies in it and little mini OLIPOP's. It's super cute. That was a nice surprise. So it's on the Mattel TikTok right now.
Emily Steele (27:17)
Yes Do you feel like over the last like I don't know six plus years of doing this almost six, right? I think that's my math here publicly sharing. Does it feel like you've reached the point where people are like we want to work with OLIPOP versus like hey We want to find these strategic partners. Is it people coming to you more than you to them or what's that mix like?
Steven Vigilante (27:47)
Yeah, it's a good question. It's definitely a mix. I you know, yes, my inbox is forever insane. And there's like, I, you know, I get an email a day that I'm like, this is crazy. This is just like coming to us, you know. But then it's like, it's even more so as we're, you know, having more conversations with like professional sports teams and athletes and big music artists and like, they all have opportunities with the bigger guys. And there's probably more money in it for them. But there's just so many people now who want to be aligned with brands that they truly care about and that they think are doing the right things out in the world. And, you know, that's definitely playing to our favor. And then the younger generation is also, you know, much more health conscious and label reading and want to support brands that are doing certain things for the environment. We got our B Corp certification last year, which has been, which has been really critical for us. And so it's wild to me. Yeah. I can, it, you can really feel it. I feel like anytime I meet anyone who has someone you know, kids aged like 14 to 22. They're like, yeah, my that's all my son drinks are all my daughter drinks are I've heard multiple stories now from people have kids who like they get an OLIPOP, you know, they set up with an olive pop at lunch, and they're like trading OLIPOP at lunch, because somebody's got another flavor that they want. And I'm like, that's kind of crazy. It's kind of crazy that that's that's happening. Just you can feel this sea change coming. And we have some conversations going on now with some massive partners that, you know, have been with one of the big three, as a distribution partner for 10 years and are like, our data just says, we think you guys might be a better fit. And that's kind of crazy to hear those, to have those conversations every day.
Emily Steele (29:22)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, just that fast. So I guess like last kind of thing I'd like to double click on is you talk about some of these like big athletes, celebrities, but then also you do things like more, you know, brand advocates, everyday people and like the local voices. So I'd love to just understand how do you think about tapping into big audiences, big influencers, celebrities, all the way down to your everyday person and how do those mix together, how are they separate, all those things.
Steven Vigilante (29:51)
Yeah, it's probably my favorite topic. I kind of think about the world in terms of like, a number of people who know us, a number of people who don't know us, there was still a vast significant, a vast majority of Americans never heard of OLIPOP, right? So to me, there's like so much white space and we, our data says like, our biggest hurdle is getting people to try it because people are skeptical of low sugar drinks. And we're still only in 30,000 stores. There's like 200,000 convenience stores in the country that we're barely in. And there's just so much more opportunity for us out there. And so I'm always thinking about like the next like five to 10 % of like awareness for us. It's like, who are those people and where are they and how do we get to them? And, you know, we've done a handful of things this year. We've sponsored our first country music artists, we actually have a product placement in a massive country song or the massive artists that will come out in two days. It'll probably be out when this podcast comes out, which is exciting.
Emily Steele (30:28)
Okay. I'm like, you can say it because we're recording and not going live until later unless you're like, Emily, you're gonna spill the tea.
Steven Vigilante (30:47)
It is a music video with Luke Combs for a blockbuster movie that's coming out this summer. And then I finangled our NASCAR driver who we just signed two months ago into the music video, drinking an OLIPOP which is like very fun. Yeah.
Emily Steele (31:05)
What? You're the master orchestrator. It's just wild. my gosh. Okay.
Steven Vigilante (31:10)
I just have these like weird neural connections in my brain where I'm like, wait, this is happening. And we've got this thing over here. I love cross pollinating our partners. I think it's such, it's so fun and interesting. I just feel like from a social media perspective, it adds a whole layer of like, cool. It's cool to do a product placement. But if our NASCAR driver is posting about it and Luke's Combs is posting about it, it's like, it's just a whole other layer.
Emily Steele (31:13)
Yeah, like this makes sense.
Steven Vigilante (31:33)
But yeah, I mean, it's like really trying to find people who have like actual outsize influence. We have a lot of data we get around like where our kind of target audience is, what they do, what they listen to, where they hang out. And then I always ask for, just as like a random fun fact, the sport that has the highest loyalty between fans and brand sponsors is actually NASCAR, which I was like, that's a pretty fascinating data point. And you would never think about OLIPOP and NASCAR, but like I met this team. I went to a race last year. I kind of saw it in person. There was like amazing sampling opportunities and NASCAR races, which we're now doing. And, you know, we met this driver who's like 25. He's up and coming. His dad was a hall of famer. His name's John Hunter Nemechek. He's like, they're like very good at content. They're very content focused. It just, it checked a lot of the boxes that were important to me. And, you know, it's been fascinating. Like the pickup we've had on specifically on Twitter from the NASCAR audience has been amazing. And I just feel like this is a huge opportunity for us. Because like, so many people are trying to be healthy, right? They're everywhere, right? And there's also so many people who drink soda and so many people who are addicted to diet soda as an example. And that's kind of our core customer that we're going after. And so, yeah, I try to find these partners that have an outsized influence over a specific group of people. I think like mega stars, right? And the mega influencers like are they're so expensive on one side, but they also often have tons of brand deals and the value of the 12th brand deal is not as high as like, we just signed a country artist who we'll announce in the next month, who's blowing up right now. We're her first brand partner ever. She's actually just featured on the Beyonce album. So that's sort of why she's blowing up. But I'm trying to find the next big thing in everything that we do as opposed to the current big thing. There's like the Coke and Pepsi people and then there's the OLIPOP people.
Steven Vigilante (33:21)
And oftentimes we're looking for people who are already customers and drink the product and yada, yada, yada. But then also I see so much value in like, I can't tell you how many people I've like gifted a case to four years ago and like are still texting me pictures and putting people onto it. And they're like, you know, obsessed with it. And we know we have very high conversion rate. Once people try it, we have a repeat purchase rate in retail. That's about two and a half x of the industry standard. And so We're big believers in gifting. I think you just send people product and especially people who are hyper connected. And that's why I love the Hummingbirds, right? It's like these younger moms who have like outsized influence in their communities, whether they're like soccer coaches or PTA parents or what have you. Like those people are goldmines, right? And they're harder to reach and it's hard to scale that. But it's super important. And word of mouth is like the reason this business is where it's at today, right? Like everybody knows somebody who needs to get off traditional soda or you know, grew up on it and misses it like me as an example. And so finding those people is super important for us.
Emily Steele (34:21)
Mm -hmm Yeah, cool I so appreciate just the lens and perspective of like the small for the large and how you play to that and like your different stage of company than maybe someone tuning in and just getting started so it's like You know someone who maybe is getting off the ground in their local community It's finding those local bloggers those like going to the places where people with outsized influence are hanging out right like tapping into those voices at a local level is still helpful.
Steven Vigilante (34:45)
Every earlier stage brand that I'm involved or I advise, I'm like, you need a gifting strategy. You need to put in place a strategy for finding the right people. Pay attention to who's tagging you on social, right? That's always something I ask when people reach out. Like, I love you, I wanna work together. I'm like, okay, cool, have you posted it before? Do you buy it on your own? And then finding the right events. And there's brands like Tru Fru, if you know them chocolate covered frozen fruit. They built that business to nine figures on literally sampling and events and influencer marketing. That's all they did. And now they're much bigger and they do a whole bunch of other things. But there is a playbook there, right? Getting product to be in the people's hands from sampling and getting product into the right influential people in the communities you're trying to hit. It's not that complicated. I feel like everybody wants to go and do the splashy things at the beginning. And I even remember looking out of home for us in the early days and it's like a vanity thing to some extent at that point. Now it's a strategy for us, right? We have a whole campaign around it, but it's easy to do those things. They look good to investors and they look like, you know, you're bigger than you are, but they're not actually moving the needle for you when you do it too early. So I think that's the hardest part of building a brand and building a business is like, there's all this opportunity out there and like for us, there's so many different places we can spend money and it's like, how do you actually figure out the right opportunities and I do think we've done a good job of picking the right things at the right time for the business and that's really, really critical.
Emily Steele (36:11)
Mm -hmm, mm -hmm. Critical, absolutely. Well, thanks for the time today. Thanks for telling us about you, your strategy, teaching us all about OLIPOP, the benefits. Anything else you want to leave with listeners today?
Steven Vigilante (36:25)
we're in 30 ,000 stores across the country. We're in every Walmart, Target, Kroger, Whole Foods, Sprouts, AGB, Publix. and then we're actually pushing into the convenience store channel this year. It's like a big, a big new prerogative for us. We're in WaWa now, which I grew up on. So it's kind of, kind of full circle for me. and we do have some really interesting stuff coming down the pipeline that will, you know, hit over the next couple of months, which I'm excited about.
Emily Steele (36:31)
Cool, well thanks for being on podcast today. Steven, appreciate having you.
Steven Vigilante (36:57)
Thank you.
