Mike Cessario on Building Liquid Death as a Beverage and Entertainment Brand

Liquid Death founder and CEO Mike Cessario tells Harry Stebbings that the common account of the company beginning with a rock star hydration problem misses the point. He says an earlier experience planted the idea, but that the product emerged years later.

Cessario recalls that Monster sponsored the Warped Tour and supplied bands with cans that looked like its energy drinks but contained water. The cans were not sold; on stage, however, fans could see the branding. His friends in the bands cared about health, yet the marketing suggested a different lifestyle.

He began wondering why healthier products could not use the humor, youth culture and irreverence commonly associated with alcohol, soda and candy. Liquid Death became his attempt to make a water brand that was entertaining in its own right.

When people dismiss an idea as silly, Cessario advises founders not to assume rejection proves they are right. Most ideas may indeed be bad, he argues, so the important question is what evidence can test the hypothesis.

He says Liquid Death had encouraging early signals before a real product existed: social followers, messages asking where to buy it and people sharing beverage images. These were indicators of interest, not proof of eventual sales; he says some technology-oriented investors understood their potential more readily than traditional consumer-goods investors.

Cessario grew up near Newark, Delaware, and describes attending an elementary school where recess was sometimes canceled because of shootings and needles appeared on the playground. After moving schools to Pennsylvania, he encountered a different environment. He believes seeing different circumstances influenced how he thinks about culture and marketing.

He found community in punk music before the internet made it easy to find like-minded people. He designed covers and posters for bands, studied graphic design and moved into advertising because he liked funny, creative work.

At large agencies he worked on major consumer brands, but never felt fully at home in the corporate culture. He wanted to combine entertainment and irreverence with a product he actually cared about, rather than spend nights and weekends selling something that did not matter to him.

For Cessario, high performance means doing a lot with a little. He defines a strong brand as one whose meaning to customers goes beyond the functional value of its product; fashion is his illustration of the emotional and sometimes status-related reasons people pay different prices for similar items.

He thinks Liquid Death resonates for different reasons. Some customers recognize a culture they grew up with; others enjoy a small sense of rebellion without having to drink beer or an energy drink. Water, in his view, gives many more people a way to participate.

Cessario argues that marketers can underestimate the breadth of audiences for dark or unconventional entertainment. He points to horror films and true crime as examples of interests that extend beyond the stereotypical heavy-metal fan. These are his interpretations of audience tastes rather than independently presented research.

Asked about alienating customers, he says provocative work requires judgment: a few degrees in one direction can make it distasteful, while the other can make it dull. His view is that a brand people love will also attract critics, and trying to please everyone can produce indifference.

Looking back, he wishes Liquid Death had hired a retail expert earlier. He says the company signed unfavorable distributor contracts and had to pay to exit some arrangements. Someone familiar with the industry could have helped assess distributors before the company needed extensive retail access.

A common founder mistake, he says, is overestimating how distinctive a product appears to outsiders. Founders know every detail of their own work; they should place it alongside alternatives and ask people unfamiliar with it what they actually perceive.

A new ingredient may differentiate a product briefly, but competitors can copy it and larger firms may price it more cheaply. Cessario therefore sees a distinctive brand voice and style as a more defensible asset than an ingredient alone.

Liquid Death could emphasize aluminum cans, but he argues that promoting a feature shared by competing canned waters would also help those competitors. He believes its tone and unusual marketing are harder for large organizations with extensive approvals to reproduce. This is the founder’s assessment of his own company’s position.

Cessario is skeptical of calling most marketing storytelling. He prefers to think of it as rapid communication: a commercial should leave a viewer with a particular feeling. For Liquid Death, the desired reaction is often that the viewer has just seen something exceptionally funny, rather than a reminder to hydrate.

He rejects the suggestion that everyone hates Liquid Death’s marketing. His argument is that people often dislike conventional advertising and that parodying the conventions of advertising can itself be entertaining, even for people who do not identify with skulls or heavy metal.

Why might ads feel less creative? Cessario offers two hypotheses: excessive reliance on testing and data can displace human judgment about what is funny, and the visibility of negative social media reactions can make brands overly cautious. He presents these as explanations, not proven causes.

Criticism still hurts, he says, but his team tries to put it in context. If a post has thousands of likes and a handful of negative comments, the few objections should not automatically outweigh the broader response. He also notes that many viewers watch without commenting at all.

As a startup competing with large beverage companies, Liquid Death tries to make marketing spending go further. Cessario describes an earned-media approach: create ideas people will share or journalists will cover, rather than paying for every impression.

He treats platforms as distribution vehicles rather than the strategy itself. At the time, the company focused on Instagram and TikTok because audiences were there; if a platform changed, the task would still be to put entertaining ideas where people gather.

The company’s creative team works, in his analogy, more like Saturday Night Live than a conventional marketing department. Ideas can come from anywhere, but professional creative people develop, write and execute them as entertainment in service of the brand.

One example began with parents sharing photos of children holding Liquid Death cans and joking that they looked like beer. The creative team turned that observed behavior into a beer-commercial parody starring children and water. Cessario says the execution required writing, shooting, direction and production expertise.

He says the Super Bowl commercial cost roughly $100,000 all in, compared with the much larger budgets some advertisers use. His team tries to control production spending through creative decisions and experienced producers. This is his account of the company’s cost, with no independent breakdown provided.

Cessario says the company’s major content pieces have generally performed well. He attributes that record in part to basing ideas on demonstrated audience behavior, as with the photos of children holding the cans, rather than guessing in isolation. The interview does not provide a complete success rate.

Brand building is only one part of making a beverage company work. He praises Liquid Death’s sales team and says staff must visit stores to ensure products make it from the stockroom to the shelf. Without that execution, an ordered case can sit in the back while the shelf remains empty.

He also alleges that competitors sometimes move products or remove inventory-scanning tags, making replenishment harder. These are his descriptions of industry conduct; the interview does not establish who did so or independently verify the incidents.

In the quick-fire round, Cessario recommends The Menu, a dark comedy that satirizes high-end dining. He likes its creative premise and sees it as an example of entertaining work that does not require the largest movie budgets.

He says Liquid Death had shifted from publishing many small pieces toward fewer, larger moments. His comparison is a move from a Netflix-like volume of bets toward an HBO-like emphasis on select projects. Small pieces can consume substantial time too, he argues, and constant posting risks training people to scroll past.

He cites content with Bert Kreischer, Tony Hawk and Martha Stewart as examples of larger moments, and says some celebrity collaborators are also investors with existing relationships to the company. His reported impression figures are company claims, not independently established results.

For celebrity investors, he looks for people who genuinely enjoy the brand and its humor. Rather than appoint one permanent spokesperson, the company invites different people into its comic world and creates ideas tailored to them.

One example involved mixing Tony Hawk’s blood into ink for limited-edition skateboards and filming the process. Cessario estimates that the shoot cost about $10,000 and says the unusual idea generated press and sharing. His cost and reach claims are not independently verified in the interview.

Asked which brand he admires, Cessario chooses Trader Joe’s. He argues that its store-brand assortment, perceived value and distinctive design have created trust that extends across many product categories. This is his interpretation of the retailer’s brand, not a nutritional assessment of its products.

Looking back at Liquid Death’s founding, he wishes he had understood fundraising and dilution better. Beverage is capital intensive, he says, and startups can find themselves raising money repeatedly before reaching a scale at which they can be profitable.

He says investor selection matters too: he has heard of companies harmed by poor investor relationships, although he describes Liquid Death’s own investors as strong partners. Founders who understand the mechanics of shares and financing earlier, he believes, will be better prepared.

Asked about 2028, Cessario describes an ambition for Liquid Death to become a multibillion-dollar beverage brand that also produces comedy people would watch even if they did not buy the drink. The comparison with Red Bull and Monster is a five-year goal, not a reported outcome. Stebbings thanks him and closes the interview.