Mike Cessario and the Cult of the Tallboy
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Mike Cessario has made drinking water cool. Liquid Death, the absurdist canned beverage brand he founded in 2017, has simultaneously fulfilled and created a need for luxury water that looks like a beer without containing a drop of booze and doesn’t come in turtle-killing plastic. Liquid Death’s valuation hit $700 million at the end of 2022 and while the brand’s definitely experiencing scaling difficulties, its hype is real.
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“When I worked in advertising, I always noticed how unhealthy brands like soda, beer, and energy drinks got to have all the fun in their marketing, while healthy brands played it safe and boring. I started toying with the idea of using humor to help promote healthy products,” Cessario told SPY. “With Liquid Death, we’re building a comedy entertainment platform for healthy beverages.”
Liquid Death’s flavors — Severed Lime, Mango Chainsaw, Berry It Alive — definitely stick out on the shelves, and the brand’s tagline “Murder Your Thirst,” nods to Cessario’s upbringing entrenched in the grunge, alternative scene in LA. After years at the skate park and playing in bands he noticed that many of the products marketed towards kids like him were junk food and sugary sodas. After a decade in advertising, he decided to inject some rebellious energy into the wellness industry. It worked, and now his cans are sold in Whole Foods, Target, Sprouts, 7-Eleven, and at concert venues across the country.
Liquid Death’s position within the beverage industry is a peculiar one. It’s a higher ticket product that fulfills a basic human need, but it does much more than that. It gives road trippers and airport dwellers an option for non-tap water that isn’t in plastic. All of their cans are made of aluminum, a material that’s infinitely recyclable and often consists of up to 65% recycled materials. Liquid Death also gives sober people something to hold at bars and concerts that isn’t obviously water, and it tastes incredible.
SPY sat down with Cessario to chat about his brand, his position on their unique place within the marketplace, and his personal beverage preferences.
SPY: People purchase bottled water for convenience, but Liquid Death’s absurdist, humorous branding has made drinking water a whole vibe. What drove the design of the label, humor in the brand copy, etc?
MC: We didn’t have the marketing dollars to compete with Coca-Cola and Pepsi, so we needed to find affordable ways to cut through the noise. That meant using humor and injecting virality into everything we create because people love to share real entertainment more than typical marketing.
To stand a chance on the shelf, we needed packaging that stood out in a sea of plastic bottles. We tapped Will Carsola, artist and co-creator of Adult Swim’s Mr. Pickles, to do a lot of the artwork you see today, including the melting skull logo, the various designs you see on our boxes, and even our mascot, the Thirst Executioner.
When it came to content, we knew we could win if we made people laugh. We hate ads just as much as everyone, so instead of creating ‘marketing’ that people scroll past, we focused on producing true comedy and entertainment that people want to share. We approach our creative work like an SNL writer’s room and hold our content to a much higher bar because of that.
SPY: Liquid Death doesn’t just make drinking water look cool, it also kind of makes it look like someone is drinking booze when they’re not. What role do you think LD plays in the sober trend/community and was that a part of your original conception of the brand?
MC: Everyone needs to drink water, so we never planned on targeting just the sober community. However, we did always want Liquid Death to be something you could drink in a party environment — whether you’re sober, just trying to drink healthier when out having fun, or just taking a break with someone between non-alc drinks.
Interestingly, there seems to be something psychological about holding a tallboy can like ours. When you drink water in a tallboy, your brain basically associates it with all the fun times you might have had while drinking something that was actually unhealthy in a can.
Before Liquid Death, water really wasn’t seen as a “fun” refreshment, so people at bars or parties might have grabbed another drink solely because they didn’t want to make it look like they were opting out of the fun.
SPY: Were you a big bottled-water drinker before creating Liquid Death? What are your personal gas station go-to purchases?
MC: I’ve been pretty health-conscious most of my life — I was vegetarian for many years, I don’t really drink soda, and I’ve always been an advocate to drink more water and less sugar and caffeine. For other personal go-to purchases, I love the occasional kombucha.
SPY: Liquid Death’s cans being made of infinitely-recyclable aluminum also gives environmentalists and those looking to avoid single-use plastics a reason to purchase. How important is environmentalism for the brand and what drove the use of cans as opposed to other plastic alternatives like glass or cardboard?
MC: Our mission is #DeathToPlastic, and sustainability is a very important value. A portion of our proceeds goes to nonprofits helping to fight plastic pollution and to bring clean drinking water to those in need.
Only about 5% of plastic actually gets recycled with the rest of it ending up in our landfills and polluting our oceans. By comparison, aluminum is infinitely recyclable, and nearly 75% of all aluminum ever produced is still in use today.
We went with aluminum over other options because it is far and away the most recycled economically viable material to recycle. Glass and paper cartons have their own issues that make them difficult to recycle at the scale of aluminum.
SPY: Do you think more brands are going to emerge using plastic alternatives in the packaged water space?
MC: When we started packaging still water in cans, we expected more brands to follow suit. Which is why we always focused on building our unique brand and not being overly focused on the cans themselves. All beer comes in cans, so you don’t see beer companies touting the fact they come in a can, because all their competitors do as well. We hope and expect more brands will make the shift away from plastic.
SPY: Liquid Death has a huge loyal following. Has there been anything that’s surprised you about the larger reception of the brand? Any particular sub-cultures you’ve loved seeing adopt the brand? Festival heads, gamers, etc?
MC: Our target audience is anyone who likes to laugh, which spans pretty much all subcultures. That’s why we’ve been able to build such a cult following — we’re currently the #3 most followed beverage on social in the world.
That said, we’ve still had some surprises. Parents love to give Liquid Death to their children, which we didn’t initially expect. Many have said they are amazed that it actually got their kids excited to drink healthy zero or no-sugar beverages instead of soda or high-sugar drinks.
A dad on TikTok recently posted about mistakenly packing his son’s lunch with a Guinness beer instead of our sparkling water and then having to pick up his son who got caught with it at school.
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