Roy Dano
May 14, 2026
Hey there,
Liquid Death sells water. They generated $333M in revenue last year and are valued at $1.4 billion. They started with a $1,500 marketing video filmed in 2019. The product is canned water. The business isn't. Here's the move every founder is missing.
The teardown
Mike Cessario was Netflix's creative director before founding Liquid Death in 2017. In 2019 he shot a launch video for $1,500 showing a punk band drinking water from beer-style cans. Six years later the company is in over 133,000 US retail stores including Walmart, Target, and Whole Foods, with $333M revenue in 2024, a 26% increase on the year before.
Here's what every founder gets wrong about Liquid Death. They think the product is canned water. It's not. The product is the 16.9oz tallboy aluminium can.
Cessario figured out that water has no positioning surface. You can't make water taste better. You can't sell water on hydration claims everyone else also makes. The competition was Evian, Fiji, Smart Water. Brands that competed on the bottle.
So he didn't make a better bottle. He moved the category. He took the format used by the most identity-loaded products on earth (beer, energy drinks) and applied it to water. Now the can does the work. A 16-year-old at a music festival who doesn't drink alcohol can hold a Liquid Death and signal exactly the same identity as the kid next to them holding a Modelo.
That isn't a product strategy. It's structural arbitrage. He took a format that already carried meaning and applied it to a category where meaning didn't exist.
Result: in 5 years, $3M to $333M. 110x growth. A category nobody thought was disruptable, disrupted entirely on packaging.
The principle
Most founders treat packaging as the last step. You build the product, design the brand, then figure out the packaging.
That's backwards.
For commodity categories like water, food, supplements, beauty, and clothing, the packaging IS the positioning. The product can be identical to your competitor's. What it goes in determines whether anyone buys it.
Look at every breakout creator brand of the last decade. Prime took a bottle format borrowed from sports drinks but built it for the energy-drink shelf. Athletic Greens chose a sachet that signals routine, not powder that signals supplement. Olipop went with a fountain-soda silhouette in glass, retail-positioned to compete with Coke, not kombucha.
Each one took a packaging format from one category and applied it to another. None of them made better products. They made better signals.
If your brand competes in a commodity category, your packaging decision IS your positioning decision. Stop treating it like the last 10%. It's the first 80%.
Your move this week
Twenty-minute exercise. Pull up your homepage. Pull up your product page. Pull up your packaging photo.
Ask one question: what category do my visual signals say I'm in?
Not what you sell. What the visual signals say. Then list every brand in that real category, the one your visual signals match. If they're brands like yours competing on identical product features, you have no positioning. You have a logo.
Now ask: which category has the most identity loading for the buyer I actually want? Beer cans signal one identity. Wine bottles another. Premium spirits another. Beauty syringes another. Supplement sachets another.
Pick the category whose identity matches your buyer. Then redesign your packaging to borrow that category's signals. Not copy. Borrow the visual codes.
This takes 90 minutes if you have a designer. It costs nothing. It changes your entire conversion rate.
If you want the full framework
The 5-second positioning test, the category-flip canvas, and 5 worked examples (including Gymshark and SKIMS) are in Chapter 2 of the £9 Playbook. grwthmode.com/get-playbook
PS: Next Tuesday, the BodyPower 2013 risk that built Gymshark. Two students emptied their company bank account to book a stand. They sold out their entire stock on day one. Then a tracksuit went viral on Facebook and generated £30,000 in sales in 30 minutes. The structural lesson behind it is what most founders miss.
Roy