Sales Execution Manager

Untapping licensing opportunities for water brands. By Mark Seavy Bottled and canned water brands are finding themselves at the confluence of several trends in the health and wellness space, including a focus on better for you ingredients and a move away from microplastics. Yet the market is relatively untapped for licensing. PepsiCo's Aquafina, which launched in 1994, has found its way into licensed lip balms and cosmetics. Danone, which acquired the Evian brand as BSN Group in 1970, launched a collaboration with fashion brand Balmain that produced a co-branded glass bottle and couture gown in 2022. And Liquid Death has been focused on expanding its brand, recently taking booth space at Licensing Expo in Las Vegas and signing deals for a range of products, including cosmetic face masks with ESW Beauty. Yet outbound licensing for bottled water has to some extent been flat despite a global market that was valued at $378 billion in 2025, according to Straits Research. The Asia Pacific region accounts for 43% of sales, and the market is projected to grow to as much as $498 - $725 billion by 2034, depending on the firm making the forecast. Part of the reason for that broad forecast is the wide range of brands. Private label, for example, accounts for about 25% of bottled water sales at U.S. grocery, according to analysts. Coca-Cola Co.'s Smartwater, which it acquired in buying Energy Brands in 2007, has the top U.S. market share followed by Primo Water Corp.'s Poland Spring and Pure Life labels as well as PepsiCo's Aquafina, according to research firm Statista. Coca-Cola also launched Dasani in 1999 to rival PepsiCo's Aquafina, which has been a sponsor at many sporting events. Primo (Mountain Valley, Saratoga, Chrystal Springs) itself merged with private equity-owned BlueTriton (Poland Spring, Deer Park) in 2024. And this doesn't include dozens of other brands that have recently emerged as the water market evolved to also include "functional beverages" with electrolytes and other minerals like Unilever's Liquid I.V. (powder) and All Market Inc.'s Vita Coco (coconut water). "We compete in an attractive category and continue to benefit from strong tailwinds in health and wellness and hydration," said Eric Foss, CEO of Primo. "It's highly penetrated, frequently purchased, and among the fastest-growing categories within liquid refreshment beverages." In addition to that high penetration (per capita consumption was 47 gallons in 2024 and consumption expanded 4% between 2021 and 2022), the bottled water market has also produced a new round of luxury brands that are focused on a more niche consumer demographic. That is a category once home to Evian, Perrier, and others, but that is now being filled by the likes of Loonen, a brand that hits lifestyle marks by being bottled at a spring in Southern California with stainless steel filtration as well as boasting natural minerals like Celtic sea salt, magnesium, potassium, and calcium. Loonen is packaged in a glass carafe, which can be recycled, and its upscale design has been captured in photos posted to social media by the likes of pop star Dua Lipa and reality TV star Lisa Rinna. Similarly, The Wonderful Co.'s Fiji brand stood out due to its square container while Mountain Valley's green glass has been popular with the likes of rapper Jay-Z and actress Gweneth Paltrow. Additionally, alkaline-based water and other luxury brands like One Water Global and Litewater have recently shared space at fashion shows. "Once plain water became suspect, it became a category you could charge a premium to solve," Jenna Movsowitz, co-founder of Substack newsletter Express Checkout, told the Wall Street Journal. Yet that premium, especially for licensing, also takes some brand building. ESW, for example, signed with Liquid Death both for its widely known brand and the fact that it was water, a core ingredient in a hydration mask, said Francesca O'Donnell, Head of Sales at ESW. "It made complete sense because it already had the element we needed and a brand name that was widely recognized, which would give us more exposure," O'Donnell said. "That is really the key to expanding your brand's reach at a relatively low marketing cost."

Murder your bathroom: Liquid Death partners with Goodwipes for sCream Soda flushables. August 11, 2026 Filed under * Liquid Death collaborated with Goodwipes for a limited-edition flushable wipe inspired by the beverage company's sCream Soda flavor. * Goodwipes and Liquid Death are also giving away a "buttler" personal butt-wiping service to one lucky winner. It can be exhausting to keep up with Liquid Death's rapid-fire collaborations. Its latest partnership, however, seems like an unlikely pairing, one that follows you into a place where everyone can escape and take a brief respite from the rest of the world. The bathroom.

Murder your thirst and measure everything. Tuesday, August 11th, 2026 - 6:00 am A podcast interview with Benoit Vatere Chief Media & Digital Commerce Officer Liquid Death is all jokes and dark humor on the surface, but the canned water brand's chief media and digital commerce officer, Benoit Vatere, takes measurement deadly seriously. And that's because Liquid Death, like all CPG brands, is dealing with one of the gnarliest problems in marketing: proving that media actually moves product off of shelves. Although Vatere has "digital commerce" in his title, he'll be the first to admit that most CPG sales still happen at the register, not online - and it's not like you can put a pixel on a tall boy of water. For Liquid Death, measuring success means looking beyond channel-specific dashboards and trying to understand how the full media mix across formats and platforms is reflected in sales data. For example, who cares about return on ad spend if there's no causal lift in the number of cans sold? It's not that Vatere straight-up ignores ROAS, but he believes there's no point in considering it in isolation. It has to be connected to another metric in order to mean anything. "I track it attached to the new-to-brand metric," he says on this week's episode of AdExchanger Talks, "because, combined together, it's a very good proxy into incrementality... [but] if it's ROAS on its own, I don't even pay attention. I don't look at it at all." Vatere's focus on incrementality also shapes how he thinks about loyalty. In CPG, most people bounce between multiple brands without thinking too hard about it, especially for something as basic as water. People "are just not loyal" to CPG brands, Vatere says. In fact, he adds, most big soda companies generate more than 50% of their revenue from people who only buy a couple of times a year. That's why Vatere says he cares more about marketing to light and lapsed customers than to Liquid Death's smaller base of passionate existing fans. The brand love is real - Liquid Death has people willing to get its logo tattooed on their bodies, and not a lot of brands can say that - but superfans aren't what drive growth. "In order to be a billion-dollar brand," Vatere says, "you need to get the people that are not that heavy and committed." Also in this episode: the delicate dance between paid and earned when your ad creative is so fun it generates its own headlines; Liquid Death's partnership with performance marketing platform Ibotta to run always-on incrementality testing; and why agentic AI could turn grocery shopping into a three-way negotiation between people, brands and bots. Tagged in: