In just three years, canned water startup Liquid Death has gone from selling its first products online to a $700 million valuation — and you might soon get a chance to own a piece of the fast-growing, eco-conscious company.
The challenge: Every minute, one million plastic bottles are sold worldwide, and only a fraction of them will be recycled. The rest will be incinerated, sent to landfills, or — worse — littered into the ocean and natural environment.
In recent years, the number of those bottles filled with water has surged, particularly in the US, where 50 billion bottles of water are sold every year.
“We’re trying to bring death to plastic bottles.”
Mike Cessario
Canned water: Since 2019, California startup Liquid Death has been offering a more environmentally friendly way to satisfy our cravings for water on-the-go, by selling still and sparkling water in aluminum cans, which are easier to recycle.
“Part of the reason it’s called Liquid Death is because we’re trying to bring death to plastic bottles because most plastic isn’t actually recyclable,” Mike Cessario, founder and CEO of the canned water startup, told Freethink in 2021.
The name Liquid Death was also a key part of the company’s strategy to generate interest in its canned water by marketing it similarly to edgier beverages, such as beer and energy drinks.
“We saw that all the unhealthy brands in the world of marketing were doing all the coolest, funniest, most irreverent marketing,” said Cessario. “So we thought it would be interesting to take the healthiest thing you could possibly drink, which is water, and one-up the marketing of all the unhealthy stuff.”
The latest: Liquid Death’s imaginative branding and focus on sustainability hit a nerve with consumers and investors. The canned water is now sold at 16,000 US locations, and the company just closed a $70 million investment round, bringing its total investments to $195 million.
With a current valuation of $700 million, Liquid Death is now exploring the possibility of going public, giving those who love canned water — and eco-conscious businesses — a chance to own a piece of the company.
“It’s a path we are exploring sometime in the next two years,” Cessario told Bloomberg.
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