In March 2024, a company that sells water in cans raised $67 million at a $1.4 billion valuation. Not a new kind of water. Not a special filter. Water, in a tallboy can, with a heavy metal attitude and the tagline "murder your thirst".

That company is Liquid Death, and the water was never the clever part.

Where the idea came from

Mike Cessario was a graphic designer based in Delaware. According to the brand's history on Wikipedia, the idea goes back to the 2009 Vans Warped Tour, a touring punk and rock festival. He saw people there drinking water out of Monster Energy cans.

We can only guess at why they did it, but a Monster can looks a lot more at home at a punk gig than a bottle of spring water does. Cessario decided to market water the way Monster markets energy drinks.

He founded Liquid Death in December 2018, and it started selling through its own website in January 2019. Tallboy cans. Heavy metal and punk fans as the audience. "Murder your thirst" on the side.

By 2023, the brand had $263 million in retail sales. A few months later came that $1.4 billion valuation.

What this means for your brand

Water is about as close to a pure commodity as you can get. It comes out of your tap. Every supermarket has a whole aisle of it. If any product should be impossible to brand, it's water.

Liquid Death didn't try to prove its water was better than anyone else's, and we're not going to claim that either. What it changed was who the water was for and how it felt to hold it. A tallboy can at a gig says something about you that a bottle of mineral water doesn't. That is perceived value: the same product, sitting in a different place in someone's head.

Picture this. Two plain white T-shirts, same cotton, same factory. One is blank. The other has the name of a band you love on the front. You'll pay more for the second one, and you'll know exactly why, even though the cotton is identical.

Your business probably has a plain water of its own. It's the thing you sell that looks, on paper, a lot like what your competitors sell. Similar service, similar price, similar promise. When that's the case, the difference a buyer feels comes from everything around the product: who it's obviously for, how it talks, what it looks like when it turns up.

The honest counterpoint

It would be too tidy to say a clever can built a billion-dollar company on its own. Two things are worth knowing.

First, Liquid Death isn't only still water any more. By the time of that 2024 round, BevNET reported that its sparkling water and tea lines together made up more than half of the business. So the valuation isn't resting on plain water alone.

Second, distribution did a lot of heavy lifting. The same report says the brand had reached over 113,000 retail stores across the US and the UK. Positioning got people talking. Being on the shelf when they went to buy something is what turned that talk into $263 million of sales.

So we wouldn't read this as "be edgy and the money follows". In this case, positioning made an ordinary product worth noticing. Then the slow, unglamorous work of getting it into stores had to keep up.

One thing to try this week

Write down, in one sentence, what you sell with no adjectives at all. "We sell water." "We bake bread." "We design websites." That's your plain water.

Now write a second sentence: who is it for, specifically, and how do they want to feel when they buy it? Not "anyone who's thirsty". Something closer to "punk fans who'd rather not be seen holding a bottle of mineral water at a gig".

If that second sentence could sit on a competitor's website without anyone noticing, that's where the work is. Your product may be perfectly good. The story around it might just be missing.

So what's your plain water, and who is it really for?