Dont Start a Clothing Brand. Start a Men’s Mocktail Brand !!!!
**Woofta I was awfully quiet in June. I traveled multiple weekends for my best friends bachelor party & weddings and I began drowning with all the things I put on my to-do list (this newsletter included).
Giving myself grace & reminding myself a lot of you probably didn’t even notice I had not written in a few weeks lol.
And I need to enjoy these milestone moments for the people close to me! But…. we are back. LFG.
Table of Contents
If someone told you to describe a mocktail brand…. I’d bet you describe the below:
Pink. Botanical. A little label that whispers "wellness” or a “new ritual.”
I then saw that Katy Perry was in one of the ads for a mocktail brand and celebrity brands always interest me….
So I did what I always do. Tapped in with my Particl connector on claude to go pocket-watch a stranger’s brand.
De Soi, the non-alcoholic aperitif Katy Perry put her name on, did almost $36 million the last twelve months. One month, this past May, it did $8M by itself.
s/o to Particl for the numbers
Then I pulled the brand sitting in second. Ghia. Roughly $16M last year. Also good. Also growing.
So unlike most weeks, this category has not one winner but two!!!
Which actually made it more interesting, because the second I looked at the two of them side by side, I saw the exact same thing twice.
They are both selling to the same person.
PARTICL DATA x CLAUDE
What's Actually Wrong w/ This Category:
Open almost any non-alcoholic brand right now and you'll see the identical mood board:
Soft pinks, terracotta, a little sun motif
Words like "botanical," "adaptogen," "ritual," "spritz"
A founder story about slowing down and dinner parties
A can that looks gorgeous on a marble counter next to a single ceramic bowl of olives
It is beautiful. It is also the same brand over and over. De Soi and Ghia are basically fighting for one customer: the design-literate woman hosting a Sunday spritz on the patio.
Thats a real customer. She is just NOT the whole market.
What De Soi Actually Did to Win:
The lazy read is "Katy Perry slapped a celebrity name on fancy juice." Wrong.
The celebrity got attention, but the move underneath it is the part worth stealing.
De Soi made not-drinking feel like an upgrade, not a deprivation of being “the sober one.”
For decades the non-alcoholic option was the sad one. Club soda with a lime. The "nahhh I'm driving" drink.
De Soi took that exact moment, the moment you order the un-cool boring thing, and made the it most aesthetic object on the table!!!
Same as what Athletic Brewing did for beer on their way to an $800M valuation as the biggest NA beer brand in the country. Insanity.
But truly that is the whole category thesis: give the person who isnt drinking something they are actually proud to be holding.
De Soi nailed that feeling for exactly one person. The aesthetic dinner-party woman.
So who is making the proud-to-hold drink for everyone else!!!??
ZOOM OUT! Look at the macro trend
This is NOTTTT a quick fad. The non-alcoholic alternatives market is projected to grow about 18.5% a year through 2029, one of the fastest growth rates in all of beverage.
Gen Z drinks less than any generation on record. "Dry January" and the sober-curious thing are now a permanent thing, not a New Years stunt.
And here is the tell. Look at how many versions of the alcoholic version exist?? There is a beer for the tailgate, a whiskey for the poker night, a tallboy for the job site, a shot for the bachelor party.
Every male drinking occasion has its own product lmao
The non-alcoholic version of all of those? Pink spritz. One vibe. For her.
Gen Z doesnt party???
Four Open Lanes I'd Actually Build Into
Going head to head with De Soi on the patio is a dead end. They own pretty. But here is where my brain went instead, every one of them the same pink can will never reach:
The guys-night play. Poker night, the group chat, the fantasy draft. None of those guys want a botanical rose spritz in their hand, but plenty of them are the one not drinking tonight. A non-alc built like a bourbon or an Old Fashioned, dark glass, zero flowers, sits on the bar cart next to the real stuff.
The blue-collar / job-site play. Who is making the NA drink for the guy who quit drinking but still wants the cold one cracking open at 5pm when the truck's unloaded? Not a wellness elixir or Ultra 0. Not ‘a ritual.’ The crack and the hiss, none of the hangover.
The sports-bar play. You cannot order a sober drink at a sports bar without feeling like a narc. Theres a brand to be built that lives ON TAP in that environment, designed for the guy watching the game who has a 6am, packaged so nobody at the table even clocks it as the non-alcoholic one.
The gym / recovery-bro play. The guy who traded drinking for the gym is a massive and growing tribe, and right now his only options are pink adaptogen cans or n/a beer. Theres a functional, refreshing, masculine-coded "wind down without the booze" drink with his name on it that nobody has made.
Same drink. Different person. THAT is a brand.
Weapon of the Week: The Persona Swap Prompt
The last few weeks I gave you prompts to FIND white space and to COUNTER-POSITION against a big player. This one is sharper for a category like this, where the product is already great but pointed at only one kind of person.
Copy and edit this:
I'm looking at [CATEGORY]. The leading brands are [BRAND 1] and [BRAND 2].
First, profile the single customer these brands are actually built for. Be specific about gender, age, aesthetic, the exact occasion they're imagined using the product, and the emotional promise.
Then:
List 5 completely different personas who have the SAME underlying need but would never buy the current brands because of how they look, sound, or are packaged.
For each persona, name the specific occasion or ritual the product would slot into for them.
Pick the strongest persona and build the sibling brand: name, packaging direction, price point, channel, and the emotional promise rewritten for them.
Give me the first 3 ad hooks for that persona, in their language, not the original brand's.
Be opinionated. The goal is not to out-pretty the leader. It's to find the person they were never built for and build the thing that's obviously theirs.
Run this on any category where every brand looks suspiciously the same!
Source It
If the men's mocktail caught your eye like it did for me, and you want to test a small batch of a non-alc drink this quarter:
Alibaba: pre-filtered non-alcoholic beverage / functional drink co-packers, Trade Assurance + Verified only — https://www.alibaba.com/trade/search?SearchText=non+alcoholic+beverage+manufacturer&assessment_company=GS
Pietra (vetted small-batch beverage manufacturers, lower friction than wrangling Alibaba): https://www.pietrastudio.com/platform/sourcing-and-production/products
Beverage is more regulated than bath salt, so get a co-packer who handles formulation + canning before you spend a dollar on the brand.
And for the weekly quote we are back with the creative whisperer, DOUBLE R.
Till next time soldier,
Carson
P.S. If you made it this far, here is my weekly beg to subscribe to my brand new YouTube channel. !!!!!
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