How Liquid Death Became Gen Z’s La Croix
Gillian Lange, a bartender from central Illinois, just ordered a twelve pack of Liquid Death to her house. She usually picks up a couple cans at a gas station on the way to work, too. “One to drink on the way, and one to drink at work,” the 23 year old says. For Lange, her love for the canned water isn’t just about the flavor or carbonation. It’s also about the brand as a whole. “The whole gimmick,” she says. “The logo, the names they have for their flavored waters, and even the tagline, ‘Murder your thirst.’”
For Gen Z water connoisseurs, Liquid Death has become a cult favorite. The punky, counterculture drink, sized like a tall boy and adorned with a melting skull, has drawn droves of fans on social media. Its TikTok account is the most followed beverage brand in the US on the platform, at 2.9 million followers, while its Instagram boasts 1.3 million. “Bro liquid death is honestly some good water,” reads a comment on one of the brand’s recent TikTok videos. “Half of my wall is filled with liquid death cans help,” reads another. According to the company, a quarter of its consumers are between 18 and 25 years old. Circa 2015, La Croix had an absolute chokehold on millennials, but today, it seems like Liquid Death has taken up its mantle as the drink of a generation.
The fandom has helped catapult Liquid Death to more than just a highly branded can of water—it’s a way of life. Since the brand’s first sold can in 2019, more than 225,000 people have “legally sold their souls” to the Liquid Death Country Club, a membership program that allows patrons early access to merch drops and live events, according to a spokesperson for the company. Others have gone so far as to tattoo the brand logo on their body, making a reality out of what I can only assume has been every CMO’s dream for the past decade. Liquid Death is the third best-selling carbonated water brand on Amazon and its most recent round of funding has bolstered the company’s valuation to a staggering $700 million.
Mike Cessario, Liquid Death’s co-founder and CEO, attributes much of the brand’s success to its marketing. “At the core of Liquid Death is that we’re a brand that wants to make really funny, entertaining stuff on the internet,” he says.
Liquid Death has made a particularly large splash on TikTok, where its campaigns often garner millions of views. It’s collabed with icons like Martha Stewart, who’s hawking a Liquid Death-branded severed hand candle for Halloween; Tony Hawk, who appears in several videos as a Liquid Death fanboy; and Steve-O, who got “Liquid Death” tattooed on his neck. Eli Rojas, a 22 year old from San Antonio who recently became a Liquid Death convert, notes that the brand’s humor doesn’t seem as forced as most other brands. “They’re pretty great at using internet humor compared to other corporations. Liquid Death is just chill about it.”
Taylor Lorenz, a tech columnist for the Washington Post who frequently reports on social media creators, says that Liquid Death’s content resonates with Gen Z audiences because it speaks to them on their own terms. “[Liquid Death is] kind of nihilist in a way that appeals to Gen Z,” she says. A slogan like “Murder Your Thirst” taps into Gen Z’s surreal, Dadaist meme humor.
Apart from its marketing, Liquid Death has another competitive advantage: sustainability. Whereas many water brands use ecologically damaging plastics that clog our oceans with a glut of microplastics, Liquid Death’s aluminum cans can be recycled an infinite number of times. Andrea Hernandez, a food and beverage brand expert and founder of Snaxshot, points out a beverage brand’s sustainability message can be a major sticking point for young audiences. “I feel that they actually care about sustainability and don’t just use it as an advertising point,” Rojas confirms.
Liquid Death’s popularity recalls the La Croix madness of the mid-2010s, which also began, as Vox reported, online. TV writers, as they’re wont to do, wrote about the delicately flavored seltzer extensively on Twitter, and slowly but surely, La Croix’s aluminum cans appeared on tee shirts and in enormous displays in supermarkets across the country. Fans highly anticipated and hotly debated new flavors were tickled that La Croix had little perceptible flavor.
Today, La Croix is the millennial pink of the beverage industry—cloyingly ubiquitous and desperately overdone—but last decade, it was somewhat of a status symbol. For a certain group of urban, terminally online millennials, it was an inside joke; a shared meme that not only existed in real life, but also faintly tasted of grapefruit.
Much in the same way La Croix did, Liquid Death has become an identity signifier. It’s not just about sipping water out of an aluminum can; it’s about signaling to others that you’re the type of person who appreciates the irreverence or environmental values associated with Liquid Death. It’s also, as with any brand touting a strong internet presence, a way to show people that you get the meme—you have access to a certain circle of TikTok, and if someone else gets the joke too, well, you may just have something in common. “But it’s [also] not a joke, because then you start enjoying the product,” Lorenz adds.
Seltzer has long been growing in popularity, and in 2016 (probably thanks to La Croix), it eclipsed soda for the first time. Now, in lockstep with the cultural zeitgeist, Liquid Death represents a new future for seltzer. One that invites drinkers to not only sip on a can of Liquid Death, but to step into its world filled with macabre candles and merch-based midterms voting incentives.
“I’m not much of a water drinker because the taste of water is straight up not enjoyable most of the time,” says Rojas, “but something about Liquid Death makes me want to drink more. I had two cans in one sitting and I could’ve totally had four more.” For many Zoomers, Liquid Death has positioned itself as the drink of choice by acknowledging what they have been tacitly joking at: In the world’s ever-shifting landscape of terrifying absurdity, what else is there to do but throw up your hands and take a sip of Liquid Death?