Building LiQure: From Startup Idea to 250+ Retail Stores | LINK LIVE EP. 23

This week on Link Live Episode 23, host Lorenzo Costa, CEO of Link Creative, sits down with Daniel, Co-Founder of LiQure, one of the fastest-growing alcohol recovery brands in the country.

Born and raised in Wisconsin, Daniel turned a personal frustration with post-drinking recovery into a rapidly scaling consumer product company. Alongside his co-founder Logan, he spent years researching, formulating, and refining LiQure's alcohol recovery gummies before bringing them to market. After overcoming manufacturing setbacks, failed production runs, and launching with virtually no marketing budget, the team built LiQure into a nationally distributed brand through persistence, retail partnerships, and community-driven marketing.

Today, LiQure is available in more than 250 retailers nationwide and continues to gain traction through innovative grassroots marketing, retail expansion, and a rapidly growing online community.

Daniel joins the podcast to discuss the realities of launching a CPG brand, navigating manufacturing challenges, scaling retail distribution, raising capital, building a viral social media presence, and creating a product in one of the most competitive consumer markets.

Inside the Episode:

From Problem to Product: How a conversation with his mother introduced Daniel to DHM, the key ingredient that inspired the creation of LiQure.

Building a CPG Brand from Scratch: Lessons learned from product formulation, manufacturing setbacks, and launching with virtually no marketing budget.

Retail Growth & Distribution: How LiQure expanded from a handful of local stores to more than 250 retailers across the country.

The Importance of Taste: Why product experience became the deciding factor in refining the formula and positioning the brand for larger retail opportunities.

Organic Marketing That Works: The strategy behind LiQure's viral state-by-state drinking content and rapid social media growth.

Raising Capital & Staying Resilient: Daniel shares lessons from bootstrapping the business, navigating investor conversations, and managing the realities of entrepreneurship.

"You need to be able to sell the brand, sell the story, and sell the future." — Daniel

DANIEL | LIQURE

Instagram: @liqurehq
Website: liqurehq.com

LORENZO COSTA | LINK CREATIVE

Website: linkcreativeco.com
YT | @linkcreativeco
INSTAGRAM | @linkcreativeco
TIKTOK | @linkcreativeco

00:00 - Intro & Teaser
01:42 - Daniel's Background & Wisconsin Drinking Culture
04:58 - The Science Behind DHM & Alcohol Recovery
09:22 - Turning an Idea Into a Business
11:29 - Manufacturing Challenges & Product Development
15:33 - Choosing the Right Manufacturing Partner
17:51 - Formulating a Consumer Product
19:34 - Launching LiQure With No Marketing Budget
22:36 - Growing to 250 Retail Locations
26:26 - Breaking Into Major Retailers
28:55 - Reformulating the Product & Improving Taste
31:08 - Rebranding & Marketing Strategy
34:10 - Wellness Trends & Consumer Behavior
36:50 - What Makes CPG Brands Stand Out
38:42 - Building a Viral Social Media Strategy
43:54 - Raising Capital & Investor Lessons
49:31 - Staying Healthy as a Founder
51:06 - Advice to His 18-Year-Old Self
54:00 - How to Connect With LiQure

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

What's going on, everybody? It's Lorenzo back with another episode of Link Live. We got episode 23 for you guys today. We're welcome today by Daniel Otix, co-founder of Liqueur. Liqueur is one of the market's leading anti-hangover recovery gummies. They just iterated their second variation of the product, they're spreading nationally like crazy. Daniel breaks down some of their early struggles, how to pick distribution, what to look out for when you're formulating a product, how they are now reaching national scale, and what their plans look like moving forward as they continue to scale their brand and digital presence. And without further ado, let's hop into Link Live episode 23. We're back with another episode of Link Live. We're sitting down with a very special guest today, Daniel Odix, uh co-founder of Laqueur, which we're gonna get into. But um have known Daniel and and his his partner Logan now for a couple years. So been wanting to uh find the right time to get this episode in. And I think what you guys are building at Laqueur is something very, very prevalent right now. It's a it you're solving a very common problem, as we've been able to see. And I think you guys are going through all of the the facets of what a rising CPG-based business looks like in 2026 and onwards. So I'm really excited to get your perspective on all that, but really appreciate you coming.

SPEAKER_01 1:25

Yeah, Lorenzo, thank you so much for having me. It's been a long time coming. Like you said, we've been going back and forth since we had our first iteration of our product, and we're about to launch our third. So really excited to have the opportunity.

SPEAKER_00 1:37

Awesome. Um, let's hop into it, kind of just square one. I know you you weren't really born and raised in the Chicago area, but you're you're based here now. Talk to us a little bit about like your upbringing, kind of like where where you grew up, what some of those early inspirations look like, your background, family, things of that nature.

SPEAKER_01 1:54

Yeah, definitely. So I grew up in the north suburbs of Milwaukee, Mekwong specifically. And if you don't know a lot about Wisconsin, for those listening, we're known for our cheese, but we're also known for our drinking culture. And being immersed in that my entire life, even though I'm not drinking as a youth, you kind of notice the trends of how people go about their consumption. And especially in Wisconsin, it's not the most responsible. Once I went to the University of Wisconsin, you got to experience that firsthand. And after I graduated, you get to try to keep that up your first year in uh out of college, and you realize very quickly your body has already changed since your diploma hit your hand. Whereas a couple of drinks with your coworkers might ruin your Friday morning, especially at a happy hour. And I noticed this, and so did my co-founder, Logan. And we realized, like, alright, what can we do to bulletproof our bodies? We ended up getting introduced to our main ingredient, DHM, by my own mother. It was actually pretty, pretty awesome of an experience. I was complaining to her about like how awful I was feeling after just, you know, a couple of a couple of drinks with my friends, with my co-workers. She told me that she had been taking this Japanese raisin tree extract for about a year now. Takes it every time that she would drink her wine and would wake up feeling great the next day. And I was like, skeptical, but alright, I'll give it a shot. Take it in pill form. Was blown away with how good I felt the next day. And then uh all of a sudden I do my own research. There's pills of this, there's tablets of this, there's liquids of this, but no one had been able to put this into a gummy format. And I was actively seeking out different formats because uh Logan and I, we'd be popping pills in the middle of the bar. You'd get the weirdest looks from the managers, you get the weirdest looks from people that you're talking to. The optics are very taboo for pills, but for a gummy, with like the increase in uh preference for gummy supplementation, but also the the rate of acceptance of like THC products, the gummy association with THC, how that skyrocketed over the last several years, it's made it to be the most likely it made it to be the most likely format for us to find success with this type of ingredient. So we started putting our head down and working. We contracted a dietary supplement chemist out on the west coast after about two years of RD and numerous setbacks, numerous manufacturers, we ended up launching late in 2024. So it's been quite the journey since then.

SPEAKER_00 4:33

Yeah, absolutely. Um you dove into a lot of stuff that I want to talk through, but I want to peel back a little bit. When because you you and Logan went to school together, or you were not the same college.

SPEAKER_01 4:44

So Logan and I we grew up together in Milwaukee, and then when I went to the University of Wisconsin, he went to Florida Atlantic University, so definitely another party school. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 4:53

Um I guess talk about the right we you went through the you got the inspiration from from your mom and you know, something that she was kind of like looking into when it comes to DHM. That specific aspect of this for people that don't understand or don't know, like, what is a little bit more on the history of DHM? What does it do compared to like other things on the market that may suggest, you know, anti, you know, you know, alcohol AIDS and all that kind of stuff? Like, what what is different about that specific? It's a plant-sectic beer, it's an herb.

SPEAKER_01 5:27

Yeah, so it's a flavonoid, actually. Okay. So, how it compares to a lot of the other products that are on the market. So let's start with the biggest one, liquid I feed. And yeah, it's a great product for hydration. Realistically, hydration is only a fraction of the reason why you don't feel great the next day after drinking. The other 80 plus percent of that is how well your body is able to metabolize the alcohol. What DHM does is that it actually increases the amount of two specific enzymes that your liver produces alcohol dehydrogenous, acetalohyde dehydrogenous. But what they do is they convert the toxic byproduct of alcohol, acetalohyde, into a non-toxic format and clear it out of your body before it can wreak havoc on your organs. And that's where you get the headaches, the upset stomach, the mornings in the bathroom. So effectively, DHM helps you metabolize the alcohol much quicker than your body would be able to on its own. There are other products on the market that have DHM in it. We just happen to be the first one that put it into this guppy format.

SPEAKER_00 6:26

Got it. Okay, that makes sense. Um, and this is something that's big over in Asia, right?

SPEAKER_01 6:33

Absolutely. So in South Korea, absolutely the biggest users of DHM, they have full aisles dedicated in their convenience stores where they have DHL products. And we actually learned from one of our friends that's in South Korea that it's actually chivalrous to bring your date a h anti anti-alcohol drink while they're in in lieu of flowers, essentially. So the culture around alcohol recovery, given that they're a very high, they're a very high drinking uh country per capita, it's very it's very interesting because you're starting to notice those tailwinds carry into the United States market as well. But even going back further in history, this DHM has been used in uh China even for centuries for liver health, and only within the last two-ish decades has there been medical research here in the States from USC, UCLA, and a couple of other uh research organizations about its efficacy in uh mitigating uh out damage from alcohol, but also supporting the metabolism of it.

SPEAKER_00 7:40

Why do you think it's taken so long for the I guess the research of it or the the popularity of it to make its way to the States?

SPEAKER_01 7:47

That's a great question. I think a lot of it has to do with the culture of the United States. A lot of people here, you just kind of go into drinking where you don't really plan for the next day. But as we're seeing a lot of trends in longevity and biohacking, we're having people that are drinking, or people that don't even drink that much, but when they do, they want to be more intentional about how they feel the next day. So that's bringing in this whole influx of products that are whole all designed around like health, productivity, but also making sure that you're able to maintain your social life because so many people use alcohol as a social elixir. And you know, we all know like the damage, the damages, the danger of alcohol, but if you're able to consume in a responsible manner and have tools with you that are going to be able to help mitigate that damage, you're also gonna be able to maintain that that social life. That sure I absolutely will use alcohol in settings where I might be a little uncomfortable, but it helps me relax a little bit, it helps the conversation flow more naturally. I didn't drink before this podcast, but thinking that'd be kind of a wild one if we had a a glass of champagne or two.

SPEAKER_00 8:57

Yeah. Um love it. So what I want to dive into now, like you you had this realization when your mom introduced you to DHM. What was the gap of time, or like what were the things occurring in between you, I guess, discovering the DHM, and then you taking the first initiative, first action to start liqueur? What were the things that had to happen in between?

SPEAKER_01 9:22

So the things that had to happen were the main one is I had to make sure that this made sense financially. Like I was working for a small consulting firm at the time in Chicago, so I at least had a salary to back me on this, but there's a lot that goes into a manufacturing run. I was completely unaware of like the additional costs that it would take, especially working with manufacturers that have significantly higher MOQs. So the first thing you needed to do was make sure that it just made sense financially and I was able to afford the risk that I was taking on for a product like this. The next things that we had to do were research alright, what's on the market right now. And I kind of alluded to some of those other formats, the liquids, the pills, the tablets. I needed to make sure that this was something novel. And with my research, no one had been able to make a gummy uh with DAM shell uh as early as 2023. So from there, we realized we had something novel. We began working even on the formulation with our dietary supplement cabas, began working with IP attorneys to make sure that this could be defensible in the United States patent and trademark office, and from there we started working on branding, sourcing packaging, and making sure that we had enough budget to be able to launch and really come out swimming. Naturally, you're gonna have some bumps on the road. Our first manufacturer they sent us a sample that was really good, and then they went into bulk production and it worked, but it looked awful and it tasted even worse, which I don't even know how that's possible. So that took another six to eight months out of our timeline, working to make another manufacturing run, doing all more RD with another team, and then by then we launched with essentially no budget whatsoever. But we had the money to be able to make that first mistake with our manufacturer and be able to still come out with the product that we initially envisioned. So a lot of it had to do with budgeting as well as making sure that our formulation or IP could be defensible.

SPEAKER_00 11:28

Got it. What are some of those initial things that you don't, you know, it's your first time going into the industry, starting a business at all? What are some of the initial things when you go through the process of manufacturing that you're just not thinking about at the time?

SPEAKER_01 11:43

Oh my gosh, where do I even start? So I would say that the first thing is that when it comes to creating a consumable, not just like a pill, but something that you're gonna be chewing, something that you're gonna be uh savoring, flavor is king. You could have the most effective product in the world, and even our first iteration of our gummies, they absolutely did work. But if you're not gonna have an audience that's gonna be willing to tolerate a subpar flavor, who cares how well it works? And we realized that really quickly with our first launch, like, okay, we were getting the best feedback on our efficacy, but then everyone was saying, like, yeah, they probably want to take it again because the experience going down was just dreadful for them. So moving forward, we needed to make sure that flavor is gonna be king. I think I underestimated that going into this. I was like, oh, if if it works for uh making me not spend the morning in the bathroom after drinking, everyone's gonna want to take this.

SPEAKER_00 12:41

No, you gotta those who don't know talk about like the taste, the flavor profile a little bit because of the what's used.

SPEAKER_01 12:47

Yeah, so this DHM, it's very bitter, and then we combine it with a bunch of other active ingredients like milk thistle, ginger root, prickly pear, all of these things are not great, especially when you combine them together. In our first iteration, we really didn't have anything masking that flavor. We have like a little bit of erythritol, a little bit of stevia, but realistically, that was going to be completely overpowered by the actives that we had in there. Now, with our latest iteration that we're coming out with, we have a medicinal grade bitter blocker we reformulated to dilute the actives much more in our pectin. But the first time that we launched, we really had no idea what we were doing when it came to the flavor. And even with our dietary supplement chemists, this was the first time working with DHM, so they had no idea how difficult it was going to be to create something that was not only going to be, you know, holding its form, but just as flavorful.

SPEAKER_00 13:43

Right. So you go through your first manufacturing, Ron, you're you're getting a lot of feedback. What do some of the minimum order quantities look like? What are what are some of those bumps in the road that for a lot of people would deter them, but you guys kind of stuck the course and continue to like see it through?

SPEAKER_01 13:59

Yeah, that's a great question. So for our first MLQ that we ever had, we had to order like 300,000 gummies total. And I think that equated to like about 50,000 packets that we were working with. We didn't end up completing that run with our first manufacturer. They got about two-thirds of the way through, and honestly, it's a miracle that they didn't complete it because uh the product that they gave to us, it was just awful. And they had their machine breakdown multiple times on us. They kept giving us some fishy story about the origins of not only like the ingredients but the machinery itself. Uh, it definitely raised a couple of flags for me, and we asked them to just like refund us on the rest of the order. Fortunately, with that, we were able to take it to our next manufacturer, and they were super sympathetic with us. They were able to give us a bit of a lower MOQ, not drastically, but just understanding that we had had this awful experience with our first um run, and they wanted to make sure that they could produce a product that actually met what we had envisioned from the start. Yeah. That one looked more like 250,000 gummies, but that's exactly the type of risk that we could uh stomach at that point. The newest one that we're coming out with, that's back up to about 300,000 gummies, and this is an even newer formulation than what we have had previously. So we really wanted to make sure that we didn't overbuy in the event that for some reason bulk production goes awry. I'm very confident that that doesn't, but you can never be too sure when it comes to manufacturing.

SPEAKER_00 15:32

What would you say are some of the top attributes or qualities if someone's starting a CPG brand from scratch today? What are some of the positive top quality attributes you want to look for when choosing a manufacturing partner?

SPEAKER_01 15:47

If you're looking for a manufacturing partner, communication is going to be the biggest thing. You're going to want to have a direct line to your manufacturer, someone that's either in the sales department, someone that's in the quality control team, but you always need that one person that you could shoot over a text and hope that they reply within, you know, 12, 24 hours. And at least on our side, first manufacturer, that's why I'm saying this. We would go like a week on end, not getting the simplest answer. We're asking, like, okay, can you tell us the address to ship our packaging to for you? Like, this is gonna help them out in manufacturing. You get a business day, like go buy, couple more, silence. They reply, like single word, might have even forgotten the address, like might even forgotten the zip code on it. It was awful trying to get a hold of them. Right. Also, if they're already distributing into mass retail, like our our manufacturer, I won't go into specifics on them, uh, but they have gotten into you know the Walmarts, the targets with some of the SKUs that they produce, not for us, but for other people. So they have been able to meet uh the quality as well as maintain the certifications necessary for FDA uh compliance.

SPEAKER_00 17:06

Okay, makes sense. Um what were you know, so you you get this first launch done, you're you're happy with the product, at least to go to market with it. What talk to us about, because I think this is like some of the things that people wonder when it comes to CPJ or like someone wants to start an energy drink or a hydration product or a protein bar, what goes into formulating the ingredients if you don't have a I guess a scientific background, right? Or you don't have a background in food science and all that stuff, who do you go to to start creating a formulation? How you start to trial and error different combinations of the product initially?

SPEAKER_01 17:49

Yeah, so at least for me, I don't have a scientific background. I was a marketing major at Wisconsin, but I've always had a keen interest in dietary supplements. I've always been focused on diet, fitness, and health, and that's always been paramount in my life. So I had a very strong understanding of what ingredients that I would want to go into a gummy that was designed to help you recover from your drinking. However, no idea how to be able to put that all into a pectin format. That's where you want to go and reach out to someone that's been on the gummy side of things, that's been on the supplement side. And we hired a dietary supplement chemist that was out on the West Coast, and we contracted him to do RD on his own accord. You know, we would source the ingredients for him, but he was the one that was doing all of the testing of making it try to look better, making it taste better, having them all gelatinized properly. If you don't have like an understanding of what ingredients you want to go into your product, I'd probably say that's not the industry for you. You really want to have some innate knowledge about not only like you know, if it's energy drinks, you want to understand, like, okay, what kind of caffeine do I want, what type of uh flavors do I want in this, what type of vitamins do I want? Um, you do I want this to have like an electrolyte profile as well. If you're not really under if you're not really sure about that, sure you could outsource that to someone else on if you're on like the brand side of things, but at least my recommendation is find something that you have some previous knowledge on or something that you're just so passionate about that you're willing to go and study and figure out what's going to be the best fit for not only your brand but for your product.

SPEAKER_00 19:33

Amazing. Um so you get to that point, you guys get to a product that you're happy with. What are some of the first steps now to get the product out into the market? How do you guys start to tell people about it? What does that look like? You have this physical product now, you went through all this work, now you have to obviously sell it.

SPEAKER_01 19:50

Yeah, oh my gosh. So when we first launched, because we had that issue with our first manufacturer, and we had to do essentially a completely new run with a higher quality manufacturer, which meant we were still gonna be paying a little bit more for this one. We launched with zero marketing budget whatsoever, which is terrifying because we were like, okay, we're gonna go try to do some ads online. Great, we don't have any ad budget. So everything that we were doing was organic. And at the start, neither my co-founder or I really had laid down a good social media strategy. We were just kind of throwing crap at the wall, hoping something that that would stick. We ended up deciding, like, okay, we can't do like Amazon ads, we can't do meta ads right now, but what we can do is at least build a connection with the city that we were in, Chicago. So we spent an entire summer going around door to door to like mom and pop liquor stores, convenience stores, any place that sold alcohol essentially, and building these connections with managers and hoping that they would give us a shot to be not only just by their alcohol, but also on their counter as an impulse purchase, right as they're checking out. And by building these connections, we were able to scale our first store into five, five into ten, ten into fifty, and then all of a sudden we're able to leverage this into getting into our favorite chain here in Chicago, which is Foxtrot. So even though we had no marketing spend to be able to launch, that didn't stop us from at least putting our product into places where not only our consumers are gonna need it, but also almost using our product as like a uh a billboard for itself, because even if you're not gonna buy it now, we're still building those touch points. And you might have a really bad morning one day, and you start hearing from your friends, oh, I just got these magical gummies that I took them. I feel so great. Next time you're at that liquor store, you're more likely to give them a shot. Right. So we did things the unorthodox route, and it absolutely worked for us. Now that we've actually been able to make some money, start generating revenue, we've been able to invest a lot more into the Amazon side of things. We've stayed a little bit away from meta, we're currently reformatting. Our website right now, and once that launches, we'll be driving a lot more traffic to it. But when we had a super rudimentary Shopify website, almost all of our ad spend went to Amazon. And after about a year, we saw ourselves grow 40% month over month. And we were only putting in a few thousand dollars a month. So Amazon's been a blessing on e-commerce. You get a little gypped on the margins with it. So that's why we want to start pushing meta more. But who's to say that Amazon isn't going to continue being like our most successful channel because it's Amazon at the end of the day?

SPEAKER_00 22:36

No, smart, very smart. So present day, how many retailers are you guys in currently?

SPEAKER_01 22:40

So we're in about 250 retailers across the country right now. Out of those 250, we got about a hundred of those that are here in Chicago. So we stay very loyal to the Midwest at the moment.

SPEAKER_00 22:51

Nice. Um, what does navigating the retail world look like as an emerging CPG brand, right? It's probably one of the most competitive things to do in business, period, um, with how many products are on the market and within these stores and retailers, but navigate like those early experiences for us, like what were some of those conversations like? Um, and how did you start to break through? And when when did you guys start to really see the momentum where you're in some notable stores?

SPEAKER_01 23:23

I would say that for us, at least when once we hit like the 50 store count, that's when people actually started taking us seriously. We kind of got laughed out of a lot of places, you know, when we only had, you know, one to five stores under our belt. You go into a place, you start telling them about these gummies that claim to have these really profound impacts on drinking. They kind of laugh you out the building. Sometimes you'll have a you'll have a bit of a language barrier with the type of uh individuals at the location that we're working with, and like no fault on them, but oftentimes they would think that our gummies either had THC in them just because our packaging definitely looked more THC-esque at the time, or they think that the gummies have alcohol in them, and it leads to them thinking, like, oh, this is gonna be like a compliance issue. We already have a team that we source all of our alcohol from. So we struggled at the start conveying the messaging of what our product actually was. Once we got into enough stores, though, it began to the story began to tell itself. It was really hard approaching, you know, some national retailers at the start because we had no presence whatsoever. They definitely want to see data, they want to see what velocities you're doing in the best stores that you have, what's your average sell-through rate, they want to be able to see how many skews you have, what skews do best. We only have a single skew, so it was like, all right, you we're a one-trick pony over here. We ended up building a really strong relationship with the Foxtrot buyer. Um they fortunately are very loyal to the Chicago brands that are up and coming, and they saw us being a very strong fit as a uh brand that has a lot of health products, but they also sell a lot of wine and a lot of spirits. And um, once we were able to highlight kind of like the versatility of our placement, we could be put into the wellness, we could be put into the impulse, we could be put directly into the alcohol, so we're in line of sight with what's going to be a complimentary purchase for them. Right. That's when things start to click for the buyers and they start to see the value proposition. Then from there, leveraging Foxtrot to get into other Chicago liquor stores, that that's been huge for us, and that's why we have uh a little over a hundred store presents just in Chicago alone. Now we're really looking to take that data and bring that across the rest of the country. And we've seen that already in Iowa with our Casey stores, in the Dallas-Fort Worth area with our Murphy USA stores. Our dreams are gonna be getting into you know the Binnies, the Total Wine, some of those national or big regional liquor stores, and then also taking it to the more like the natural grocers that also do sell alcohol. So if we could get into, you know, fresh time, fresh market, those are gonna be very strong fits for us, and we're hoping to have our data open the doors to those.

SPEAKER_00 26:23

Got it. Yeah, that kind of leads me to my next question because I was gonna say, what separates you guys today versus the company in the brand that is able to break into those stores? Is it just I'm sure a lot of times and at the end of the day it's numbers, it's it's notoriety, it's virality, but like what do you need to have under your belt to break into the big boys?

SPEAKER_01 26:43

Yeah, that's another great question. I think a lot of it has to do with there's so there's so many uh answers that you can put into this. You want a decent social media following, that's not gonna be a make or break, but if you can come in and say that you have like, you know, five-digit followers, they're gonna be more inclined to give you a shot because you already have a pre-built audience, you guys. If you have some type of strategic backing, let's say you have a celebrity endorsement, you just raised a big seed round, a series A round, so you're in the news, they definitely want to ride that hype wave. For us, we were bootstrapped up until a few months ago, so when we were approaching these retailers, like, yep, this is all just us. Like we we we built this ourselves, we didn't take anything from anyone else, no one notable, we didn't have, you know, we're not we're not backed by any like big Chicago millionaire or something like that that's gonna get us into one of these locations. The other thing that I would say that they really want to see is it goes back to the data. They want to see they want to see where it's moving, the demographics of the people that are buying it, how quickly they restock us, and also what's the what's the people's opinion on it? Surely it can work, but so does a pill. If people don't like the flavor of it, they don't like the experience of taking the product, then that's going to be it's it's not gonna be bountiful for you. I was at a conference trade show about a year ago, and one of the VPs of Whole Foods was speaking, and she made it very clear taste is king, I don't want to try anything that does not taste good. It could be, you know, it could save my life, but if it doesn't taste good, we're probably not gonna put it on the Whole Foods shelf. And I didn't even mention, I would love to get it to Whole Foods. I think I think we're not too far off of that in the future. They've already shown an appetite to uh having other alcohol A products in there. Sure. But realistically, taste is gonna be king when it comes to uh opening that door, and no one at no one uh any of these big retailers has tried the newest version of our product that's about to launch.

SPEAKER_00 28:54

Yeah. So when you go back to the drawing board for this this V2 product, if you will, what are the main things you guys are mixing and matching? What are you pulling out? What are you putting in? Obviously, uh we've been talking about it's a lot of flavor-based decisions, and how does that start to to to form?

SPEAKER_01 29:11

Yeah, so when we first look at like who we're trying to improve this product for, we look back on the consumer feedback that we were getting. And men, they enjoyed our product, the uh the first iteration of it. They they like how it tastes for the most part, even if they didn't like the taste, they like how they felt after it. They kind of were like, oh, they puff out their chests, and why goes, just I'll take it, and I'm gonna feel good the next day. When it comes to the women, we love them, but they're a lot more particular about the types of things that they take, and it could absolutely help them the next morning, and that's the feedback that we got from the majority of people that take our gummies. But some people would say it was like, oh, this is the worst experience going down, like this is the worst gummy I've ever had. And you hear that enough, like, okay, we we definitely need to reformulate, and we really want to target the women on this production run, make sure that they are in tune with you know they they like the product as much as we do, and so we decided to go a little bit more on like the fruitier side with the flavoring of it. Our newest flavor is called Berry Spritz, it's like a berry blend with strong notes of raspberry in it. And we have gotten some rave feedback on it from those that have been able to try it up to this point at some of the presentations that we've done, at some of the sampling events up to this point. We're really excited about this one. We think we really cracked the code for making a alcohol recovery gummy that actually tastes like it doesn't work, as opposed to something that tastes like it works. With some of the reformulations that we did, I don't want to give away like all of our trade secrets, but the uh instituting more bitter blockers, changing the weights of our active ingredients as well, those are some of the big things that we did that allowed us to unlock a whole new level of flavor. Got it.

SPEAKER_00 31:09

Very cool. Um, with this now, how does that change the strategy? How does that change your guide's output on what you're doing? Now that you have the new flavor and in your obviously same product, say similar messaging, but how like what is the the attack strategy, I guess, look like now?

SPEAKER_01 31:29

Yeah, so what we did with the launch of this new flavor, we also refreshed our branding as well. And our old packaging, we had some like squiggly lines on it. We wanted to lean more into the THC aesthetic, just because in this advent of THC acceptance in convenience stores, we were like, oh, this is gonna be the easiest way for people to want to look at our product and be like, oh, is this a THC gummy? Oh, wait, this is actually gonna help me with my hangover. Amazing, I want to try this. Now, the alcohol aid industry, fortunately for us, it's growing enough where people know that to look at the counter like, oh, there's gonna be this little potion that I could take at the counter. Oh, there's gonna be these gummies that I can take at the counter that I did get with whatever six pack I'm buying. Our packaging now leads way more into the wellness side of things, and we really want to make that be the point of emphasis as we're building a brand and differentiating from what might be seen as like, you know, a gas station gimmick per se, which is some of the feedback that we had gotten from previous retailers that we had proposed to before. Um, when it comes to attacking with marketing, we're still gonna keep up doing what we had done with our previous iterations. We do a lot of activations in Chicago, we do a lot of events with uh event companies here where we'll either sell at the bars, sell at a kiosk, and we'll get feedback the next day from anyone that tries and leverage that for our social media. How we're looking to do things a little bit differently now is that previously we knew that our product wasn't the best tasting, but we really prided itself on the efficacy. It's kind of like malur. You don't like it going down, but it's kind of a stable at that point. At least for us, you take ours with your malore. But when we look at how we're gonna go about when we look at how we're going to go about getting this into new retailers, we have a lot more confidence that if we give this to a buyer, they're not going to immediately reject it just off of the taste. And that's a lot of the times what it came down to. We get rejected by a buyer, you get rejected by a VC, all because the product just did not meet meet their flavor uh expectations.

SPEAKER_00 33:40

Right.

SPEAKER_01 33:41

We even had, so for those that didn't know, our last flavor that we had, it was called Applejack. It tasted nothing like Applejack, it was the super bitter, you know, fruit medley. At least with this berry spritz flavor, we wanted to keep it a little bit more ambiguous, but it is a berry flavor. So now expectations actually align, whereas, okay, you thought it was going to be Applejack and it ended up just being this like bitter medicinal tasting.

SPEAKER_00 34:06

Uh yeah, it's leading in that in that case. Yeah. I get it. One thing that I I one thing that I wanted to go into, and you just mentioned the word wellness. I oftentimes have been saying to people, it's never been a cooler time to be healthy. Health is on the rise, the the decline of nightlife and drinking and bar culture, it's always gonna be there, it's always gonna have a place, but it's definitely on a decline a little bit. Absolutely. Uh, not to discredit what you guys are doing, it's again gonna have always have a market to fill, but um, how have you guys used this wellness era and the promotion and the kind of the boom of it to ride that wave? Like how have you guys adopted different messaging or you know, just putting yourselves in a position to ride the wave of this wellness era?

SPEAKER_01 34:55

Yeah, what we've been doing a lot is that a lot of our positioning has to do with this isn't just gonna help you recover from whatever millers you drank the night before. This is gonna be a productivity hack for you so that you can enjoy your social life and wake up and get after it the next day. We're seeing a lot of trends right now, at least with you know, with people that are drinking, they still want to be able to drink, but they want to be able to feel good the next day. And we're seeing that in the markets also. The alcohol aid uh industry is growing at about 15% year over year. So we are seeing that even though there is a notable decline in alcohol consumption, those that still do consume they're very much more mindful about how they go about it, and still I'm not super worried. I'm I'm like to be the glass half full type of person when it comes to the alcohol industry, but it truly is one of the most cyclical industries ever. And you had a big boom around COVID time because everyone was at home drinking, they were all kind of depressed, but everyone was also trying to make the best of it, and now we've had hit a sharp decline from there. But you've seen these trends throughout the last hundred years of alcohol booming, busting, booming, busting. Um, even if it it is going to be a little bit, you know, lower just historically, just because of you know the introduction of GLP ones, even though if they're making people want to drink less, you have more wellness that is uh paramount to people and their lifestyle. You you are never going to get rid of alcohol, and if anything, you're gonna have people just being more responsible about how they consume, which is where we exactly fit in. We don't try to tell people to drink more or drink less, but if you're gonna drink, you but you should drink with us.

SPEAKER_00 36:43

Yeah. No, I love it. Um what do you think CPG brands need to do today to stand out amongst competition?

SPEAKER_01 36:53

It's a very loaded question. Um I think that some of the most successful CPG brands right now that have gone like zero to a hundred very quickly, they thrive off of community. And that's something that we struggled with at the start, and that's when we kind of realized like, okay, if we're struggling on social media right now, let's just go to where our consumers are. And that's why we started doing events where people were gonna be drinking at, selling that at the bars when they're gonna be needing at most. Um, and then over the last few months, we've been able to start cultivating a community on social media where we start interjecting conversation about drinking culture, uh intertwining that with whether it's sports, whether that's statehood, whether that's uh talking about like rivaling colleges. We try to foster conversation within, you know, drinking, this whole social going out scene. And if you're able to control the narrative, you're able to have a lot stronger influence on your audience. And I've seen some really good CPG brands like Sour Milk, they did a fantastic job of being able to build a community right out the gate. And I think that a lot more CPG brands should at least attempt to foster a community before they even launch. And that's something that we regret doing our first time that we launched. We we launched with like no build-up whatsoever. We were just kind of like, hey, we're here and expected that to work well. If we were to build up a following leading up to that, like you know, three, six months out, I think we could have been a lot more successful from the jump. And that's what I encourage a lot of aspiring CPG brands to do now. Build that audience even before you have product.

SPEAKER_00 38:42

Love it. Um, I guess perfect segue to for how you guys have started to find your footing socially, right? You have this new sort of strategy, at least in my opinion, that's been going viral quite a bit. Um, why don't you talk about that and what you've you've been putting out on on IG and stuff lately?

SPEAKER_01 39:00

Yeah, so this has been really exciting for us. When uh I'll go back like a few months. I had been posting about three to four times a week, and my co-founder Logan, he had been super supportive and super uh complimentary to the type of you know just content that we were making, but we still didn't really have a voice at that point. And March Madness came around, and I was like, okay, let's let me let me try to make some brackets. And you'd see all these like brackets go up go viral where it's like you know, 64 like fast food restaurants or like 64 like other sports moments, and these would go crazy viral on like Twitter, on Instagram. Like, all right, let me make one that's all drinking related. And so I made a couple that was like, here's your bracket. If you pick the schools that have the most bars within a one mile walking distance of campus, um, if here's your bracket, if you pick the schools that drink the most, Wisconsin wins. Um and that video itself, within less than a few days, got over half a million views. And we started be like, okay, this is kind of turning into a hack because you had so many people in the comments talking, like, hey, this school should be here. I would have never expected the school to be this far. But then you also found schools that were referenced, like LIU Brooklyn. You had those people commenting and they had this personal attachment to having their school, their city being mentioned. And that was kind of an aha moment for Logan and I. Okay, we're sparking conversation. We're also sparking a little bit of controversy. I encourage social media creators to lean into the culture. I encourage social media creators to lean into the controversy in a responsible way. You can have people saying, like, you're wrong, you're stupid, never talk about the subject again, but at the end of the day, that's engagement. And we started taking those characteristics and applying them into other areas of our content moving forward. Obviously, we can't make brackets the entire year. March ends, and we were really thinking, how can we continue to invoke this type of conversation, this type of cultural, if anything, trying to challenge the cultures of people and their expectations around drinking, but also still make it personal. And that's when I came up with this idea to just go and review every state and how they drink. And the first video that I made for that one, it was on Wisconsin. So we're really coming out hard. And even that video, that one blew up well beyond expectations that I ever had. It's over 500,000 views now, and then the next couple of Midwest states that I covered, those ones had 200,000, 200,000. And nowadays we're seeing it like taper off a little bit more as we get a little bit outside of the Midwest, less drinking loyalists out there, but we're still averaging anywhere from like 40 to 100,000 views per post on this. And every single time that we post, we get about a hundred new followers. Um, about a month ago, we had uh closer to six weeks ago, we had barely over a thousand followers, and as of today, we just cracked over seven thousand. So it's been explosive growth. And at this point, even if we're not talking about our product mostly, we're building an audience so that when we actually come back and launch, we have a group of people that are committed to not only like our series, they enjoy what I have to say about the states, but then these are all people that drink and could benefit from having an alcohol-aid product in their life.

SPEAKER_00 42:43

Nice, nice. Congrats on that, by the way. That's awesome. Um what's next after that? How do you how do you how are you gonna parlay that after you run out of states?

SPEAKER_01 42:53

That's a great question. And uh fortunately, we have the World Cup this summer. So we started with the states, we're gonna go to countries next, nice, which we're really excited to expand the international reach, even though we don't sell internationally. We love to build that base so that when we do take liqueur overseas, uh, even you know, it's not overseas, but even to like Canada, yeah. That we would love to be able to uh have at least some type of foundation there. So we're still working on uh we got we just got meta glasses also. We want to be able to do some more in real life content at the events that we do because we do have some pretty hilarious speakers that come up to us, ask us questions about our gummies, and we see a lot of virality in that. But you know, people are okay with being filmed for the most part if they know they're being filmed, but they get a little uncomfortable if I'm just like holding my phone in front of them rather than having like a baby camera in the corner of my glasses. Right. So that's something that we're definitely going to be taking advantage of this summer.

SPEAKER_00 43:53

Makes sense. Love it. Um, really quick, too, because I know you know Logan and I have talked about this a bit, and I know you guys are going through it. For those who are going through the process of raising capital, talk to us a little bit about how that process has been to navigate and maybe just very quick some tips to go uh to add with that when people are ready to do that. So our process for this entire raise, it has been and let me just sorry so to rewind the first year or so when you guys did the first run and all that, that was bootstrapped technically, or did you guys take money up front as well to jumpstart it?

SPEAKER_01 44:32

This was all bootstrapped. Okay. We had we had uh support from our families, yeah, but the majority of that came from just Logan and I.

SPEAKER_00 44:42

And that's important to know because there's a lot of people out there that think you need to raise immediately, yeah. Right? That there's a lot of preconceived notions when it comes to raising money and just uh the mantra that's been created around it, right? Especially everything that goes on social media. But um talk about, I guess, to start it, like you guys bootstrapped first. What was the shift in in understanding or knowing when you needed to raise, and then I guess hop into how that process has been so far?

SPEAKER_01 45:09

So we knew that we needed to raise as soon as as honestly, as soon as our uh as soon as the latest iteration of our product came out back in 2024 when we hard launched for real. And it's kind of funny saying that, like, oh, you just came out with a bunch of product, why would you need a raise right now? Even though we were happy with the product because it tasted so much better than like our rough draft, it still had a lot of work to do in order to make it the best version of itself. Yeah, and even with that, we had this product, we had no ad spend that we could do with it, we had nothing that we could like pay for promotions, we had to really rely on just doing everything organically. And if we really wanted to take this to the next stage and get into some national retailers, get some like mainstream attention. We knew that we needed some actual capital in there. Like we there were multiple, multiple times that I can think of where Logan and I are having sleepless nights because the bank account's overdrawn, and it it sucks, but you swallow it, and that's part of being an early stage business operator. You are gonna go through that. I I think I've I've talked to so many people in the CPG industry. Like, if you haven't had an overdrawn account once, like you're not even trying, because kind of how it is. And our going to like the process of raising, we tried reaching out to like a lot of like early stage VCs. Realistically, we just didn't have the numbers to be able to get any type of traction at that point. They typically want to see, you know, a hundred thousand dollars worth of revenue at that point. We had barely cracked 45 lifetime. Yeah, and we ended up coming across a group that we got a mutual introduction to that really believed in um Logan and I as founders, they believed in the product, they tried it themselves. One of their wives felt great the next day after it, and they they had the trust in us and they were bought into the vision that we had, especially with making it not only taste better, but getting into the locations that we believe that it could. My advice to people that are going to go out and look to raise money, first off, if this is your first ever venture, I would say try to try to bootstrap it as long as you can, as long as you're able to stomach the risks that you're going into it. You're probably, you know, depending on the industry, whether it's beverage, whether it's supplement, you're probably going to want to set aside anywhere from like 20 to 30,000 minimum. You might even need more. And that's that might be heartbreaking for some people that are aspiring to get into these spaces, but it is very difficult to kick things off with a low budget because you do need some buffer when things go awry. And that all comes into where you feel comfortable stomaching risk. Sure. The next couple of things that I would say are that don't keep don't give up too much equity right at the start. I know that's like, you know, anyone's gonna tell you that. Conserve as much equity as possible, but it can't be it can't be said enough. We had some pretty ridiculous offers for like, you know, 30-40% of our company right out the gate for very, very nominal in comparison to what we were actually looking to raise. So I would say hold your hold your equity and know your worth. You will be able to find the money that you're seeking. You're gonna be able to find the terms that you're seeking. You're just gonna need to cast a wide net and you're gonna have to be extroverted. You're gonna have to go out of your way to make these connections because at this point you're a nobody. I was a nobody. I still am a nobody, and no one's gonna be looking to invest in a brand that has nothing going for them. You need to be able to sell the brand, sell the story, and sell the future. And then lastly, just no, I don't know if I can say this, know your shit. Yeah, knowing know your margins. Um, there are so many times where we would like watch people and have their, they would be in their investor uh presentations, pitch contests, even, or they wouldn't even know their unit margins, they wouldn't know their revenue, they wouldn't even know how much they did in the last year. So you need to be able to just have every single quantitative figure about your business known on the back of your hand, and that's gonna also instill confidence in potential investors that all right, these guys know exactly what they're talking about, they know their figures. I have confidence in them.

SPEAKER_00 49:30

Love it. Amazing advice. Um, how do you keep yourself today kind of like sane to this all? Like, what do you do? What do you do outside of the business, outside of the work to keep yourself on track, motivated, healthy at the top of your game?

SPEAKER_01 49:47

When I'm not working on the business, I try to separate my mind as much as I can from it. And that's inevitable that, like, you know, I think about liqueur every hour of the day that I'm not sleeping. But sometimes you have to try to take a step back just because otherwise you will get brain fog, you will begin to struggle mentally, and it does get hard because sometimes those bad days they really weigh you down. The good days make the bad days all the more worth it. Yeah, they make they make them in incomparable. But some of those bad days where it seems like everything's, you know, Titanic is sinking, those can be hard mentally. What I do, and I've been on this since I since I started Liqueur, very into fitness. I love to work out, I love to run, being able to have some type of outlet so that when the stresses of work try to inflict damage on you uh mentally, you can at least combat those physically. That's where I would like to see a lot of my you know time outside of the office. If I'm not working on the business, I'm working on myself, and therapy TV is is uh under a barbell.

SPEAKER_00 51:00

Love it. There we go. Um amazing. We have one closing question on the show that I want to ask you, and it's if you could say yourself, say something to your 18-year-old self, what would it be and why?

SPEAKER_01 51:19

I would tell my 18-year-old self. I would tell my 18-year-old self to talk to more people. When I first graduated high school, I had a strong friend group, but realistically, I was never considering myself an extrovert. I was very much an introvert surrounded by extroverts, and it was, you know, comfortable that I had this little bubble that I was in, but more often than not, I felt like I needed to rely on people to facilitate conversation to have me involved in it. Once I got to college, everything changed. And I started off still pretty shy, pretty uh pretty timid to be able to like go up and introduce myself to new people and out of school like Wisconsin where there's 40,000 people. If you aren't like that, you're gonna you're gonna have a bad time. Things began to shift when I started taking a more I I changed my mindset on. I changed my mindset on the fact that like originally I thought that I needed to try to convince myself that people wanted to talk to me. It ended up being the case that I had a lot more confidence just being myself in a lot of these conversations. And those are what allowed me to build a completely brand new friend group at the University of Wisconsin. It allowed me to come out of my shell a lot more, and it really unlocked a different side of extroversion that I didn't know I was capable of at 18. And if I told my 18-year-old self that I was gonna be, you know, making videos for thousands of people that they're gonna be watching on a daily basis, I would have I wouldn't have been able to believe that because that would have mean I would have had to like present myself and put myself out there. But being able to put myself out there, whether it's uh in new circles, networking, social media, it's unlocked so many doors that are not gonna be available if you stay, you know, in your hermit shell. So I'm very glad that 18-year-old Daniel ended up opening up to the world, but at that time I would have definitely urged him to grab the reins of conversation, grab the reins of just being an outgoing individual and really dive right into it.

SPEAKER_00 53:45

Love it. Well, Daniel, it's a it's a very true cycle story at this point, and I'm excited to see the liqueur vision grow. I know it's gonna grow, and uh I'm glad to be a part of it in a little way that we can. So um, again, thank you so much for being here. Tell the camera, tell everybody where they can follow you guys, learn more about liqueur, find your personal stuff.

SPEAKER_01 54:07

Well, Lorenzo, thank you very much. This is a full circle moment for us, and I really appreciate being on the podcast, talking about the journey and giving as much advice as I possibly could. You can find liqueur on Instagram at liqueur hq. You can find us on almost every other social media at liqueur hq as well. We're in Foxtrot, we're in Garfields, we're in over a hundred stores here in Chicago, 250 online. You can find where your closest store is at liqueur.com, and we look forward to you taking a shot with us.

SPEAKER_00 54:37

Love it. That's a wrap. Link live, we're out.