Liquid Death

Dandy

Liquid Death

Consumer packaged goods (CPG) — Liquid Death sells canned water and flavored beverages through retail stores, Amazon, and DTC. Revenue comes from wholesale to retailers (7-Eleven, Whole Foods, Target, Walmart) and direct online sales.

The aluminum can format commands a premium over plastic water bottles — a single tallboy typically retails for $1.89 to $2.49, significantly more than a bottle of Dasani. The brand licensing and merchandise arm (selling branded t-shirts, hats, and absurd limited-edition products) adds high-margin revenue.

Advertising partnerships and brand collaborations provide additional income. The company has a subscription model called the "Country Club" for DTC recurring orders.

Dandy

Vertical SaaS plus manufacturing. Dandy provides dental practices with intraoral scanners (often subsidized or free to eliminate the switching cost), cloud-based software for managing cases, and its own network of digital dental labs that manufacture the final restorations.

Dentists pay per case — each crown, bridge, veneer, or implant restoration is priced individually. The margin comes from manufacturing efficiency: digital workflows are faster, more precise, and require less manual labor than traditional hand-sculpted methods.

As volume grows, Dandy's labs get more efficient and per-unit costs drop. It's the classic razor-and-blades model — give away the scanner, make money on every restoration.

Liquid Death

Mike Cessario was a creative director who had worked at Netflix and various ad agencies. He noticed something at concerts and punk shows: everyone was drinking water out of plastic bottles, but nobody wanted to be seen doing it because water bottles looked lame next to a can of beer.

The branding insight was almost stupidly simple — put water in a tallboy can with aggressive heavy metal aesthetics, give it the most ridiculous name possible, and market it like an energy drink. He made a Facebook ad in 2018 for a product that didn't exist yet.

The ad went viral with 3 million views. He used the viral proof to raise seed funding and actually make the product.

The first cans shipped in 2019. By 2022, Liquid Death was in 60,000 retail locations and valued at over a billion dollars.

All from water in a can.

Dandy

Henry Stott was a repeat entrepreneur who had previously co-founded a tech company in the UK. When he looked at the dental industry, he saw a $15 billion lab market that was shockingly analog.

Here's how it worked: a dentist jams a tray of gooey putty into your mouth, waits for it to harden, mails the physical mold to a dental lab, where a technician hand-sculpts your crown out of ceramic. Turnaround: 2 to 3 weeks.

Error rate: high. Patient experience: miserable.

The technology to do this digitally had existed for years — 3D intraoral scanners, CAD/CAM software, CNC milling machines — but nobody had stitched it into a seamless end-to-end platform for the average dental practice. Stott started Dandy in 2020 to be that platform.

Provide the scanner, build the software, run the lab — and make it so easy that any dentist can switch from analog to digital without changing how they practice.

Liquid Death

Content-first marketing that acts like an entertainment company, not a beverage company. Liquid Death's social media posts, videos, and stunts generate millions of organic views — they've had a witch hex their water, made a real music album from hate comments, and partnered with adult film star Cherie DeVille for a commercial.

Retail distribution expansion from specialty stores to mass market (Walmart, Target, 7-Eleven). The aluminum can itself is a growth strategy — sustainability-minded consumers prefer cans over plastic, giving Liquid Death a values-based selling point beyond the comedy.

Celebrity investors (Tony Hawk, Steve Aoki, Wiz Khalifa) provided credibility and reach. Festival and live event sponsorships position the brand where its core demographic gathers.

The brand's absurdity is the moat — nobody else can copy the tone without looking like they're trying.

Dandy

Land-and-expand with dental practices. Dandy gives practices the scanner for free or at heavy discount, which eliminates the biggest barrier to switching from analog.

Once a practice starts submitting digital scans, they become recurring revenue — every patient who needs a crown is a Dandy order. Sales team targets mid-size practices (3 to 10 dentists) that are high-volume but haven't invested in digital yet.

Referral programs where existing dentists recommend Dandy to colleagues. Geographic density strategy — build lab capacity in a region, then saturate practices nearby to optimize logistics and turnaround times.

Content marketing educating dentists on why digital is better, faster, and more profitable than analog workflows.

Liquid Death

It's still water. The product itself has zero differentiation from any other mountain spring water — the entire value is brand and marketing.

If the comedy stops being funny or the brand loses cultural relevance, there's nothing proprietary underneath. CPG margins are thin and retail shelf space is brutally competitive.

Scaling a premium water brand into mass market means competing on price with Coca-Cola (Dasani) and PepsiCo (Aquafina) who have unlimited distribution muscle. The $1.4 billion valuation requires the company to grow into a full beverage platform, not just a water brand — hence the expansion into iced tea and flavored water.

And there's a real question about whether the ironic marketing can sustain long-term or whether it's a cycle that peaks and fades.

Dandy

Dental practices are notoriously resistant to change — many dentists have used the same lab for 20 years and switching feels risky. The scanner hardware is expensive to subsidize at scale, creating a capital-intensive land grab.

Quality control across distributed manufacturing is hard — a crown that doesn't fit means a remake, an unhappy patient, and a dentist who might switch back to their old lab. Competition from established digital players like Align Technology and legacy lab companies investing in their own digital capabilities.

The dental industry is fragmented — 200,000+ practices in the US, mostly small businesses, which means enterprise-style sales don't work. Each practice is its own decision maker with its own habits.

Liquid Death

Mountain Water — still water sourced from the Austrian Alps, sold in 16.9 oz and 19.2 oz tallboy cans. Sparkling Water — same Alpine source, carbonated.

Flavored sparkling water in flavors like Severed Lime, Berry It Alive, and Mango Chainsaw — names that sound like horror movies. Iced tea line expanding beyond water into flavored beverages.

The Country Club subscription for recurring DTC delivery. Merchandise and limited-edition collaborations — from branded caskets to a $50,000 enema kit that sold out.

Every product name and packaging decision is designed to be the opposite of what a water brand would normally do.

Dandy

Dandy Scanner — provided to dental practices, captures a full 3D digital impression of the patient's mouth in minutes. No more putty molds.

Cloud-based case management platform where dentists submit scans, approve designs, and track orders. AI-powered restoration design that generates crown and veneer designs automatically from 3D scans, reducing turnaround from weeks to days.

Digital dental lab network with automated CNC milling and 3D printing for manufacturing restorations. Shade matching technology using AI to color-match restorations to surrounding teeth.

Integration with practice management software so cases flow seamlessly from scan to delivery.

Liquid Death

Investors include Science Inc., Velvet Sea Ventures, Live Nation Entertainment, Conviction Partners, and celebrity investors including Tony Hawk, Steve Aoki, and Wiz Khalifa. Series D in 2022 valued the company at $700 million; by 2023, valuation reached $1.4 billion.

Dandy

Investors include Bessemer Venture Partners, IVP, DST Global, and IA Ventures. Series C in 2023 valued the company at approximately $1.8 billion.