Hydration season doesn't start in summer. The brands that know that are already winning.
An unexpected package arrived at my doorstep in Austin, Texas late Friday afternoon, just as I was headed out the door to the gym.
The small parcel had LMNT's big logo on the top and "Insider Gift" on the sides. I went back inside, tossed my gym bag on the floor (which already has some LMNT packets floating around in it), and fished out the Xacto knife from my kitchen drawer. Inside the box I found five three-packs of LMNT flavors and a tightly written line of copy on the inside lid: "Introducing our two newest flavors to enjoy and share."
The first flavor featured was an “Insider Exclusive” pink lemonade, which is actually a flavor I’ve been making myself by mixing the raspberry and lemonade packets together (an idea I got from rummaging around in the comments section of their Instagram months ago). The second was one that hasn't even launched publicly yet: a lemonade iced tea with 50mg of caffeine dropping in May. They also included their lemonade flavor, already my favorite before any of this arrived.
Lately I’ve been loving an analog experience that makes me curious to unearth the digital one behind it. Physical brand experiences that cut through the noise of the feed have my rapt attention. And because I was curious, I went straight to the LMNT Instagram page and found a launch strategy I had not anticipated.
But we will get to that.
The hydration category just got a lot more competitive.
I’ve had clients within different parts of the CPG beverage category and follow the players closely because I find it to be a fascinating grocery segment to watch. The electrolyte powder market alone was valued at nearly $9 billion in 2024 and is projected to nearly double by the end of the decade. No single dominant leader has emerged, because the use case varies so widely across daily hydration, athletic performance, and weekend recovery, which means every brand with a clear point of view has a real opening right now.
The market includes large CPG-backed players like Liquid I.V. (part of Unilever and currently the most mainstream and ubiquitous hydration brand in the U.S.) and Nuun (acquired by Nestlé Health Science and is a darling brand of Whole Foods Market), and smaller independent brands carving out niche followings, like Waterboy (who absolutely crushes it on TikTok) and Skratch Labs (a niche brand that has performance athletes as their core audience).
In recent years even more big players and legacy brands have entered the market, and are going after the same shelf space and the same consumer. In September 2024, PepsiCo launched Gatorade Hydration Booster, an electrolyte powder designed for everyday hydration.
And then there is Liquid Death, which built a $1.4 billion valuation on marketing that was unlike anything else in the category. Their growth trajectory over five years has been extraordinary. But after years of triple-digit gains, their growth rate has started to decelerate, and their portfolio has expanded to include a dizzying array of sparkling water, iced tea, flavored options, and now Death Dust electrolyte sticks. They even recently launched a Pop Tarts iced tea. The brand that made its name by being unmistakably one thing is now a lot of things. The branding is holding so far and their brand identity cues are super strong across all their drink formats. But they’re also at risk of one day becoming a story where the thing that made you cool becomes wallpaper, and nobody notices until it already happened.
If you scroll through the feeds of smaller players in the electrolyte category (theres a ton of them), you can see the gap in real time. Scattershot posting cadences. Multiple font treatments in a single grid. Text-heavy overlays that all look the same. No unified tone of voice. Good products that don’t have a brand presence strong enough to carry them anywhere.
The category is growing and a lot of brands are growing into it without a clear identity.
Knowing who you are in a crowded market is the whole game right now.
Which takes me back to my social media deep dive after that box of LMNT showed up at my door.
LMNT lives in a neighborhood that has gotten complicated lately. The longevity and optimization space that has long championed their product has also attracted real scrutiny, and the brand knows it. So when I was greeted by their recent April Fools campaign at the top of their feeds, I instantly recognized that it was the clearest signal yet that they are paying attention to their own perception. They chose to meet it with humor and self awareness instead of defensiveness. On April 1st, right at the top of Q2, their Pinkle Monáde video dropped: Andrew Huberman, Matthew Walker, Kelly LeVeque, and several more influencers delivering deadpan endorsements of a fake product, with straight-faced lines like "maybe the best thing we've seen since creatine," surreal b-roll of pink lemons from Fiji, someone sliding into a pink-tinted cold plunge, lemon slices on the eyes like cucumbers, an IV drip of lemonade. It was a precise parody of the exact content universe they live inside.
The next day the blooper reel dropped and the wink became explicit. Then the real reveal began: over three days, an actual pink lemonade packet slowly emerged from the Pinkle Monáde salt. Pinkle Monáde = Pink Lemonade. The joke became the launch. And the absurdity of the fake thing made the real thing feel even more exciting.
From there they moved into a sustained content arc that included bringing back a campaign from last year where they gave kids kits to run lemonade stands over the summer. This year they brought it back, with the CEO reading letters from kids who had participated. It is warm, it is on-brand, and it carries them directly to the public drop of the iced tea flavor in May. The sequencing is intentional. April Fools generates the spike. The lemonade stand campaign sustains the warmth. The iced tea launch closes the arc.
The leaders in the category know that winning the summer hydration game is a slow build. The brands that own the season start planting seeds in early spring, while everyone else is scrambling to launch or still recovering from months of inconsistent presence.
Liquid IV also capitalized on the April Fools moment with an absurd product that turned out to be real: a Grillo's Pickles-flavored hydration powder that sold out the day it dropped. (The Grillo's collab energy is worth noting separately. Grillo's has been on a brand collaboration run lately, including a chapstick with Burt's Bees. The smarter read is probably that Grillo's is bringing the collab instinct and Liquid IV is a willing and well-matched partner). Liquid Death also leaned into the moment, launching a sweepstakes on March 31st where the winner gets a new house with Liquid Death coming out of the water taps. It was not an April Fools joke, but it launched just in time for everyone to wonder if it was.
Smaller brands are finding the white space the big players left open.
Waterboy started with one founder filming a TikTok from his driveway in 2021. That video generated 18,000 presale sign-ups. The brand bootstrapped its way to $10 million in sales in two years and is now on shelves at Target, CVS, H-E-B, Walmart, Sprouts and more. Their entire strategic premise taps into consumer occasions: different hydration needs for your workout, your hangover recovery, and your daily life. It sounds simple. The execution is sharp.
They are also not shy about the competitive landscape. Their marketing takes direct jabs at larger players in the space, including pointing out the parts of the optimization and longevity world that some consumers find off-putting. That kind of competitive clarity from a small brand is harder to pull off than it looks. I found them through my social media feed and the brand is clearly built for an audience that is having a different kind of weekend than I am. I’m not complaining though, that’s exactly their point and their fresh point of view. They know who their customer is and they are speaking directly to that person with everything they make. In a category where so many brands are trying to speak to everyone, that is a real advantage.
Skratch Labs is another one to watch, and one I discovered while doing competitive research last year for a sports gel product launch for a past client. They are Boulder-based, founded by a sports physiologist and former cycling pros who built their original formula in a five-gallon paint bucket for their team. More than a decade later their ethos is unchanged: real food ingredients, performance athletes, nothing extraneous. They own a small but mighty market share, have a strong identity, and a fiercely loyal following among cyclists and runners that respect their point of view on nutrition and sustained performance.
Q2 is go time. April Fools is the opening move.
The thing I keep coming back to is timing. Brands that want to own summer do not start their campaign in June.
You build toward it in March and April, when the weather is beginning to shift and consumer attention is still available to capture. April Fools sits right at that hinge. It is underused as a brand moment, and this year the brands that understood what it could do built real momentum off of it heading into the hottest months of the year.
My Friday afternoon routine got derailed in the best possible way. The box was sitting there bright and impossible to ignore, and I was back inside before I had even made a conscious decision about it. I strength train four times a week in one of the hottest cities in the country, by thermometer and by reputation. I am exactly who this product is for. LMNT knows that, which is why it ended up on my doorstep and not someone else's. That is the whole point of an Insider program. Play your strategic cards right, get the product into the hands of the people who actually care, and let them do the rest.
LMNT is not the only one who has figured this out. But they are the one who showed up at my door and stopped me in my tracks.
