# Poppy's $2B Exit: Digital-First CPG Strategy

**Podcast:** Masters of Scale
**Published:** 2026-04-30

## Transcript

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Humans will never be more intelligent than AI.
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I'm standing there on the edge of the bridge.
I'm just like, Should I jump?
I know I should jump, but there's going to be all of these things that I have to do to figure it out.
There's so much risk in all of this stuff.
And I donkey kick him off the cliff so hard.
She just kicks me right off.
That's Stephen Ellsworth.
His co-founder Allison is the one who gave him that donkey kick.
The married couple took the entrepreneurial leap together to create a healthier version of soda, one that you've probably seen if you haven't picked it up yet at your local convenience store or grocery store, poppy.
Pepsi bought the brand in 2025 for roughly $2 billion.
But the road to getting there was not so easy.
While you're like in the dark building and grinding, your friends are at great corporate jobs, taking trips to the Bahamas and taking trips to Europe.
And we're just like...
grinding.
But also loving the grind.
This is Masters of Scale.
I'm Jeff Berman, your host.
This week on the show, Allison and Stephen Ellsworth.
They're the married duo that started by selling homemade soda at their farmer's market.
They hyperscaled Poppy to a truly gigantic exit and changed an entire category along the way.
We talk about what it takes to juggle a growing company and family at the same time, how savvy social media strategy helped them stand out.
And what happens when you decide to run a Super Bowl ad four days before the big game?
Alice and Stephen, welcome to Masters of Scale.
Thanks for having us.
Thanks for having us.
I'm thrilled for you guys to be here.
I want to start with a confession, which is I had my first poppy just a few weeks ago.
I had the lemon-lime version.
And as someone who was addicted to Coca-Cola for many years, and I'm now 16 years off of Coca-Cola, this was such a delight.
To discover Poppy.
I love that.
So thank you.
Allison, it wasn't like you were dying to go into beverage, right?
How did Poppy come about?
What's the origin story?
The fact that you just had your first Poppy is very iconic.
And what you said is the reason Poppy exists is to give people the freedom to love soda again.
That's our purpose.
But to go back to the origin story, we didn't set out to be beverage connoisseurs.
We just wanted to create something really incredible, but it came from a personal problem of mine.
I had tummy issues.
I was about 50 pounds heavier than I am now.
My skin was a mess.
I spent maybe seven years trying to go to doctors, trying to figure out what was going on.
They kept telling me it was like girl problems.
I couldn't really like really figure it out.
Going through that process, honestly, it was really amazing for me to discover what worked for me.
And apple cider vinegar was just like a key ingredient.
It was almost like it was like a reset detox type of vibe, but I hated the taste.
So off to the kitchen, I went, created a bunch of our first versions of it.
It was called Mother Beverage.
It was in these like little mason jars.
And so, Stephen, when Allison is sort of a mad scientist in the kitchen trying to figure out, are you like, I love you, but what are we doing here?
Or did you see the vision?
Yes, I definitely thought she was a little crazy.
I would say that like for the first little bit, I begrudgingly sort of went along with this idea as a supporting husband.
I was really into health and fitness, but the things that I did surrounding health and fitness and the food that I ate, like largely tasted pretty good.
This was sort of too far out in left field for me.
I think, as Allison said, when she started making it taste a little bit better, that's when I started to get more excited about it.
I was like, taking a shot of apple cider vinegar, not for me.
But if it's something that I can drink and enjoy that's also healthy, then I'm down.
And so what was the inflection point at which you said, maybe I've got a product here that's worth taking out to market?
I just was still just so obsessed with this idea, almost so obsessed.
I just wanted people to try it.
We signed up for the local farmer's market to do it as a hobby on the weekends.
I think a lot of people start at the farmer's market and we just started selling it.
And week after week after week, we kept selling out.
And then we would spend the week bottling it and making it in our kitchen and then selling it on the weekends.
Well, he's working a job to support the mortgage of the house that we just bought.
And really quickly, a Whole Foods buyer came by our booth.
Her name was Kelly.
She's still at Whole Foods to this day.
And she gave us her card.
And that moment was just like a really reassuring moment of being like, you guys need to be in Whole Foods.
And I think that was the first time we realized we maybe had a business and it wasn't a hobby.
And I told Stephen, I was like, we're going to do this.
We're going all in.
We're going to put our life savings into this.
I think it was like our third weekend at the farmer's market.
Wow, so it's fast.
This was really fast.
And friends and family had really liked the product.
How often can you trust friends and family to give you real feedback?
We love it.
It's so good.
Oh my gosh.
We love you.
That's exactly right.
Like Allison said, the forager from Whole Foods loved what we were doing.
There was a big crowd around our booth.
We were like the talk of the farmer's market.
And so I think that was helpful.
But tried the product, loved it, loved our story and was like, you got to be in Whole Foods.
It's one thing to be.
bottling during the week in your home and showing at the farmer's market.
But when Kelly shows up from Whole Foods and says, you should be in Whole Foods, is it like, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Now we've got compliance.
We've got supply chain.
We've got a whole set of questions we haven't begun to address.
Like what happens in that moment?
The nice thing about this local forager program that Whole Foods has is they're there side by side with you to help these young and emerging products and brands sort of get up off the ground and get to retail.
And so that was just a really great relationship that we developed over time with Kelly at Whole Foods in getting compliant and starting our own manufacturing facility.
Not the wisest choice, but getting sort of all of that stuff dialed in.
They were really helpful with it.
We even had like at one point the bottles had this like metallic shine on it.
And she was like, that's not going to look good in grocery stores.
And so we ended up going with like bright colors instead that we knew would like pop off the shelf.
And I think too on top of it.
It takes time.
So from the time we got the like card to the time we were on shelf was 10 or 11 months.
Right.
And so I love that we were naive enough to think it would happen quick because we did take our life savings and we did open a manufacturing facility and we did start to grow even more locally.
And the craziest thing that we went through all that and then we finally got approval and they're like, you guys have 14 stores in Dallas, Texas, and now you have to go sell.
each store individually.
We strapped our babies in our back and we sold into those 14 Whole Foods.
And we were really successful in it that they started to believe in us.
And we just started the flywheel.
And I think we did like 500,000 in revenue.
And then that's when Shark Tank came up.
Before we get to Shark Tank, neither of you had a background specifically in manufacturing and supply chain and compliance and all the things that you have to deal with.
How did you do it?
Google's a beautiful thing right now.
There's chat GBT, but I think that there's templates online.
There's resources.
You ask people, you network, you call, you beg like other people are like, how did you guys do it?
I think like as an entrepreneur, we were just so desperate to be successful and to share this product that we kind of just did whatever it takes.
And it's almost like everyone wants that secret formula.
It's just, you have to just do the work.
Yeah.
I think the reason we work so well.
is because I'm standing there on the edge of the bridge and I'm just like, should I jump?
I know I should jump, but there's going to be all of these things that I have to do to like figure it out.
There's so much risk in all of this stuff.
And I donkey kick him off the cliff so hard.
Just kicks me right off the ledge.
But the good thing is, is that once I'm in, I'm all in.
There's no turning back.
It's just extreme focus and extreme intensity without looking back.
doing whatever you have to, to literally get the job done.
And I feel like for the first two or three years growing the business, we just muscled through.
It was just pure grit at that point.
While you're like in the dark building and grinding, your friends are at great corporate jobs, taking trips to the Bahamas and taking trips to Europe.
And we're just like grinding.
It's tough for sure.
But also loving the grind.
Yeah.
I always say, I love that I had a co-founder.
I think it would be really hard to do it as a solo entrepreneur, right?
The highs are so much higher, but the lows you actually have like support.
And so if you don't have a co-founder, find someone.
Your first hire is probably going to be basically your co-founder because you can feel really alone as an entrepreneur.
Yeah.
And there's a growing number of stories of partners, husband, wife, or otherwise who found companies together and go on to have the success you all have.
It's also a decision that's fraught.
Was there a moment where you just said like, I'm not sure this is worth it or I'm not sure we're going to make it as a couple through this?
There's never a moment I didn't think that we wouldn't make it as a couple.
I think maybe the reason that you start to see more married couples do this together is because in theory, a married couple has already committed 100%.
Whereas I think other co-founders or partners, I feel like that conviction and partnership can sometimes waver.
in the face of animosity or any sort of challenge.
So I never thought that our relationship was challenged through the growth of Poppy.
There were definitely moments where I didn't think we were going to make it.
I remember it was a slow month and we had all of this overhead and really no revenue to back it up.
And our mortgage was due.
And we had our first kid at this point.
And I was like, man, what are we going to do?
I was standing in the kitchen.
I opened up this letter.
I didn't know where it was from.
But it was a tax return from the government.
Because we had had our first kid and we didn't claim it dependent on our tax return, we got a refund back.
And it was almost for the exact dollar amount of our mortgage.
Oh, wow.
But that was probably the time that I was wavering the most.
It was early on.
until like post-exit with this story either, which I think is really interesting.
Why didn't you share that with Allison?
I don't know, for whatever silly reason.
Yeah, there was a lot of things going through my head of sort of like saying, okay, exit door A, exit door B.
Yeah, well, I mean, ask that question in part because to your point about being a married couple and already...
at least theoretically, and in your case, really being all in on it, right?
You don't have one foot out.
But when you're in it together, you're experiencing those highs and lows largely together.
And so I'm just curious, is there an element of almost protecting each other when the energy demands that?
We really like to win.
Both of us have that drive, but we also wanted to have a family, right?
We didn't want to pick and we did decide.
very intentionally to do it at the same time.
And so we at that point decided that there's three things, marriage, kids, and business, that we were like, hey, we're good.
Let's not focus on the marriage so much.
Like, I don't care if I get flowers for Valentine's Day or if you forget the anniversary or we don't have a birthday dinner, right?
Those things that I think a lot of people would probably need in a marriage to like build that trust.
But we were building trust in so many other avenues that for the longest time, we didn't really need it.
But I will say what's been interesting was like post-exit, when we had this like same goal for nine years, Poppy, and then we exit.
And now it's like he's doing stuff, I'm doing.
And we now don't have the same goal.
There was a little bit of a learning period to be like, oh, wait, we're not doing everything together.
We have to like almost.
Now go on those dates.
I want those flowers.
Don't forget my birthday, right?
With everything in life, there's waves and there's challenges and change, but I think we're pretty good with dealing it and addressing and having those conversations.
And so what happens that you then decide it's worth it for us to go do Shark Tank rather than continuing to build sort of step-by-step in a more traditional manner?
I think we're finally ready to have help, right?
I think we'd maybe...
gotten it to a really good business for us, but it wasn't, you know, 500,000.
It's good, but it's not like going to change our lives.
And we had someone reach out.
They were wanting to invest in us.
I think they were going to give us like $200,000, but they had zero connections.
They had zero knowledge and beverage.
And we've always heard of the old saying, like, don't take dumb money.
Like any entrepreneur knows that.
And as we were like discussing if we needed it, because we needed the money, I literally opened Instagram and Mark Cuban posted that Shark Tank was coming to town that weekend and there was tryouts to be on the show.
I was three months pregnant.
So it's 2017.
And we went and stood in line for eight hours.
I think it was like the first time we got a real babysitter with our first.
And we just pitched our hearts out.
And they're like, this is gonna make it all the way.
Really?
They loved us.
They were pumped.
They were pumped.
They loved us.
They loved our story.
Yeah, but it still took six months from that moment to actually get on the show, which, you know.
made me nine months pregnant on the show.
Yeah, I'm not great at math, but I was going to say that puts you right there.
Yeah, I was nine months pregnant on, but I was, I was like, I'm going to be, I don't care.
I will have this baby on TV.
Like that's how much we just, and Shark Tank absolutely changed our lives.
How?
We had resources, we had knowledge, we had network, we had access to more capital.
I will say the recognition of the American dream of as seen on Shark Tank, right?
That stamp of approval.
Like it does so many things for a business when used in the right way.
Some people go on Shark Tank, I'm told, knowing they're not going to do a deal.
It is purely a marketing play.
Other people go on with a real clear idea of what they want to work out with.
Where were you on that?
Yeah, we needed a deal.
As Allison said, we really wanted that strategic partner that could help.
sort of guide us and take us to the next level.
And I think that we're relatively coachable.
We wanted capital.
We were eager for a partner.
We were hungry to win and we wanted to learn.
Tell us what happened on the show.
Spoiler alert.
We got a deal.
Okay.
So we got a deal with Brohan Oza and he has a vast knowledge and beverage, right?
In the history, multiple exits and really had worked his whole career in the space.
And so it was the perfect shark for us.
And after getting a deal, We did a full rebrand.
We were Mother Beverage and we went into Poppy.
What did Rohan tell you about the branding?
Yeah.
I mean, he was like, basically like, your liquid's amazing, but your branding is shit.
And we as founders were not upset about it.
We were like, well, what are we going to do?
It wasn't like someone telling you your baby's ugly.
That's not how it landed.
No, because...
I think we knew our baby was ugly.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But the inside is what matters.
The inside is absolutely what matters.
Whether you can sell the inside without the outside, different story.
It almost feels like Rohan is the perfect shark to invest, not one who's a regular on the show.
Did you get lucky or was it Providence or was this part of the programming that they wanted you in front of him?
You know, contrary to what people believe, like the show wants you to get a deal.
And they do a lot of work in the back end to actually try to match you up.
I know this because I was a guest shark this season, right?
So it was fun to see both sides of it.
And I kept thinking, you guys, I am pregnant.
I know you're filming for three weeks.
Like, I think we were like the last two episodes filmed of the pod.
And it was because they were trying to match us up with Rohan.
We had no idea.
You don't find out your sharks until literally, I think like midnight the night before.
Oh, wow.
So we had no clue.
We find out.
We go to bed.
We're up at 4 a.m.
for glam and to get to set.
So you don't really even have time to process it or really dig deep or look into them.
So you just kind of have to go in there with an open mind.
And I think Bethany Frankel was also in there and she had some experience in beverage.
So we were excited to see her.
And then Mark Cuban was Dallas.
We were Dallas-based.
But I think that...
We would have done any deal with any shark, honestly, if it was a good deal and they weren't like totally being sharky.
We definitely needed it.
If there's an entrepreneur who's listening, who is either trying out for Shark Tank or is going to be going to record an episode soon, what's the advice you would need to give that person?
Know your numbers.
Don't go on the show if you can't answer just like basic questions about your business.
Go on with the intent to actually get a deal because they can see right through that.
And I think, you know, nerves get people a lot.
I saw that where it was a great product.
They knew their numbers, but the nerves took over.
So know that you are actually going on TV and you have to be able to do that, which I think probably a lot of people struggle with.
I think for the people that are wanting to go on there for marketing, I think it's great marketing short term.
I think there's a little lift, but I don't think that it's going to change their business the way that they think it's going to.
Still ahead, Allison and Steven on how they built one of the most effective TikTok playbooks in CPG history.
Welcome back to Masters of Scale.
You can find this conversation and much more on our YouTube channel.
And be sure to check out the link in our show notes to subscribe to our newsletter.
So tell us about the rebranding journey.
When we decided to do the whole rebrand, we did try to keep a little bit of nostalgic.
touch of mother beverage.
So at one point we were like, do we call it mom and pop?
Because we knew we wanted to be a soda.
Pop being, that's funny.
It's like a dad joke.
But then we're like, is it a dad joke?
Will people take us serious?
And we really wanted to be a cool brand.
And so we didn't rush it.
We hired in different designers to come up with different designs.
Do we stay in bottles?
Do we go to cans?
Do we do both?
What is the brand?
What is the vision?
And really where we landed as we knew Poppy.
was revolutionizing soda for the next generation.
We want to give people the purpose to love soda again.
I think at one point, Stephen wanted color.
I wanted white cans.
I will say it was wrong.
I'm so glad we did color.
Once we kind of figured out our North Star of our mission, everything else kind of just like landed in place on like what we were trying to do.
Help me with the timeline.
So the Shark Tank episode actually airs December of 2018.
December of 18.
We take off.
2019 is the rebranding phase.
We keep things in steady state.
Launch Poppy the first week of COVID, March 3rd, 2020.
Wow.
So what happens when you're launching or relaunching a consumer brand?
with retail partners.
I imagine you had pretty ambitious launch plans and then the world shuts down.
Yes, it was at the time devastating, but I actually think it did us well for a few reasons.
We had loaded into Amazon.
What is everybody doing during COVID?
They're pantry loading, shelf-stable products that quote unquote can boost immunity, everyone shopping on Amazon.
So that business blew up.
On top of it, We had filmed an update on Shark Tank with the new brand.
It aired the second week of lockdown.
I think it was like April 4th.
So we had a national commercial with Poppy the second month of business.
Wow.
And we hit Amazon's hot new product list.
literally overnight it was wild what we saw from that episode versus like our original episode yeah that's when we broke the internet trending higher than kim kardashian and donald trump it was it was a wild order of magnitude what does that mean from a revenue perspective in that window so march we did about nine thousand dollars on amazon and i think the next month we did 250 000 on amazon wow yeah Were you able to keep up with the demand?
We were able to shift inventory into Amazon because we were ready for launches and grocery store.
And then another huge piece that I said that was like a blessing in disguise, it made us think differently from the beginning of the way we marketed.
everything had to be digital first.
And I do believe us being one of the first brands to really lean into TikTok, to build that like community-based, really just helped our brand awareness because a lot in beverage, if you think about it, are really in a lot of better for you products.
They grow really big in New York and LA.
And those are your hubs and those are your big markets and you really focus on it.
Because we were a digital first brand, I think our largest...
Retails were like Fargo, North Dakota and Cincinnati, Ohio, and these like really middle America soda drinking places that it just allowed us to really blow up really quick because of how digital first we were.
Was the investment in TikTok content as marketing, inspiration, desperation?
What drove that in those early days of COVID for you?
I think all of the above.
I always say like.
The most underexplored emotion for an entrepreneur is embarrassment.
Get online and make a fool of yourself.
So I danced.
I made taco videos.
I put our kids in it.
I was doing transition stuff.
Steven was making TikToks.
Honestly, what worked is one night I sat down.
It was a Friday night.
I just got in the shower.
My hair is wet.
And I just told my story.
And it connected.
on such another level that it went viral, did a million views while we were sleeping.
We did $100,000 while we were sleeping that night on Amazon.
Wow.
That video now has like 300 million views.
It's just like wild.
It was just like, hi, I'm Allison.
Poppy has five grams of sugar and I was on charge taking nine months pregnant.
Like it was just so simple.
And so it also opened our eyes to...
the power of it.
So then we shifted a lot of our paid over to the platform and really just focused on that as like our community building brand awareness channel, which I think was like really smart for us at that time.
Our number one KPI was brand awareness.
For the first four years of business was brand awareness.
I think until we did a Super Bowl ad, we just were like never looking at the data.
We used an interesting, because we were Amazon, we didn't own our customer status.
So we would run all of our TikTok ads to our website.
We'd get their email and their phone.
And then you'd go to add to cart and it would check out on Amazon right from our website.
So you're capturing the customer.
You're getting their data so you can remarket to them.
But you're leveraging all of Amazon's infrastructure.
Correct.
Another little crazy hack.
This is like a pro tip.
Because we were directing traffic to our website.
to Amazon, we actually made it an affiliate link.
So Amazon was actually paying us to direct traffic from our website to Amazon while also collecting the customer status.
That's an ultra hack.
Yeah, I love that.
You referenced the Super Bowl ad.
When did you do the Super Bowl ad and why?
You know, we just did things very differently at Poppy.
And just to like lay the ground, like for us to do a Super Bowl ad in three or four years isn't crazy for a size of business that we were.
What we'd done is the year before, we did a huge brand rework of really hammering in on, you know, what is our vision?
And we created an incredible anthemic ad that was called The Future of Soda.
And we got it and we started testing it.
And it was just such a beautiful piece of content that we're like.
This is a Super Bowl ad.
You had the ad before you decided you were going to do the Super Bowl.
Right.
The ad is what triggered this.
We fell in love with this creative.
Wow.
So we didn't ever make this to be a Super Bowl ad.
And I think that that's also really amazing because people get into this cycle of you making like celebrity soup Super Bowl ads where like everybody's in it and it's like, what did they just say?
Right.
But we really wanted to come out and just like who we were.
And in the ad, I think we said we were soda 17 times.
And so we go, we want to do Super Bowl.
We go to buy the Super Bowl.
There's nothing for sale.
What year is this?
So that was 23 going into 24.
I remember I was part of this TikTok collective.
We were at dinner with a bunch of really incredible, awesome people from like Wendy's to the NBA to Thrive Market to Wyden and Kennedy, like just like incredible people like at this dinner.
And I remember I had no idea who this guy was.
I was like, anybody have a Super Bowl ad?
And he's like, I think I do.
And it was the M group.
And at the time, I called our CMO and I was like, I think I found this a Super Bowl ad.
This is the Wednesday before the Sunday game.
Four days before the Super Bowl.
Four days before the Super Bowl.
What was crazy about it, too, is it was a floater ad.
So we had no idea when it was going to air.
It's like depending on timeouts and injuries.
Because you can buy the first quarter.
You can buy halftime.
You can buy postgame.
But some of the ads are sold on a nonspecific basis.
They're going to plug it in where they can.
All it had to do was air before.
Thank you for watching the NFL.
That's how risky it is.
Could have been a blowout.
Everybody turned off the game.
And it could have been the last ad before.
49 to 7.
Yeah, forget it.
Yes.
And it costs the same for this, right?
You don't get a discount for buying a floater ad and not knowing.
But I will say we just...
rolled the dice.
It ended up airing one minute before Usher went on right before halftime, which is the most premium spot that anyone could ever ask for at the Super Bowl.
We tripled our awareness overnight.
And that was the year that like Travis Kelsey and Taylor, it was like one of the most viewed Super Bowls.
And we were like one of the most viewed Super Bowl ads at that Super Bowl.
So you could say our first Super Bowl was very successful.
And coming out of the Super Bowl, were you able to see beyond the awareness?
Were you able to see in the revenue numbers the effect?
Yes, I think is the short answer.
We were, I think, forecasting 350.
200 to 350 is really what that number was supposed to be for 2024.
We hit over 500, north of 500 million that year.
And so I would say, yes, it paid off.
Our CMO actually signed the contract to buy the Super Bowl ad before we had the money to pay for the ad.
Wow.
Because we knew they would believe in this moment.
It was just like such partnership the whole time.
So wait, you're calling Ron and...
saying, look, we're going to need some cash infusion here to cover the cost of a Super Bowl ad that we just bought four days out of the Super Bowl.
Yeah, because it wasn't the plan for the year.
Sure.
Yeah.
Yeah, and he's like, okay.
And an $11 million expense showing up overnight is not a trivial thing, even on a business at the scale that you were at.
Wow.
It's also just a great callback to your point about not taking dumb money.
Took smart money, got someone who can help you with the branding, really think through, he's got deep experience in beverage.
And when you say, this is the opportunity, we believe we've already signed the contract to do this.
They're like, I'm in, I'm with you on this.
Okay, so jumping ahead, you've made a decision to sell the company.
You've now sold the company as we sit here.
What's the process that leads to a decision to sell this company?
Allison and I also knew that in order for us to truly revolutionize soda and give people across the globe the freedom to love soda again, we were going to need a partner.
We are the official soda of the LA Lakers.
We can't be sold there at the stadium.
Because of existing contracts.
And so we had made that decision and we really built this company so that we could pass the torch to a larger business that was going to be able to carry it forward and continue that mission.
You're in a category where there are two 800-pound gorillas, right?
There's Pepsi and there's Coca-Cola.
Did you start conversations with both of them early so that you knew that they're familiar with not just Poppy, but with YouTube, et cetera?
Well, it's actually three, KDP, when it comes to these things.
And then, yes, there's the option to go IPO, but then you don't have a distribution partner.
So it's just a really tough situation to be in, in beverage.
And so...
I think we did start dating.
We started having conversations.
We didn't actually do like official process where we were for sale.
It was like, hey, let's take some calls.
And so I think we had been talking to Pepsi.
For almost a year and a half before like the actual like final offer came in, I think the reason they bought Poppy is for like our marketing and our team.
And so I think when they finally gave us the offer, I think we said, yeah, we went a little bit of negotiation, but I think we said yes in like three days.
It was really quick.
It was like February.
And then we like...
Closed end of March.
Pepsi bought Poppy for?
$1.95 billion.
It's so hard to not say two.
So let's just say almost two billion.
Let's just round it up, which is a monster exit.
It's a monster exit.
And you said Pepsi wanted Poppy in part for the team, obviously the product and the branding, et cetera.
Did that include the two of you?
It did not.
I think.
What a lot of people don't realize is we sold 100% of the company.
A lot of times you'll do a two-step deal where I would say if it was that situation, we would have stayed in our roles and kept going.
But you don't sell your company for $2 billion and then say, hey, here's your Pepsi employee badge.
It's just not the way those things work.
And we were very aware of that going in and had lots of conversations.
Now that the thing that I will say is they've kept us on as on advisory roles.
You know, I'm still the face of the company.
I still do a lot of ads.
I was in the office two weeks ago.
We were filming a Super Bowl commercial with Charlie XCX, but I can't have a team reporting into me and I can't like meddle like I used to, right?
Like you have to have boundaries and you have to have respect.
And there was mourning that came with that, I would say, that I think is very normal.
I'm like so happy.
Everybody at Poppy got jobs that wanted to stay.
They hired on 100% of anybody that wants to stay.
Some people did leave because they saw what happened with Poppy.
They're going to go get another job and get equity and hopefully do it again.
As Allison said, there's definitely this mourning period.
I don't think a lot of people talk about it.
It was a really, really challenging time.
And it's like, oh, poor you.
You sold your company for $2 billion.
life must suck for you type of a thing.
But it really is, I think, not knowing what I was going to do that day, not having like that purpose and like extreme focus on something to like wake up and get after it.
It was really, really challenging.
I think we made the right decision.
You rip the bandaid, you separate.
And so I think where we are now, I think things are great.
We're getting creative.
A lot of folks in your situation would say, you know what, we climbed the mountain.
We're going to spend time making investments, guests judging on Shark Tank, philanthropy, whatever else is meaningful for you.
Is there an itch to start another company and do this again?
Absolutely.
100%.
I think, as Allison said, I think we allowed ourselves that time to really sit and be with ourselves in process.
And one of the things that I missed the most was being with a team, building a team.
And having like this really great outlet to be creative and to solve problems and to challenge yourself.
And I also want my kids to see me work hard at something and accomplish things.
I don't want to just be passive on the sidelines playing golf.
So can you tell us about what's next?
We can't say what's next, but we will say the opportunity just kind of happened, right?
And basically if we don't do it.
Someone else will because it's so simple and it's like we're like shaking ourselves like, how has this not been done?
But it is another beverage.
It is.
We're going to do what we know.
Double down.
Double down.
And we're excited.
We're working on naming and branding and packaging and just kind of that early day grind.
Maybe not all the way back to like early stage.
Yeah, yeah.
We'll skip the manufacturing, skip the farmer's market.
We'll skip those like first three years.
I hope you'll come back when you launch the new thing to tell us about it.
Thank you so much for being on Masters of Scale.
Thanks for having us.
Yeah, thanks for having us.
Thanks again to Allison and Stephen Ellsworth for joining us.
Poppy's scale story is an incredible example of how your toughest moments can become your biggest opportunities.
A brutally honest investor told them that their bottles were terrible, but also invested in the rebrand that changed everything.
Their retail launch screeched to a halt because of COVID, but it kickstarted the digital-first marketing that allowed the brand to blitz scale.
Facing the obstacles head-on so often can unlock just the right strategy.
I'm Jeff Berman.
Thank you for listening.
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