Imagine launching a niche energy drink in 2022. Then Kim Kardashian, builder of a $4B brand in SKIMS, slides into your DMs with product feedback.

That's what happened to founder Daniel Solomons. And critically, it didn't start with a check.

2023: Kim discovers Update and becomes a daily consumer.
2024: She starts sending Solomons unsolicited feedback on flavor and formulation. 2025: She joins as a formal co-founder, helping strip away the "masculine chrome" packaging for something calmer and minimalist.
March 1, 2026: Update launches in 4,000+ Walmart stores nationwide.

The celebrity path most brands follow: identify an influencer, write a check, hope the audience converts. What Update did was rarer, let the product pull the celebrity in, then formalize what was already happening.

But the product story is as interesting as the partnership story. Most energy drinks run on caffeine, which the liver breaks down into three compounds. One of those, paraxanthine, produces the clean, focused energy. The others tend to produce the crash. Update bypasses the process entirely by using isolated paraxanthine. No crash byproducts. Just the part that works.

The category context: Red Bull is the $10B incumbent. Monster is the $7B volume king. Celsius proved there was a $1.3B+ market for functional disruption. Update is positioning as the next wave, science-based, wellness-aligned, and designed for the consumer who reads the label.

If SKIMS proved Kim could reinvent the essentials category, Update is her bet on reinventing stimulants.

The best marketing isn't 35% of revenue in ad spend. It's a product so good your biggest future influencer is already a paying customer before you've even thought about hiring them.

Most people saw Coca-Cola acquire BODYARMOR for $5.6B and called it a success story.

Michael Fedele saw the $760M impairment charge that followed, the cost of a corporate system trying to maintain what made an independent brand work in the first place.

Fedele was a marketing lead during BODYARMOR's rise. Now he's applying those lessons to Throne Sport Coffee. $10M Series A. ~$18M raised in total. Patrick Mahomes is the second-largest shareholder, not a brand ambassador, an equity holder. And a Direct Store Delivery partnership with Big Geyser, the NYC distributor that helped scale both Celsius and Vitaminwater, to force shelf presence before the majors start paying attention.

7,000 doors today. 20,000 targeted by mid-year.

The product is functional RTD coffee: caffeine, BCAAs, electrolytes, no sugar. Performance positioning, not café positioning. It's not going after the Starbucks customer. It's going after the gym bag.

The energy drink playbook from the early 2010s is being run again in a different category: high-performance ingredients, elite athlete equity, aggressive DSD expansion before any strategic can react. The window between "brand that's working" and "brand that's acquired" is where the value gets created.

Fedele isn't guessing at the playbook. He helped write the earlier version. He's running the upgrade.

Everyone dismissed Luckin Coffee as cheap Chinese caffeine. Now the private equity firm behind Luckin is acquiring Blue Bottle Coffee, the crown jewel of Third Wave.

Centurium Capital has reportedly agreed to buy Blue Bottle's global retail operations from Nestlé for under $400M.

The contrast is striking:

Blue Bottle, founded 2002, ~140 cafés across the US, Japan, Korea, China, and Singapore. Built what many called the "Apple Store of coffee": minimalist design, obsessive sourcing, slow-bar craft. Under Nestlé, the brand maintained its prestige but struggled to scale profitably.

Luckin, founded 2017, 31,000+ stores (Starbucks China has ~7,000 for comparison), $7B+ in revenue, ~$10B market cap. After a $310M accounting fraud scandal in 2020, Centurium led the restructuring that turned a delisted disaster into China's largest coffee chain.

The strategic logic is clean: Luckin is the volume engine. Blue Bottle is the prestige halo. One provides infrastructure and data at scale. The other provides brand and cultural cachet that can't be manufactured.

The macro backdrop makes the bet sharper. China currently consumes roughly 12 cups of coffee per capita per year. The US is around 300. If China reaches even a third of US levels, it becomes the largest coffee market in the world. Owning both the mass infrastructure and the premium brand in that market is a powerful position to be in.

Nestlé couldn't make Blue Bottle's retail unit economics work. Centurium isn't buying it for the unit economics, they're buying it for what it signals to the premium Chinese consumer that Luckin can't credibly claim on its own.

Era VC is a global consumer fund investing across Australia, the UK, and the US. Jeremy Evans has backed Seed Health, Pillar Performance, and dozens of others built far from New York and LA. His lens on what makes a durable consumer brand is genuinely different from what you hear in most US fund conversations.

Five things that stuck:

Smaller markets force better discipline. US brands can reach $100M+ revenue before seriously thinking about international expansion. Australian and European founders have to underwrite global from day one, which sharpens thinking on margins, distribution, and PMF before there's much room for error.

Founder psychology is genuinely different. US founders default to "we're going to dominate this category." Australian and European founders tend to be more modest, sometimes too modest, but they also reach cash-flow breakeven within one to two years, because back-to-back raises aren't a realistic option.

Brand beats formulation. Every time. Seed Health is one of Era's flagship investments. Probiotic formulations can be copied. The brand, the community, and the customer trust built over time cannot. The first-mover advantage in consumer is more durable than most software investors give it credit for.

DTC was the arbitrage. Omnichannel is the requirement. Seed eventually launched into Target after years of scaling profitably online. Strategic acquirers want proof of retail. And as CAC has risen, the retail margin trade-off is closer to neutral than it used to be.

Volume is the new Meta moat. The brands winning on paid are now testing 1,000+ ad creatives per month and letting the algorithm find the 5–10% that scale. What worked six months ago doesn't work today. Creative stagnation is a slow bleed.

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That’s it for this week.
If you liked this issue, forward to a friend who obsesses over brand strategy, capital flows, or exit timing.

In the Money – following the flow of capital in consumer

P.S. We love talking to brands interested in exiting in the next 3-18 months. If you know of any brands interested in exiting, or any firms trying to help port cos manage turnarounds, we'd love to share a POV.

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