With stars like Carmelo Anthony and Victor Wembanyama on its roster, functional beverage brand Barcode has been building its business through tight connections in the NBA. Now, the L.A.-based brand is upping the stakes from players to teams, announcing today it has been named the official fitness water of the Brooklyn Nets.
The three-year deal is the startup’s first full sports team partnership and includes rights to use the Nets name and logos across its marketing and promotions, as well as bench branding, in-game activations and in-arena exposure at the Barclays Center in New York.
“I’m excited, because this is what I envisioned for the brand – breaking through the noise of fitness waters and sports drinks and being able to align the brand within an organization at the highest level possible,” said Barcode co-founder and CEO Mubarak “Bar” Malik.
Malik, former director of performance for the New York Knicks, started Barcode in New York in 2020 with co-founder and NBA star Kyle Kuzma before later relocating the brand’s headquarters to L.A.. The company has since focused on building out its footprint in markets where it has partnered with top athletes, like Southern California and Texas, and has now begun deepening its footprint in New York.
As a lifelong Knicks fan, Malik admitted there’s a bittersweet irony to Barcode’s first major franchise partnership coming with that team’s crosstown rival, but he believes personality-wise the Nets were the best team Barcode could have forged a relationship with.
Beyond sharing black-and-white brand coloring, he views both Barcode and the Nets as having “gritty” underdog personas; where the Nets left New Jersey in 2012 to challenge the long-dominant Knicks for market share in New York, Malik sees Barcode’s mission as mounting a similar challenge within the hydration beverage space against long entrenched players like Gatorade.
“We came into the market with an anomaly of a label and I remember being told very early that we were doing everything wrong,” he said. “So, the partnership with the Nets from a business standpoint, it just makes sense.”
The announcement arrives a week after the Nets named Essentia Water as its Official Alkaline Water partner, representing that brand’s first sponsorship deal with an NBA team.
Barcode’s better-for-you fitness drinks are made with ashwagandha, magnesium, vitamins and minerals and just 2 grams of sugar per 16.9 oz. bottle. According to Malik, the brand was designed to meet the needs of pro athletes and he claims the drinks have already found fans on the NBA rosters – they just haven’t been allowed to display the Barcode logo during games.
With this new deal, Barcode will have an in-game hydration statement at all Nets home games during the regular NBA season, including branding for cups and squeeze bottles, carts and towels used by players.
The beverage company will also receive bench branding, logo placement on backdrops at the Nets Training Center for media events, permanent branding of the sides and front of the Atlantic Avenue subway station in the Barclay Center’s main plaza, LED signage and more. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
However, there is one missing item: Barcode will not be sold for consumers at the stadium. Although the brand will be donating beverages for players, Malik said the deal did not include concession stand sales, noting it is an issue of selling into the distributor who services the Barclay Center, but the company is continuing to pursue that opportunity.
According to Malik, the company is looking to make up for that with an aggressive distribution push into the New York metro area. Earlier this month, Barcode announced it has partnered with New York DSD house Rainforest and is continuing to focus on growing the brand’s presence ahead of the NBA season. As well, Malik said the brand is also sold in around 75 ShopRite stores in the Nets’ old home state of New Jersey.
“When you think about distribution and what really moves the needle, there’s nothing more important than gaining visibility in the arena, seeing your favorite players on this team drinking out of the bottle, having a product in their hands and knowing that they’re actually drinking it,” Malik said. “Then you can leave the game, go across the street to Brooklyn Fare, and buy all the flavors you want.”
The deal also reflects the growing opportunity for smaller, early-stage brands to forge big partnerships with mainstream sports teams. For example, in 2021 the Los Angeles Lakers partnered with better-for-you brand G.O.A.T. Fuel and this year the San Antonio Spurs named NERD Focus as its Official Energy Drink. In his own time overseeing team conditioning in the NBA, from around 2013 until 2020, Malik said options for partnerships with early stage brands largely weren’t there.
“When I started my career [with the NBA], these opportunities didn’t exist,” Malik said.”As someone who was giving products to the teams, it was only Gatorade and Powerade. There weren’t any smaller companies that you could reach out to or even think that the organization would partner with them. They just didn’t exist 10 years ago.”