First Drop: All Grown Up

Greater Than turned 14 years old in August. Or maybe it turned five, given its rebirth in 2019. Either way, there’s a new mom there to help it celebrate.

If you’d have met Greater Than’s founders around the time they launched, however, it would have strained your credulity to bet the brand would still be around. It’s just not that Mark and Jon Sider were young, and raw – although that was part of it for sure, i.e. after one of the Sider brothers took the stage at BevNET Live an observer compared him to Eminem in “8 Mile” – but also that the timing and approach weren’t quite there.

After all, they were launching a coconut-water based sports drink brand a few years after the big companies had already bit on the concept with the first generation of brands like Zico, ONE, and Vita Coco, and it wasn’t clear how they were going to get funded, get distribution, get much of anything done at all.

Although another entrepreneur, Mike Repole, would eventually make billions selling a coconut water-based sports drink to Coke about a decade later, at the time Greater Than leaned a little too heavily into the coconut water space, and its “>” branding evoked math homework more than it did the Nike Swoosh.

But despite the obstacles, the Sider brothers, sports nuts, young (their parents came to trade shows with them), but clever kids from Chicagoland, proved surprisingly determined. They pushed their product locally, wearing out the shoe leather and cleverly working with the one influencer they could find – Brian Scalabrine, a bench-warming basketball forward with a great nickname (White Mamba) and a future in broadcasting – to make a couple of viral videos.

“If you embodied the brand, you were a winner,” said Jon Sider. “I think we excelled in being the brand. We were brand animals, and we took that approach to trying to build a beverage business in the Chicagoland market.

They battled on throughout the 2010s, never going out of business but getting quieter with each iteration.

Meanwhile, Heather Howell kept watching the brothers from her own business, Rooibee Red Tea, a bottled fizzy tea startup that she had brought to market starting in 2010. A former NCAA Volleyball player, Howell wasn’t able to make her own brand a success, but she found that success elsewhere: she folded the business on her own in 2015 to take a plum job devising innovation strategy at Brown Forman. That gig eventually took her up the corporate ladder there, until she was working on Jack Daniels, where she produced award-winning work. She left late last year, tired and approaching burnout.

In 2019, things unexpectedly changed for the Siders via a key insight: somehow, their brand’s hydration blend had found its way into the consciousness of nursing mothers – a group that is as in need of hydration as any elite athlete. There was a potential new path for Greater Than, one that diverged strongly from their jock-y roots, and to their credit, the Siders followed it.

Gone was shoe leather and sports; now it was direct to consumer and Mom’s Choice Awards.

It wasn’t easy; business never is. Younger brother Jon, the CEO, doesn’t work with Mark anymore, but the Sider family – with parents on board – retains the majority ownership stake. The company cycled through different executives, part-time advisors, searching for steady ground.

Howell left Brown Forman last year; she acknowledges that she couldn’t have continued at the pace she was running.

“I knew if I kept working like that, I wouldn’t live to 55,” she said. “I had no more gas in the tank. They’re still using the work, and that tells me everything.”

She took a few months, evaluated her options. Some of Greater Than’s investors approached her, and she remembered a moment. She’d been at a conference in New York, there hadn’t been a seat for her. The Siders’ father had stood up so she could sit. She was amazed.

She met with Jon, his parents. They were still kind, generous, the kinds of people she liked. With the nursing mother aspect, she liked what she saw.

“They’ve cracked that code, which is difficult to crack,” says Howell, who joined the company in January, as its president.

There’s a long way to go – even 14 years after Greater Than started, the assignment Howell has taken on as President is to bring steadiness to the company. That’s a recognition that after all this time, some professional process is needed to go with Jon’s still-youthful determination.

“There wasn’t a day that we didn’t wear the brand, both with our enthusiasm, as well as physically,” Jon Sider said of its early years. “Today, how we approach the business is that we identify the customer who cares about the product as much as we cared about it.”

“You don’t need to be the brand in the real world, you need to be it in the digital world,” he added. “What being the brand was turned out to be something entirely different. [Instead of] being ‘Greater Than’ in athletics, we learned in fact that moms are the world’s greatest athletes, and they’re using that in a way that’s much more powerful than we ever could have imagined.

The kid brother has two young kids of his own now. Howell’s own kids will both be in college in the fall, but before the youngest goes, Howell’s driving her up to Chicago. They’ll go to Lollapalooza. They’ll go visit the Siders.

The mission now is to lock down the direct to consumer business and, amazingly, once again determine the right brick-and-mortar channels for Greater Than. To innovate on the opening that nursing mothers have given the brand.

“There’s something here,” Howell said, “and we are really talking to the consumer that’s purchasing the product. We are doing it, and we just need to open it up. At the end of the day, we want to see them get their due.”