Proper Wild Raises $3M Funding Round Ahead of C-Store Launch

Natural energy shot startup Proper Wild has raised $3 million in pre-venture funding ahead of its planned jump from e-commerce into brick-and-mortar retailers starting next month.

The New York City-based brand, which markets a three-SKU line of natural energy shots featuring caffeine from green tea, is set to enter 12,000 c-store locations in Florida via DSD distribution over the course of the next six months, starting with a launch in 1,000 stores in November.

Proper Wild was born when co-founder Vincent Bradley, a tech entrepreneur and former CEO/co-founder of FinTech Global Markets, began searching for a clean-label energy alternative to supplant his coffee habit. The product — which features 25 calories, 180 mg of caffeine and L-theanine per 2.5 oz serving — is one of a rising class of new brands seeking to challenge Five-Hour Energy’s dominance of energy shots through differentiated positioning, along with the likes of Ethan’s, Safina and Suja.

Having launched exclusively online in 2019, Bradley said the company has been able to quickly test and iterate on the concept — shots were reformulated to remove added sugars in June, for example — while using its collective experience in online sales to establish a solid direct-to-consumer business in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite offering the product only in 6-packs, he said that revenue is growing 20% each month.

“We’ve built a national brand, all before we’ve ever talked to a distributor or retailer,” he said.

The $3 million round represents the company’s first external capital raise, and comes at time when Bradley said the brand is at an inflection point, approaching profitability but still lacking the scale needed to materially bring down costs related to customer acquisition, warehousing and fulfillment.

The new investors are a “small number of high net worth individuals, as well as a family office,” Bradley said, representing “a lot of strategic value” with experience in CPG investment, logistics and warehousing, and distribution. He characterized the round as “pre-venture,” and that he hopes the company will never have to go take any venture capital.

“Me and my team are the type of entrepreneurs that like to brag about not having raised money and how small our team is and how much of the company we own,” he said. “We do not think it’s exciting or fun or take pride in hiring a lot of people and raising a bunch of venture capital money and blowing through it.”

The new finances will go primarily towards marketing and inventory purchase orders ahead of Proper Wild’s move into Florida, the company’s first foray into brick-and-mortar retail outside of a handful of small scale pilot runs at stores in New York City. Bradley said the company chose the Sunshine State because of data showing a strong customer base and its solid relationships with local independent Anheuser-Busch InBEV distributors.

To compete with Five-Hour Energy, Bradley said Proper Wild is leaning into its data-driven strategy through digital marketing and partnerships relevant to their consumer base, such as collaborating with bars on cocktails featuring the product. To challenge Five-Hour Energy’s claim to valuable real estate at point-of-sale, Proper Wild plans to use freestanding cardboard displays in its first 2,000 placements, a strategy that Bradley noted was expensive but which yielded 100% growth in velocity when deployed in the brand’s New York pilot tests. Each 2.5 oz. shot will carry a suggested retail price of $3.99, about a dollar more on average than a 2 oz. bottle of Five-Hour Energy Extra Strength.

“We do need to charge a little bit more to maintain our margin, but the other big thing we found is that if we went into price parity, people valued our brand less,” he said. “(Price) is a hard thing to measure at a small scale but we did a lot of in-person interviews and by coming in a little bit more expensive, we are putting our flag in the ground that we are more premium. We have the margin to come in at parity, but if we do, we’re going to get into a price war, and Five-Hour Energy will win.”