When it entered the market in 2015, Sound Sparkling Tea was one of a small group of brands cultivating the white space between iced tea and carbonated drinks. But with the debut of its new visual identity and packaging design, the New York-based company is taking its most intentional steps yet towards penetrating the premium sparkling water space.
The rebrand, which debuts March 1, will take Sound’s complete line of unsweetened tea and botanical-infused sparkling waters out of 12 oz. slim cans and into 12 oz. standard squat cans that are the most commonly used in the category. All four varieties — Blood Orange (with vanilla and black tea), Tangerine (with lemongrass and green tea), Blueberry (with cinnamon and hibiscus tea) and Grapefruit (with lavender and ginger tea) — will be available in the new cans for a suggested retail price of $1.99.
Speaking with BevNET earlier this week, Sound co-founder Tommy Kelly said that the initial idea for the rebrand came about in 2019 when, after four years on the market, he and co-founder Salim Najjar hired an outside consultant to complete a top-down audit of Sound with the goal of identifying the core principles that will guide it over the next decade-plus of growth. One of the conclusions from that experiment was that it needed a new visual look, one that told a stronger flavor story with a sense of fun and personality.
Despite that acknowledgement, Kelly said the brand’s success in driving top-line growth through corporate and foodservice channels — representing 65% of its total business, pre-COVID — inadvertently pushed plans for a revamp to the back burner. Yet once the pandemic began to spread, those channels froze, necessitating Sound to take a more proactive stance.
“At corporate offices, it’s really about the product itself — as long as people try it and they love it, you aren’t competing with 100 other brands on a retail shelf,” making eye-catching branding less critical, Kelly said. “After our sales in food service fell dramatically, we knew we needed to be more relevant in retail over the next 12 months and longer. So we looked at everything, from the packaging to the naming convention to the kind of can we were in.”
Under the new branding, Sound is clearly “leaning more into sparkling than into tea,” something that the company has been building towards for the last two to three years, Kelly said. The idea behind the label makeover was to build a story around flavor in “a visually compelling but not literal way;” The intentional retro-soda vibe, along with use of colors rather than images, are steps towards the goal of “effectively and efficiently communicating” the combination of flavors and how they are “working in harmony,” he said. Emphasizing the company’s new direction, the product is now labeled as “Sparkling Water with Tea & Botanicals,” rather than its previous classification as “Tea-Infused Sparkling Water.”
The change in can format aims to help Sound open up new merchandising and marketing opportunities at retail as it pushes in the sparkling water section. The move is designed to separate Sound from association with categories that typically use slim cans — such as spiked seltzers or energy drinks — for both consumers when they purchase and for retailers when they organize their sets. Sound’s multipacks are also changing, moving from a 12-pack shrink wrapped tray to a plastic-free 8-pack box ($12.99 MSRP). The teas will continue to be sold in 12 oz. glass bottles with the new labels at $2.49.
Sound’s new-look cans will be rolling out in Southern California next month, with sales being led by Critical Mass Group. Along with existing retailers like Whole Foods, the cans are set to enter Erehwon stores in Los Angeles, and will be available online. E-commerce growth, represented by D2C as well as its presence in FreshDirect, has also helped offset losses in the corporate and foodservice channels, with Kelly stating that e-commerce should be around 30% of Sound’s total business this year.
“[The change] is definitely a meaningful, permanent shift towards a bigger retail presence,” he said. “That said, our goal is to be as omnichannel as possible.”
Along with the label and packaging changes, Sound has also doubled-down on its commitment to using organic extracts by discontinuing White Tea with Peach and Ginger, the one SKU that featured natural flavorings.
“We really want to own that intersection of flavorful without sweeteners, obviously maintaining organic and quality of ingredients,” Kelly said. “But in terms of the space we are trying to own, it would really be within sparkling and using botanicals to create the most flavorful, highest quality unsweetened beverages that we can.”