With the opening of its new CPG marketing services division, L.A. Vibrations, SoCal-based beverage incubator L.A. Libations has taken another step towards becoming a complete one-stop shop for startup brand building.
Under the leadership of LAL CMO Bonnie Shah, L.A. Vibrations offers full marketing and branding services for CPG companies, including product design, social media management, content strategy, web development, production and retail and trade marketing. The unit also provides support with digital, ecommerce and Amazon sales, helping companies to register their brands, manage P&L, SEO, and paid social ads, Shah said.
“I think what we’re really able to be nimble with is being an emerging brand marketing arm,” Shah said. “A lot of emerging brands don’t necessarily have the budgets to be able to afford a CMO or be able to work across a lot of different marketing functions, like in the digital space or to build Amazon, and also work at experiential events to support their markets.”
Unlike the main LAL business, which is deal and partnership based with the company taking equity in many of its core brands, L.A. Vibrations operates on a work for-hire basis, CEO Danny Stepper said. However, he noted that brands should still fit LAL’s better-for-you ethos – “We’ve got to believe in it,” he said.
The announcement marks another step forward for LAL, which was founded in 2009 with a focus on introducing better-for-you beverages into mainstream retail channels. In 2019, the company launched Relentless Trade Solutions, its first for-hire division providing merchandising in California retail, and later that year Molson Coors Beverage Company acquired a minority stake in LAL with the aim of using the incubator to create new non-alc beverage brands and having the group work with its existing companies. Most recently, in December 2020, the company launched its SoCal Incubation Program (SIP), which works with startups selected through an application process.
L.A. Vibrations has been quietly running over the past year with 22 partner brands, – including companies like Shaka Tea, Hawaii Volcanic, Mingle Mocktails and Swedish energy shots brand Carly’s Naturals – but LAL is now expanding the service publicly as the company looks for opportunities to scale operations. The division has allowed LAL to move beyond beverage, working with snack brands like Blue Nest Beef. Stepper said that although the core LAL business will always remain focused on beverage, the new unit – as well as Relentless – have the potential to expand into the broader world of CPG beyond food and beverage.
“At our core, we are about emerging beverage brands, we’re never going to be The Coca-Cola Company in scale, because that’s not who we are and that’s not strategically what we are trying to be,” Stepper said. “Having said that, there are pieces of our business that are completely scalable, like L.A. Vibrations, like Relentless. There’s literally no limit to how big those businesses can get.”
L.A. Vibrations currently has 12 full time team members working on the unit, while the entire company is now up to 80 employees, Stepper said. The expansion comes as LAL is continuing to focus on its relationship with Molson Coors, both in creating new lines like Huzzah!, MadVine and barley milk brand Golden Wing, as well as working to build Molson’s partner brands like plant-based energy drink ZOA and launch new meal replacement products such as Don’t Quit! and orro.
Stepper noted that while the brands enrolled in L.A. Vibrations and Relentless remain separate from the company’s in-house and partnered portfolio, the units have synergy across the entire business. In addition to helping develop the company’s own product launches, LAL is able to form relationships with more brands who may or may not go on to work with the company in a closer fashion down the line.
“As far as L.A. Vibrations and Relentless, it’s a great way for L.A. Libations to get to know brands,” CEO Danny Stepper told BevNET. “But now with this new addition, we have, soup to nuts, every capability that an emerging beverage would need. This was a gap for us before, we had everything but this marketing capability that Bonnie’s built.”