As its distributor stakeholders take a greater share of the workload, Liquid Death is making changes to its sales and distribution team, reducing some staff while bringing in Michael Fine as its new chief retail officer to lead expansion efforts.
Fine, who spent long periods at Nestlé Waters North America and BodyArmor before moving to run marketing at energy drink company A SHOC last January, wrote in a LinkedIn post this morning announcing the move that he was “thrilled to be joining the team” and to be “bringing my experience from other high growth brands to the table. We’re only just getting started…”
Liquid Death also announced the promotion of current SVP of Strategy Marisa Bertha to Chief Strategy Officer, where she “will continue her leadership in key domains such as fundraising, investor relations, and executing the company’s strategy with a focus on revenue-enhancing initiatives that combine product innovation, data, and insights to bolster retail performance and overall growth.” Bertha, who previously worked at 7-Eleven’s venture capital arm, has been with Liquid Death for the past two years.
“There is a huge opportunity to accelerate our retail presence and market share, especially as we diversify with category-expanding products like iced tea, said Mike Cessario, Liquid Death’s founder and CEO. “Mike Fine and Marisa will play key leadership roles in growing Liquid Death through our next chapter of scale on the road to building the next beverage giant.”
Both appointments represent another step in the formalization of Liquid Death’s corporate structure: Karim Sadik-Khan was named Chief Financial Officer in June.
The announcement comes after Liquid Death confirmed reports, first published in the Beverage Business Insights newsletter, that the company had made cuts to its sales and distribution staff.
In a statement shared with BevNET, Liquid Death noted that its rapid growth — coupled with investment from eight out of its top-ten distributors as part of a $67 million round closed in March — required a shift in strategy, effective as of last week.
“Now that we are a much larger brand with deeper distributor relationships who invested in the company earlier this year, we needed to restructure our sales & distribution team that was built for an earlier stage of scale when we had limited retail penetration and were a lower priority for DSD distributors. Like other larger brands, we are now able to lean more on our distributor partners for in-store execution.”
The statement continued: “We’re deeply grateful to the talented people who were instrumental in helping to get Liquid Death to where it is today, and we’ll be providing them with severance, extended health insurance coverage as well as outplacement services to support them through this transition.”
The company declined to share further details .
Update 1:30 p.m. ET: This article has been updated to note that Stephen Ballard is no longer with Liquid Death.
Updated 3:30 p.m. ET: This article has been corrected to note that A SHOC is still in business, however its core brand Accelerator Active Energy is no longer being distributed by Keurig Dr Pepper (KDP).