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Prebiotic soda brand Oripop is in growth mode, with annual sales of $200 million and its first national campaign with pop star Camila Cabello last year.
Much of the six-year-old brand's early popularity can be traced back to TikTok. But the past year has been a transformational year for Olipop, establishing itself as a true competitor to traditional brands such as Pepsi and Coca-Cola.
“We're a much different company today than we were 12 months ago, and a lot of that is due to growth,” Olipop head of marketing Chad Wilson said on a recent episode of the Digiday Podcast. “From a marketing perspective, we've had great success in the social media and influencer space. We jumped into social early in the company's growth, and it was almost like rocket fuel. It was something.”
In this episode of the Digiday Podcast, we spoke with Wilson about maintaining Olipop's momentum, internal agency, and what testing and learning looks like at TikTok.
Below are highlights from the conversation, lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Building Olipop's internal team
It's an innovative piece of work, but it's also just making sure that the content we're creating is relevant, and we're not essentially talking to ourselves.In building the team when I first joined the company [last year], we had about 8 people on the team and now we have about 25 people. What we have done to play an important role is to look holistically. Some of our talent comes from the agency side, like R/GA and Wieden+Kennedy, but we also have people who have worked on the brand side of our in-house teams. We try to mix different people and have different perspectives at the table.
Test and learn on TikTok
I've been experimenting with TikTok Shop a little. We were trying it out and playing around with it when it was released. We have confirmed some bugs. I can say that the TikTok team has been great in helping us when we encountered certain incidents. Since this is a new product, it is expected that there will be some defects. I'm not saying it's working the way we want it to. There's still a little bit of work to do, but it's definitely something we're experimenting with.
Influencer marketing is maturing
I don't want to say this is the Wild West, but influencer marketing is just new and everyone is figuring out how to work together. First and foremost, the way we think about influencers is that we want them to become customers first. Authenticity is very important to us, so when working with influencers we want to make sure they actually believe in the product as much as we do.
