Origin of Names: Liquid Death

Want a sip of Liquid Death? This provocative brand name has just as compelling a story as the name itself.

The founder, Mike Cessario, was a marketing professional with a background in design and the underground music scene. In 2009, at the Warped Tour music festival, he noticed musicians drinking Monster energy drinks and wondered why there weren’t more healthy products that have cool, funny, and irreverent branding. This thought stayed with him when he decided to launch his own water brand in 2019. As a way of keeping marketing costs low, he decided to come up with a name that was funny, edgy, and super-shareable so people posted it on social media (i.e. free advertising).

When it came time to name the company, Cessario asked himself what the dumbest idea would be (a marketing trick he says his team still uses) for a healthy and safe brand of water – and voila, Liquid Death was born. Liquid Death winks at the extreme sports and energy drink culture it was inspired from, while simultaneously subverting the norms of the beverage industry, challenging the idea that drinking water (something healthy) has to be dull or boring. Liquid Death is arguably one of the more provocative and compelling brand names to have made a splash in the market in recent years.