DTC Growth Teardown: Hint Water

💦Drink week💦presents a thread on🍉Hint Water🍍

Hint is one of the more mature DTC brands, so I wanted to look more closely at how

💪Hint’s brand is strong yet flexible

🔑Data is a key asset

🔧Content is always a growth lever

🎤Hint uses Twitter for community empowerment

Hint Water’s branding is sophisticated, with enough color and youthfulness to be comfortable in the hands of women, men, and children. This flexibility allows Hint to grow across various demographics, while still focusing on 25–40 y/o women.

It’s subtle, but you can see that as the company grew, they evolved their creative to appeal to their newer/broader audience. Let’s look at IG (56k followers) as an example. 2017 leans feminine in imagery and color palette. 2019 is more gender neutral in color and content.

Arguably Hint’s best asset is their Facebook audience (774k👀). It gives them insights they can leverage in other parts of their business.

Which regions to expand wholesale? Check fb.

Interest campaigns that will resonate with our audience? Check fb.

Any good DTC brand will dissect and test against this data.

h/t @mrsharma for driving growth here for a long time.

Supporting and appreciating teachers is just a good thing to do, but for Hint it’s probably the smart *data driven* thing to do. 📊🍎

I can’t be sure, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Hint’s expansion into sunscreen was informed by audience insights from their DTC channels.

Now, let’s talk content.

It’s worth exploring how your brand can provide more value than just the utility of your product. When you earn more engagement and trust, you’ll earn more attention in the market.

Hint is already doing really well — $100mm as of Jan 2019 (yeesh) — but they can do even better. What would happen if they created long form content to serve their audience, and spent fewer impressions promoting themselves?

Your DNVB ceiling is pretty low if you aren’t investing in brand and content. Yes, the product must be good, but in DTC your stories inspire customers to choose you over your arguably identical competitor.

In 2019, all brands are media companies.

Now, I haven’t seen many DTC brands use Twitter well, but @hint is doing a stellar job. It’s hard to build brand narratives on this platform, so they aren’t even trying to.

Hint’s Twitter (135k) is primarily surfacing customer content to deepen brand loyalty and build a sense of community. They’re minting new brand evangelists every day.

If they’re already talking about your brand, give them access to your platform.