The Future of Hydration: An Interview with Eddie Zelenak of Buoy

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Where did the idea for Buoy come from?

We were fed up with the sugar, sweeteners, artificial ingredients, empty calories, and hydration mixes that only work with water. It’s difficult for customers to find a versatile hydration supplement with clean ingredients and sustainable packaging.

Sports drinks, powder packets, and tablets offer sugar, sweeteners, artificial ingredients, and/or calories in plastic packaging. Even the market leaders are 69% sugar, so we made a clean hydration solution that you can add to any beverage (even alcohol and coffee) in one quick squeeze.

What is your most popular product?

Hydration Drops are the best way to start! All of our Hydrating Wellness Drops dissolve instantly and evenly in every beverage and are flavorless in everything.

You can try Hydration Drops for yourself by texting $BUOY2 to 81000.

How did you create an effective subscription model?

Creating an effective subscription model starts with product development. Just being a consumable product isn’t enough. To convince a customer to incorporate your product into their daily routine, you need to answer a real problem with health, convenience, sustainability, and branding at the forefront of your mind.

Our problem: three out of four Americans are chronically dehydrated.

Our answer: creating a hydration solution that seamlessly fits in with people’s pre-existing habits and rituals — for us, that meant all the drinks they’re already drinking.

We removed the junk and replaced it with cleaner, more effective ingredients.
Our form factor is easy to use and aligns with the best approach for optimal all-day hydration.
We took an industry littered with single-serving plastics and cut out new plastics with 100% PCR bottles, fewer materials per serving, and carbon-neutral shipping.
We crafted an approachable brand rooted in trust and transparency which is needed to win over customers.

Subscription in today’s world goes beyond offers and discounts. It starts with making a case for why your product should even exist at all.

What has it been like going into retail?

We started at CVS with zero brand awareness and surprisingly became the third best-selling SKU on a hydration end cap last summer with new and legacy brands in the space. We were just behind two legacy brands with large, established sales and followings.

We’re now expanding our store count to 3,500 with our own POS towers in CVS’s most high-trafficked locations, and we’re in talks with convenience stores to start pilots next month. Buying windows, slotting fees, and finding brokers isn’t the easiest thing, but we’re excited by some of the new retailers coming our way!

What type of advertising do you do?

We recently ran our first paid media campaign outside of Amazon. All of the growth we’ve had so far has been organic or through Amazon PPC.

For some brands, the idea of growing without paid media isn’t an option or a way for sustainable growth. At Buoy, we lead with our product and brand rather than focusing on ad-spend. Ultimately, this enabled us to learn how to navigate a post iOS14 world as a brand that’s not reliant on paid media to scale.

We’re focusing on community-building, organic content, and off-the-wall marketing tactics that will supplement a modest paid media budget moving forward.

Where do you see the future of e-commerce going as it relates to Buoy?

Buoy, as a product and brand, meets customers where they already are.
For example, Buoy is a flavorless hydration solution that our customers add to the drinks they’re already drinking, and we offer a subscription so customers can get Buoy delivered right to their doorstep.

Frictionless commerce is exactly that — making purchasing and engaging with a brand seamless and native to the platform you’re on. Social media is quite obviously the start, but as this scales, you’re seeing virtual farmers markets and other real-life applications where the lines of piquing a customer’s interest and allowing them the opportunity to interact are blurred into a seamless experience.

Meeting customers where they already are and integrating seamlessly with what they’re already doing — albeit drinks or scrolling Instagram — is where we want to be.

Being side-by-side with pioneers in this space like Boost is important.

What was your experience like in the MetaMarket?

I loved being in the MetaMarket! It was super fun to geek out with so many like-minded people in the CPG space. It was great to peek into a window to see what the future of commerce in the metaverse looks like.

What other channels do you want to explore to sell?

Everyone is familiar with paid channels like social media, owned channels like email and SMS, and online retailers like Amazon. When new channels emerge, I’m always fascinated by how brands choose to react. You can either ignore them, passively partake, or actively and loudly partake.

For example, when SMS marketing emerged, some brands were late adopters, others added a phone number field during the sign-up, and others screamed it loud and proud — “text us” or putting numbers on their cans like Taika!

The way a brand approaches a new channel can excite their customers. Now, QR scanning is making repeat purchases seamless and easy, and there’s a wave of new channels emerging as well.

Supplements are usually the last category to move into new channels like Instagram Shop and other less-friction commerce routes to market because of regulations, but new platforms like GoPuff that list ready-to-go food and beverage products are perfect channels to sale Buoy through.

How can brands continue to build loyalty with their customer base?

The first thing that comes to mind is using customer experience as a service, and the second is your branding. The brands that do both well, like MadHappy, have an easy time building loyalty.

Customer Experience — If your customer experience isn’t a 10, it won’t stick out, and you’re missing the chance to build brand loyalty and foster a connection with your customer.

Branding — It’s not just colors and a logo. It’s how you show up on owned channels, how you talk to people, and how you’ve encouraged or allowed people to talk to you.

We love Buoy’s merch! Why are more CPG startups experimenting with merch?

Thanks! We have some more fun stuff coming your way!

Merch is an extension of branding and is a great way to turn customers into brand advocates. It allows for previously “boring” companies that you find in your pantry to generate excitement and, for pun’s sake, more shelf space in your customer’s mind.

It also reveals to customers that there’s a real team with real people behind the brand. Someone has taken the time to develop a world of experience for a singular product or brand that conveys a level of trust to your customer.

Plus, it’s a great way to root your product in your larger core values — Youth To The People does this perfectly with all of their capsules. It’s not product branded, it’s core belief branded, which always has a larger reach and resonates deeper.

Where can people check out and keep up with Buoy?

Check out our website justaddbuoy.com and follow us on Instagram @justaddbuoy!

If you want to try out the different Buoy Drops, text these tags below to 81000:

Text $BUOY1 to 81000 for the Daily Wellness Bundle (features 1 of each Hydration, Wellness, and Energy Drops)

Text $BUOY2 to 81000 for Hydration Drops

Text $BUOY3 to 81000 for Energy Drops

Text $BUOY4 to 81000 for Immunity Drops