Instead of passively monitoring communities like Reddit for brand mentions, Breeze's founder advocates for actively joining the conversation. This means responding directly to negative feedback and using it as a real-time tool to improve the business, fostering a more authentic and resilient brand.
The founder identified his own conflicting experiences—loving the social aspect of alcohol but hating the harm, and enjoying weed but disliking the disconnect. He built Breeze to provide the benefits of both without the downsides, starting from a deeply personal, relatable human problem.
Breeze ran its Black Friday promo for so long that customers tuned it out. They were "missing the wave." The solution was not a small tweak but a complete, real-time relaunch of the promotion with a novel offer, which allowed them to recapture attention and momentum during the peak shopping period.
Despite beverages being a category people rarely buy online, Breeze generated tens of millions in DTC sales. This built a huge base of customers who preferred to buy in-store, creating a powerful demand flywheel. When Breeze launched in retail, it sold four months of inventory in two weeks.
Breeze's most effective ads are raw, unedited videos of the founder. In one example, he filmed himself calling a customer to refund their $560 order after a coin flip. That single ad cost $560 to make but generated an estimated $500,000 in sales, proving authenticity trumps production value.
Instead of the traditional CPG model of acquiring distinct brands (like Coca-Cola owning Sprite), Breeze is building a centralized platform. Various "feel-good tonics" exist under the single, strong Breeze brand, similar to how Apple sells the iPhone, MacBook, and AirPods under one unified identity.
LLMs learn from existing internet content. Breeze's founder found that because his partner had a larger online footprint, GPT incorrectly named the partner as a co-founder. This demonstrates a new urgency for founders to publish content to control their brand's narrative in the age of AI.