How Liquid I.V. Went From Unknown to a $1 Billion Brand

Liam:

Dominique, incredibly excited for today’s episode. This one is a long time coming. Your story and journey at Liquid IV in particular is just incredible. Seven years, employee number 12, joined when the business was around $20 million in revenue — and it’s a household name today. For those who don’t know you, why don’t you give a quick introduction?

Dominique:

Hi, I’m Dominique Brown. I’m the Head of Customer Experience at Liquid IV. Before that I was at a place called Hub Nutrition, so I’m used to the Los Angeles health and wellness space. I’m a native of LA and I oversee customer experience, voice of customer, data and analytics, and also AEO and GEO for Liquid IV.

Liam:

Why did you join Liquid IV so early on, before they’d even proven themselves? What drew you to the brand?

Dominique:

Two things. First, I have an entrepreneurial spirit — I love embracing a new challenge where there’s no playbook. When I joined they said, “We want someone to come in and really build out the customer support function and drive this as a customer experience channel. We don’t have any processes in place, no SOPs, no policies. The CEO is literally responding to tickets at 2am.” I was excited by that blank canvas I got to paint. And then the give-back mission. Liquid IV has always, since its inception, had a portion dedicated to giving back to the community, focused on clean water access and hydration for all. I thought that was a really exciting mission to be a part of.

Liam:

So you basically came in to build the foundations of an incredible CX function from what was just chaotic fires of responding to customers. What were the early problems?

Dominique:

Very early on there were two major problems. One was that Liquid IV is a category disruptor — no one knew what it was when I joined. If I said I worked for Liquid IV, people thought it was IV drips. Now it’s everywhere. So the first thing was how do we create a legitimate customer experience through product education. Getting the sentiment from social media through our inbox, making sure we had FAQs, making sure we were responding to questions properly. The DTC channel was very small and very strictly performance driven and conversion focused at the time. The second was — what identity did we want to form through our customer experience? I look at CX as an extension of marketing. It is a marketing channel. The last thing you want is people walking to social media and leaving negative reviews because of a bad experience. Those were the first two missions as we were building out the brand.

Liam:

Today you look after so much more. How would you describe the day-to-day of your role now?

Dominique:

I serve more as a partner to other functions. I sit under the ecom and media function, so I’m really tied to what’s happening in retention and acquisition from the voice of customer side — how are people actually receiving things. On the acquisition side, my team talks a lot with media teams about what types of messaging we want in ads from a customer-centric perspective. What are people saying about product education that we’re seeing through ads, and how can we tweak messaging to meet customers where they are. From a retention standpoint, CX is all about retention — not just the CRM side but also how we create more proactive communication channels for our customers, particularly around peak seasons where we know certain customer issues are going to come up. And then partnering on subscription programs and loyalty programs. It’s really just taking the voice of the customer and figuring out ways to build that throughout the organization.

Liam:

You were with Liquid IV from $20 million all the way to over a billion dollars. How would you describe the distinct phases of the business?

Dominique:

The first phase was very entrepreneurial, founder-led. And I should mention — I’m now the longest tenured employee at Liquid IV. The founding leadership team has all moved on to other ventures. That early phase was about product education, figuring out our tone, how do we want to influence because we were disrupting the market. The second phase was growth — we got very intentional about who we were partnering with, and with that came a little more conservatism around brand voice. Like, we don’t want to say the wrong thing because now we have a brand identity that people are tied to. And now at the billion dollar mark, we’re in a phase where the thinking is — scale quickly, but also innovate quickly. Every department is encouraged to experiment, whether that’s how we’re using AI, the tools we’re bringing in, how we’re structuring teams. The market we disrupted 14 years ago is not the same market it is today. Everyone knows functional hydration solutions now. But back then, nobody was walking around with powder sticks for hydration.

Liam:

The best brands seem to win when they’re obsessed with experimentation. How have you been able to foster that environment at Liquid IV?

Dominique:

I think it’s about bringing tools to the surface that we maybe wouldn’t have tried before. I have the privilege of overseeing my own tech stack, so I’m making decisions on what technology we bring in and proposing solutions not just within my vertical but to the broader ecom team and cross-functional partners. We’re seeing over 300,000 different tickets come in the inbox in a year. One person analyzing that and distributing data across the organization is not effective, and human error means you miss things. So we brought in AI tools to democratize that — now our product innovation teams are also using CX tools to get their feedback.

Liam:

What tools are you using?

Dominique:

There are so many. For AI in customer experience, we’re using FlipCX for phone automation — if you’re canceling your subscription you don’t want to wait 10 minutes on hold, you want it done immediately. For chatbot we’re using Codef AI, which automates support tickets and embeds self-service options. Yogi has been a partner for voice of customer AI data and analytics. We also have company-wide access to ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot. And then Profound for AEO and GEO.

Liam:

How are you investing in AEO and GEO today? Do you think it will require a tool forever or will it become a standardized skill set for marketers?

Dominique:

I think there will always need to be tools, at least from the data scraping perspective. But the space is moving so quickly. Six months ago there were specific tools like Fermat, Evertune, and Profound that everyone was talking about. Now I’m looking at review platforms that are saying they do SEO, AEO, and GEO all in one. We’re seeing vendors expand their portfolios to include it. What’s interesting is it reminds me of SEO in the early days — it’s encouraging brands to experiment on the types of content they’re creating and how to reach customers. From a CX lens, what I love is that we’re not guessing anymore at how customers are searching for our product. We’re actually seeing the types of questions and discovery happening because it’s so conversational.

Liam:

Are you seeing a trend toward shoppers searching on ChatGPT or other LLMs, or are you more just getting ready for when that shift happens?

Dominique:

A bit of both. We’re seeing people discover Liquid IV through it — mostly through discovery, not direct lookup. Someone isn’t searching “what are the ingredients in Liquid IV” on ChatGPT, but they are saying “I’m going to Coachella, what are some essentials I need?” And if the brand has the right content, they’re showing up as a recommendation. Then there’s that discovery of — let me try Liquid IV. We’re still seeing people go through traditional search for direct brand lookups. So it’s really both — how do we prepare for the next stage of search which is way more conversational, and how do we already show up well while building content around use cases we maybe haven’t fully explored yet.

Liam:

Do you think a brand’s website has suddenly become way more important in the context of AI search? Product pages, FAQs, copy and detail that maybe didn’t get as much attention before?

Dominique:

I think so. The transition happening with websites right now is that they’re becoming education hubs, and the selling work is actually happening in the backend. A lot of brands were focused on conversion-focused websites — above the fold, grab attention, get them to convert. Now it’s about instilling confidence because there’s so much competition, and then learning as much as you can about the customer so you can bring them into your segmentation and convert later. It was a bit of a transition because before it was all about that immediate conversion moment. Now it’s about being an information resource that builds trust and then working through tools in the backend to actually drive the conversion.

Liam:

How are you thinking about retention today, particularly in an AI world?

Dominique:

Retention has always been a big pillar of Liquid IV, but like most brands, as we were scaling we focused a lot on acquisition. The question now is really about how our brand provides value and how that conversation is shifting. We have a lot of data from our DTC site because it’s been running for so long — we understand when people repurchase, how they’re actually using the product. So we’re asking — do we have the right cohorts? Are we studying the right behavior patterns? Liquid IV has a strong seasonality component. People want hydration solutions when it’s hot. In winter, maybe not as much. So we’re trying to get more sophisticated in our CRM around how we’re messaging customers at the right times. We’ve done interesting work around heat waves specifically — we know there are heat waves in certain parts of the country, how do we talk to and target those customers proactively to show up at the right moment. We’re also still experimenting a lot on how much we can customize the subscription and loyalty experience per individual.

Liam:

How do you think personalization will change in today’s world? It’s not just first name anymore.

Dominique:

Personalization in the past was really about building cohorts based on customer personas — this is who’s buying and they fit into these three buckets. What we’re seeing now is way more diversification in actual customer behavior. How many times are they visiting the site? What are they doing on the product detail page? Who actually uses the Shop All page? How do customers actually engage with the website and can we track that behavior to make decisions for them without us having to manually build out cohorts? I think personalization is going to get even better because of AI tools working in the backend. Instead of CRM specialists sitting down to guess at what cohorts make sense and testing over months, we’re going to be able to test in real time, see what works, move faster, and learn about our customers at a completely different speed.

Liam:

The most exciting thing to me is that it’s just never been possible before for a marketer to send truly different emails to every single shopper. The next phase will be agentic campaigns — not 30 campaigns a month but 200 or 300 campaigns to different types of shoppers in a single day. Do you think email and SMS will remain important through all of this?

Dominique:

Absolutely. Email and SMS will continue to matter. I think SMS has a lot of opportunity still sitting on the table that brands haven’t figured out. The challenge with SMS is that customers experience fatigue fast, and SMS doesn’t have the visual components that email does. A lot of brands are still struggling to create that brand identity and voice through SMS alone. When I personally get SMS, I often just unsubscribe. I haven’t seen many cases where I think people are doing it really well — you see lifts early but I’m not sure it’s always sustainable in the long run. I think it comes down to experimentation, and it’s just harder in SMS. That’s where I think AI tools are going to fill in the gap — more personalization, less generic static discount messages, maybe some visual components eventually.

Liam:

You’ve mentioned that CX should be a growth driver for the business, tied to marketing, not just a support ticket function. How have you actually done that?

Dominique:

A lot of it is figuring out the right language internally. CX can operate within a bubble because you’re seeing every problem with a magnifying glass. If you take a step back and look at the data in terms of how it impacts the total business, and then talk about the opportunities to win and keep customers longer, you develop the language to use in cross-functional conversations. I don’t expect my marketing team to understand what it means when I say 50 people complained about something. They’re looking at total sales — if we sold 100,000 units and saw 50 complaints, how critical is that really? So I have to translate that into something meaningful for them. When I first joined Liquid IV, I sat down with every single department leader and asked — what are the priorities that matter to you? That helped me develop the language. And then reporting — the same metrics consistently. My team internally knows what NPS and CSAT mean. We have a metric in ecom measuring campaign success based on CX qualitative feedback. If a certain issue has increased tickets by a certain threshold, that triggers a conversation and we build processes to improve for the next promotion. Being somewhere for seven years also means there’s now trust within the CX function that wasn’t there on day one. But the key is always volume, context, impact to the business, and brand identity — is this how we want to show up with our customers? That lens goes a long way in influencing decisions across the organization.

Liam:

Without giving away too many specifics, what do you think are the most important things to get right over the next 12 to 24 months to continue that hypergrowth?

Dominique:

Continuing to figure out new ways to meet our customers. We’ve talked about our product in a very specific way — daily functional hydration. But people are using Liquid IV in ways we haven’t even expected. How can we meet them with the types of content we create through AEO and GEO, so that we’re more discoverable and people can find us in those moments? We always want to reach more people, get into more households, expand into more markets — we’re international now which is exciting. And then not losing the entrepreneurial edge that made Liquid IV so successful. We’re the number one functional hydration brand — how do we not get complacent? The answer is experimentation. We launched a pickle flavor recently and it sold out in 36 hours. That’s risky for a hydration brand known for being number one in taste, but people loved it. The reason we did it is our customers told us they wanted it. We did an April Fool’s joke about it and they said, we really want this. So we made it and they bought it. That’s what it looks like to keep customers at the pulse of the organization.

Liam:

What do you think are the most overhyped things in AI at the moment?

Dominique:

Anytime someone says “we’re going to eliminate these roles completely because AI is in place.” CX was the number one place people said that — we won’t need teams, AI bots will handle everything. And I’m like, someone has to train it. Someone has to QA it. Someone has to build processes and feed it information. And then you have to continuously improve those processes. It’s like any other function. You put out 10 ads, you see which ones aren’t performing, you turn those off and put more spend behind the ones that are. You’re doing the exact same thing in CX — putting out flows and workflows and seeing what’s going on. I also saw an article recently that said the CMO role is dead. It is absolutely not dead.

Liam:

So many incredible nuggets in here. It’s so rare to get the opportunity to be part of such an insane growth story. The fact that you started when not many people knew what Liquid IV was, and now you can turn up anywhere and everyone knows it — being part of that is just an incredible thing to have in your career. Dominique, thank you so much for coming on.

Dominique:

Thank you for having me.

We cover:

What it looked like in the early days (no processes, no playbook)

How Liquid I.V. built a category from scratch

The phases of scaling from $20M → $1B+

Why customer experience is a growth and marketing channel

How the team continues to experiment and stay ahead

This is a real look at what happens behind the scenes of building a billion-dollar brand.

00:00 How Liquid I.V. Went From Unknown to $1B

05:07 Building a Category No One Understood

07:46 The Phases of Scaling to $1B

09:40 Why the Best Brands Win Through Experimentation

10:24 Using AI Across CX and Ecommerce

15:45 Retention Strategy at Liquid I.V.

18:17 The Future of Personalization in Ecommerce

22:42 Turning CX Into a Growth Function

26:23 Lessons From Scaling Through Acquisition

27:18 What’s Next for Liquid I.V.

29:01 Customer-Led Innovation (Pickle Flavor Story)