This essay is about a verbal exchange with Maddie Voge, the 27-year-old co-founder of the Aura Bora soft drink logo. It has been modified to make it clearer and more durable.
When my husband Paul and I started betting on the combination of sparkling water, herbs, and new fruits in our kitchen in early 2019, we never imagined it would become a full-time business with “Shark Tank. “
Our love for sparkling water as adults stemmed from the fact that crunchy moms were kids who wouldn’t let us drink soda. But we didn’t enjoy many of the sparkling water flavors available, so we made ours at home.
As soon as we combined freshly crushed basil and frozen strawberries with sparkling water, we knew we would have achieved interesting results.
We created 4 more flavor combinations through the mixture of cacti with rose petals, lemongrass with coconut and lavender with cucumber. Not all combinations made the cut: incense and birch are one.
In October 2019, encouraged by the enthusiasm of our friends, we used our savings to make 1,000 cans of five other flavors. At the time we lived in Denver and took the cans to an industry exhibit in Boulder. The load on the cans is low enough to put on a private credit card, but big enough to be stressful if we didn’t do well on display.
Fortunately, not only did consumers love them, but we piqued the interest of a visitor at Whole Foods, who was our visitor a year later.
We also piqued the interest of our first store, a organic food store, which kept the cans we had left.
Every day a learning curve. We didn’t know how to create legal nutrition labels, where to get barcodes, or why grocery outlets charged us to be on their shelves. Fortunately, other emerging homeowners we’ve met have been very generous in answering all of our questions.
In the summer of 2019, Paul took the plunge and quit his job at a venture capital firm. However, I had just gotten a new marketing job at a tech company in San Francisco, so we moved to the Bay Area. Paul worked full time for Aura Bora, while I worked for the logo in the evenings and on weekends.
Instead of taking our cans to industry exhibits in Colorado, we threw samples in the trunk of our Subaru and knocked on the doors of retail exercise food stores in San Francisco. Then, a few months later, the pandemic came along and everything changed.
Most buyers bought the essentials and went home. Due to issues with the supply chain, aluminum was difficult to unload at the same time, so we also considered whether we could have enough cans from the factories that worked with us to fill our inventory. Deliveries were also affected as trucking corporations had to cede their area to emergency items.
Despite those challenges, we still checked to fulfill our orders and our deliveries still reached their destination, even if they were delayed.
But being a new logo has helped us, especially when the pandemic has created higher prices for everything from ingredients to shipping. While the most powerful logos had to combat emerging prices, we were still young and flexible enough to incorporate those adjustments into our business and spending plan.
After receiving an email from the TV screen manufacturer asking if we wanted to participate, Paul and I immediately moved up a notch. We watched over a hundred episodes of the screen to help us prepare for our presentation. When we continued, we had reactions. Robert Herjavec really liked our speech and invested $200,000 in our business.
When the exhibit aired in January 2021, we generated more profit on our online page that day than before in the entire history of our site. It was a wonderful time for us.
Since then, the company has continued to grow. We now manufacture with 3 factories in the United States and are sold in 2500 retail stores nationwide. In addition to Paul and I, we now have thirteen workers in a variety of roles, from social media and graphic design to sales and operations. We also started creating limited edition flavor drops found exclusively on our website.
In February 2021, the bloodless froze in several spaces where we sent the waters of Aura Bora, which our boats exploded in the back of the delivery trucks due to the drastic drops in temperature. Some Texas consumers said the boats delivered to their door were so bloodless that they turned into sludge.
Waking up to an inbox flooded with emails from other people who love our logo saying their cans had exploded was definitely our hardest day yet. We immediately started replacing the cans and put in place a strategy to retain long-term orders if the temperature dropped again. . Now, if we detect that the weather changes, we stop shipments and tell consumers that they will arrive next week once the temperature rises a little.
This investment has helped us fill stock for our contracts with stores such as Whole Foods, Sprouts Farmers Market and Fresh Thyme.
I quit my task in the generation and joined the team full-time in February 2022. I hesitated to give up my task. I wondered what it would be like to paint full-time with my husband and wondered if I had learned enough to do it. But at the end of the day, I felt like I had learned a lot during my time with the tech company. Paul and I feel able to work as a team and seek to play a greater role in the development of the logo. helped create.
Although we had some difficult days, I couldn’t be happier. Every time we release a new flavor and creature to illustrate the box and write the ornamental haiku, I feel like I’ve given birth to something in the world.