If you wanna build a multi-million-dollar alcohol brand, it turns out that partying in the Hamptons isn’t the worst place to start. Just ask Kyle Cooke.
One minute, he’s partying on Summer House. The next, he’s importing booze in giant plastic totes, navigating the nightmare that is alcohol distribution, and launching Loverboy - a zero-sugar hard tea that actually tastes good.
The idea was simple: make a fun drink that tastes good, looks good, and doesn’t sneak 50 grams of sugar into each can.
Fast forward to now, he’s sold millions of cans, built a brand with a cult following, and somehow made “Reality TV Star turned Beverage Mogul” an actual job title.
In our interview, Kyle spills the (hard) tea:
- How Loverboy started as a personal guilt trip about drinking too much sugar.
- Why launching an alcohol brand is basically the hardest thing you can do.
- The chaos of fundraising, running a business, and starring on TV (all at the same time).
- The one thing he thinks is about to blow up in the beverage world.
If you want to know what it really takes to scale in a brutally regulated industry, here’s your playbook:
Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?
I’m Kyle Cooke, founder of Loverboy, the first-ever sparkling hard tea that isn’t loaded with sugar.
I started Loverboy back in 2018, and since then, it’s blown up into one of the top brands in the category. We’ve expanded beyond hard teas into spritzes, espresso martinis—you name it.
The whole idea is simple: if you care about what you put in your body, why would you drink sugar bombs and artificially sweetened alcoholic beverages?
What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?
I was originally working on a nutrition coaching app, focused on 1:1 coaching. Around the same time, I got approached to star in and cast the show I’m in on Bravo.
In 2015/16, people were starting to realize that 90% of reaching your health goals is nutrition. I saw how much money people were spending on gym memberships while completely neglecting their nutrition.
That’s what led me to launch the app.
But there was a problem—the app was hard to showcase on the show. People didn’t really grasp what it was.
What they did ask about was what we were drinking.
Most of the time we were drinking products like Twisted Tea, which has 25g of sugar in a small can. Turns out a lot of our calorie intake is from alcohol — over 20% on average. I was sick of recommending products that were terrible for you. I wanted to create a zero-sugar beverage that actually tasted good.
That’s how Loverboy was born.
We’ve continued to innovate on other beverages since then, like the Aperol Spritz and Espresso Martini.
But at its core, Loverboy is a lifestyle brand—it’s about having fun and not taking yourself too seriously, while also caring about the quality of ingredients in what you’re drinking.
Take us through the process of building and launching the first version of your product.
I had 10 weeks to figure it all out. No joke.
It was April 2018, and filming Season 3 was slated to start filming in July. I wanted the process of launching Loverboy to be included in the show, so I had to move fast.
I started Googling like crazy and getting on the phone with co-packers, branding agencies, and formulators. I was up against the clock because I wanted some of the process to be included in the show.
I was also committed to self-funding because I had tried raising money before, and I didn’t want to waste time pitching if I didn’t have anything to show.
And somehow, in 10 weeks, we went from idea to actual samples in cans in time to capture my friends trying it on camera.
Over the course of the first year, I spent over $75k of my own money to get things started, but that enabled me to get the business to a point where it was launch ready, making fundraising easier and more efficient. This strategy allowed me to raise $1.25M during the two months leading up to our soft launch in NYC, July 2019.
Since launch, what growth channels have been most effective for you?
The biggest one? Bravo.
We leveraged my role as an entrepreneur on Summer House in a way that was much more about product placement; it was brand integration. Our product appears 50 to 100 times in a single episode—that kind of exposure is insane. But we’re also talking about it.
Beyond that, we’re a digital-first brand, which is unusual in alcohol because of the three-tier system. We launched DTC with the spritz since it has a wine base, but at the end of the day, 75% of our revenue comes from wholesale.
Content has always been our biggest growth channel. We’ve done over $10 million in direct-to-consumer sales without spending a single dollar on marketing.
I learned early on that every company needs to be a content company.
In 2009, Gary Vee came to Babson where I was getting my MBA and said, “Every company needs to be a content company.” He was right. Today, content is king.
If you want to succeed in 2025, you need content. And not just any content—you need a cheat code that lowers your customer acquisition costs. That’s how we did $10 million in DTC sales with $0 spent on marketing.
If you do it right, you can get them close to zero. That’s why I signed my life away to do a Bravo TV show—it wasn’t starting a YouTube channel, but it was a platform. Every brand needs to figure out what their platform is.
Now, go read Crush It! and figure out your platform.
Did you ever have an “oh shit” moment where you thought it wouldn’t work?
So many.
First, there was the mad dash to get the product on Season 3 of the show. I had 10 weeks to start the product from scratch before filming started. But then, after filming, I had to figure out how to actually launch an alcohol brand. I had no idea how to source ingredients for full batches.
Our entire marketing angle was zero sugar, but the only alcohol base that fit our specs was made overseas. The U.S. manufacturers wouldn’t sell to a small brand like mine. So I had to figure out how to import six massive totes of alcohol myself.
Then came 2020. We were having our lightning-in-a-bottle moment, sales were taking off and our velocity was best in class—and suddenly, there were no aluminum cans available. We had to get them printed in Shanghai and Kuala Lumpur, ship them over at a time when containers costs over $20k in freight alone, and then they got stuck off the coast of LA during the supply chain nightmare.
That’s the kind of stuff no one prepares you for.
Can you break down the keys to this business model for us? What makes it work? And what do outsiders typically not understand about your industry?
The three-tier system is what makes alcohol so damn hard. You have:
- Supplier (the brand)
- Wholesaler (who legally buys from suppliers and sells to retailers)
- Retailer (who sells to consumers)
Most brands in any other industry can just ship directly to retailers when their small and are given a shot. That’s illegal in alcohol. If Whole Foods wants to take us national, we can’t just send them cases directly.
If you want to go nationwide with beer wholesalers, the preferred distributor for canned beverages, you need hundreds of them to cover the country. At our peak, we had 160 distributors—each one with different requirements, different rules and state regulations, different headaches.
It’s one of the least startup-friendly industries in all of CPG. And people don’t realize that even the biggest alcohol brands aren’t in every store. Only a dozen or so beer SKUs are in every Walmart.
Its also a dog-eat-dog, zero sum game when it comes to getting your brand on the shelf and into the coolers. There’s a finite amount of space, so for your brand to go in, a competitor has to come out.
To some extent, we were a victim of our own success—we expanded too fast and didn’t have the resources to support our distribution network. Lesson learned.
What platform/tools are absolutely crucial for your business?
For wholesale and retail sales, we have to use VIP, which tracks wholesale-to-retail transaction, and to track consumer behavior, there are a number of companies tracking scan data. Unfortunately, the data tools in this industry are expensive and cumbersome to manage and digest, and startups have to piece everything together.
For our DTC business, we’ve built a full tech stack:
- Klaviyo for email marketing
- Attentive for SMS marketing
- Rebuy for subscriptions
- SmartCommerce to help consumers find where they can buy our product
- Shopify – Our DTC storefront.
- And so on!
It’s unusual for an alcohol brand to have a full tech stack, but we do.
What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?
For industry-specific insights, I recommend:
- Jim Koch’s book (Boston Beer)
- Sam Calagione’s book (Dogfish Head)
- Brewbound and Beer Business Daily for news
For sales and business strategy:
- The Challenger Sale – essential for anyone remotely involved in sales
And for overall business philosophy:
- Crush It! by Gary Vee – he basically predicted influencer marketing
- And the book he wrote after called Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook
Where do you see untapped opportunity in the market? What business do you wish someone else would build that would make your job easier?
The alcohol industry is 10-20 years behind. Consumers haven’t always been able to get what they want, when they want it since the 3 tier system is so challenging to navigate—but that’s changing.
There’s a huge opportunity in transparency. Most canned teas and cocktails don’t list their ingredients and nutrition facts because the their not required to, allowing them to hide all the corners they’re curring. That creates an open lane for startups focused on higher quality ingredients and better-for-you products.
We just launched Flowerboy, a THC-infused "social soda". It has a full stack of functional ingredients that give you a great alcohol-like buzz without making you tired.
Similar to Poppi and Olipop, we want you to be able to enjoy nostalgic soda flavors like grape orange and cola without the guilt. So we sweetened it with blue agave, and total sugar is 5g or less.
NA beverages are another huge space.
And honestly? Data & analytics in CPG is a nightmare. Someone needs to build a better version that integrates shipments, depletions, and scans.
What are some strong opinions you have about leadership, and how do you actually put those into practice in your company?
You have to give people the reins and let them figure it out.
We’re a startup—there’s no training manual. If you’re waiting for someone to tell you what to do, you won’t last.
That’s why, when I interview people, I ask:
- Tell me about a time you took initiative.
- Give me an example of how you’re proactive.
I want people who act like owners, even if they’re not founders. At Babson, we called this "intrapreneurship"—thinking and acting like an entrepreneur within a bigger company. That’s the mindset I look for.
I know I’ve said it before but if there’s one thing I’ve learned—content is king.
We’ve done $10M+ in DTC sales with $0 spent on marketing. If you can figure out a way to acquire customers without paying for them, you win.
Where can we go to learn more?
Personally, I find being the CEO of a startup to be downright exhilarating. But, as I'm sure you well know, it can also be a bit lonely and stressful at times, too.
Because, let's be honest, if you're the kind of person with the guts to actually launch and run a startup, then you can bet everyone will always be asking you a thousand questions, expecting you to have all the right answers -- all the time.
And that's okay! Navigating this kind of pressure is the job.
But what about all the difficult questions that you have as you reach each new level of growth and success? For tax questions, you have an accountant. For legal, your attorney. And for tech. your dev team.
This is where Hampton comes in.
Hampton's a private and highly vetted network for high-growth founders and CEOs.
