How Bloom Took On Red Bull

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The defining moments behind generational companies.

Red Bull already had the shelf space. Greg LaVecchia needed a reason for retailers to make room for Bloom.

He couldn't promise the sales volume of the established energy-drink brands. In a July 2026 interview with Inc., he explained his pitch to convenience stores: Bloom could bring in female shoppers they weren't already reaching.

That is a commercial argument. It only works if you actually know who might walk through the door.

Years earlier, Greg had paid to learn how easily attention and purchase come apart.

Greg's work began alongside Mari Llewellyn's fitness journey. On The Kara Goldin Show, Mari recalled sharing a before-and-after photograph in November 2017. Her community wanted the workout plan she'd followed. She sold the plan as a $5 PDF. Resistance bands followed, packed by hand in her father's attic.

Mari's account of those days is practical: she and Greg handled the work themselves, including customer service. Hiring and learning to let go of tasks came later.

Greg describes himself as a marketer. Early on, he used paid ads to bring people to Mari's Instagram rather than straight to a store. Her content gave those visitors a reason to stay. Fitness products gave them something to buy.

Then he bought the wrong kind of attention.

On The 505 Podcast, Greg described an early Instagram campaign that cost roughly $10,000. It brought in followers who couldn't buy the products. He recalled spending the money they had available at the time.

The number on the profile went up. The money was gone.

For a founder, that's a different problem to work on. You have to understand what makes someone interested enough to return before asking how much you can sell them.

Greg and Mari founded Bloom in 2019. She brought her lived experience and understanding of the customer into the brand. He became its CEO.

The relationship was the beginning. Greg's responsibility was helping build a company that could deliver on it.

Around 2020, Greg called his high-school friend Leo Walter, then working in sales on Wall Street. He wanted that outreach and follow-up applied to an in-house influencer operation. They built the program together.

That decision gave the business a way to develop relationships beyond Mari's own following.

It's easy to look at a creator-led company and treat the creator's audience as the explanation for everything. The founder still has to answer the operating questions. Who brings the next customer in? Who maintains those relationships? What happens when the original source of attention isn't enough?

Those questions get harder with each expansion. A customer can love the brand and still fail to find the product, or see it in a store and buy something else.

For Greg, energy drinks would take that challenge into an entirely different aisle.

Nutrabolt CEO Doss Cunningham told Taste Radio why Bloom interested him: it reached younger, female shoppers who were underrepresented in his company's customer base.

During partnership discussions, Cunningham said Bloom surveyed greens customers who also consumed energy drinks or better-for-you sodas. Would they try Bloom in those categories?

The responses, he said, helped build confidence in a beverage business.

These customers already bought drinks. Greg and his partners could test whether the relationship Bloom had earned gave them a reason to choose a different can.

The next business was hiding in what their customers already did.

Interest alone wouldn't put a drink on a shelf.

In January 2024, Nutrabolt announced an approximately 20% ownership stake in Bloom as part of a $90 million financing. The announced uses of the money included product innovation and expanding the company's internal capabilities.

Bloom Sparkling Energy launched at Target that July. Nutrabolt supplied beverage expertise. Bloom brought its brand and customer knowledge.

For Greg, the expansion meant building with partners. Nutrabolt later identified its ongoing relationship with Keurig Dr Pepper as part of Bloom's retail strategy. An ambition that started with a small operation now required capabilities well beyond the founding team.

The next test was the retailer.

Greg's convenience-store pitch gave buyers a commercial reason to care about Bloom's audience: it could bring additional shoppers through their doors.

That is why a surprisingly specific detail belongs in a national beverage story. The same Inc. report described Bloom starting with roadside stops such as Buc-ee's, where clean bathrooms helped make the visit more appealing to its customer.

Knowing her had to influence where he pursued distribution, down to whether she would want to stop there.

On July 24, 2026, Inc. reported Bloom's energy line in more than 60,000 stores, with convenience stores accounting for about half its retail footprint.

The scale is striking. The more useful detail is how specific Greg's argument had become.

Greg also described overestimating an orange energy-drink flavor. Market data looked encouraging, but he said the team put too little effort into the launch. It became a weak performer.

Even with a larger business, he could still misjudge what it would take to earn the purchase.

That's why the mistakes belong in this story. The early campaign bought attention from people who couldn't buy. The later launch assumed too much about people who could. Neither problem could be solved by pointing to the strength of the brand.

Greg's story asks something more demanding of a founder than confidence. You have to keep testing your understanding of the customer while the stakes, the product, and the company change.

Before you enter a new market, establish why your existing customer would follow you there.

That's what I take from Greg's journey. The work runs from attracting the right person to giving a retail buyer a reason to make room for her.

If you're building a product alongside an audience, ask someone who already trusts your work what they buy elsewhere to solve the next part of their problem. Find out what would make them try your version.

You may discover a business worth building. You may discover that the relationship doesn't extend that far. Both answers are more useful than assuming attention will turn into demand.

Greg's route into convenience stores depended on more than getting a can onto a shelf.

He needed to understand the person who might walk through the door. Even the bathroom belonged in that calculation.

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I appreciate you,
AP