From online growth to IPO and beyond: How Lunar supports Vita Coco’s continued growth.
Project overview:
When we first met the Vita Coco team a couple years ago, they were already profitable and had a strong foothold in third-party retail storefronts. But their rise to popularity hadn’t gone unnoticed, and Big Soda players were launching competitive products.
Vita Coco knew they needed to expand their reach via new channels to retain strong market share and prepare for their upcoming IPO. They had ambitious goals for a full digital and direct-to-consumer strategy and needed a strategic partner to help get them there.
Lunar and No Sleep bring Vita Coco’s brand to life online
To be successful in every aspect of their new digital marketing strategy, Vita Coco needed a comprehensive library of creative assets to build a pipeline of dynamic, engaging content. Initial photo shoots focused on in-studio shots for the website and for an initial paid social campaign abd website build. Then, we moved out of the studio — dreaming up visually compelling use cases to help customers make emotional connections between their own lives and Vita Coco’s variety of offerings.
Meanwhile, LSG’s No Sleep Studio team provided Vita Coco with creative direction, optimization, design, and development on their Shopify Plus site to grow the DTC audience. The entire website was re-built with a fresh DTC approach in mind. Vita Coco was already a force in-store, which meant that DTC adoption would be dependent upon frictionless e-comm UI and incentivizing subscriptions. We created a website that would accomplish all of Vita Coco’s brand goals while providing insight into core audience buying habits.
While our No Sleep team was bringing that first set of creative to life online, we moved into creating the video assets we knew the Vita Coco team would need for the best performance on paid social channels.
We planned shoots focusing on specific promos, while shooting evergreen content in tandem. This included a handful of shoots where photo and video work would happen at the same time, maximizing pre-production hours to work within specific budgets outlined for the year.
“We tapped Lunar Solar Group to help us launch our first ecommerce website and then build our ecommerce program,” said Brittany Harshbarger, Vita Coco’s Director of Growth Marketing. “Since then we haven’t looked back and we’ve been fortunate to count Lunar Solar as a partner.”
The right combination of ad strategy & creative generates online traction.
“Working with Lunar to create quality content for ads, while simultaneously managing paid ads, is a growth marketer’s dream. Forget the painful process of fighting for creative that is optimized for performance media.”
Continued partnership
By the time of their IPO, Vita Coco was the undisputed market leader in the coconut water space, with a 50% market share. (That’s bigger than the 10 next biggest brands combined!) Along the way Vita Coco has managed to beat back the advances of behemoth would-be competitors like Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, both of which tried to crack the coconut water market to much less success.
“…(W)hen Coke and Pepsi came into the category that I was trying to build, it drove me to find new, creative, innovative ways to outmaneuver them”.
Co-CEO Mike Kirban told Food Dive in a 2021 interview. One of those maneuvers? Reassessing the identity of the brand’s core customers.
“Every time we talk to the [Lunar] team there is something new for us to sink our teeth into — unique platform strategies, new tech, and even product ideas”.
— Harshbarger (Vita Coco)
With the support of Lunar Solar Group, Vita Coco expanded their target audience beyond the typical “health and wellness” demographic with new campaigns that speak more directly to a younger customer — one more inclined to turn to coconut water as a hangover cure or an alcohol mixer.
Today, Vita Coco is a household name, and Lunar is proud to be a piece of their growth story.
