How a Tiny Soda Brand Became a $2 Billion Pepsi Acquisition 🤯 #ecommerce #poppi

That's what PepsiCo paid on a soda brand that started at a farmer's market in Dallas. But Poppy didn't win in retail first. They won online. They proved them through e-commerce, socials, and email before going big in stores. Today I'm breaking down the four e-commerce strategies that helped them turn a small drink into a 2 billion brand. If you run an e-commerce store, this will change how you think about growth. Let's jump in. Okay, so let's go back to 2016. Ellison Ellsworth is struggling. She has chronic gut issues, doctors can't help, and nothing is working. Until she tries apple cider vinegar. This one actually helps, but it tastes disgusting. So she starts mixing apple cider vinegar with fruit juice and prebiotics. At the end, she manages to create something that actually tastes good. So Ellison and her husband Stefan start selling this at the Dallas farmer's market as mother beverage. Victorian label, glass bottles, and overall very medicinal looking. First year, they make $20,000, which means they're barely making even. In 2018, they get on Shark Tank. Rohan Oza, the guy who built vitamin water into a billion dollar brand, invests $400,000, but he tells them rebrand. And prove to me that it works online before you go to retail. So they rebrand mother beverage at the time to what we know them as today, poppy. Bright colors, modern design, aluminum cans. And in 2019, they start selling online and testing and validating their product. This is exactly where the e-commerce playbook starts. They use online sales to validate product market fit. Most brands do this backwards. They spend months getting into retail and hope customers buy. Poppy did the exact opposite of this. They use online sales as almost like a testing lab. Now let's take a look at what they tested. They tested flavors. Which one sold out fastest? They tested messaging, prebiotic soda, or gut healthy refreshment. Which one resonates more? They also tested pricing. Single cans or 12-pack subscriptions. And lastly, target audience. Who were their customers? Who were actually buying their products? And here's what they learned. Strawberry lemon outsold everything and became their number one. Prebiotic soda resonated more than ACV beverage. 12-pack sold three times better than single cans. Women aged 25 to 40 were 70% of their customers. And they had repeat purchase rate of 35%, meaning customers would buy again. This data is gold. Because now they know exactly what to make, who to target, and how to price it. And most importantly, they were also building proof for their long-term goals. Real customers, real reviews, and real demand. For those of you who are in the beverage space, or any CPG industry really, and you're eventually planning to scale to retail, this is a playbook. Use your online store as a testing ground first. Because when you eventually walk into that buyer's meeting, you're not walking in hoping that they would take a chance on you. You're actually walking in with data, which is a real proof that your product sells. And that's what gets you the deal. Now going back to Poppy, let's check their numbers. In 2029, they were generating around 100k per month by the end of the year. Not bad, but still pretty small. By 2020, that number jumped on an average of 300k per month. So yeah, at this point, things were definitely picking up. By 2021, they were already hitting around 500k per month. So yeah, growth was happening super fast. But now that we know, it was just the beginning. And then January 2021 arise. And suddenly the game flips and the numbers start to skyrocket like never before. For them, one TikTok changed everything. January 28, 2021, Allison picks up her phone. No script, no fancy lighting. She opens TikTok and just starts to talk. She literally tells her story. Her gut issues, how much pain she had went through, how she created Poppy in her kitchen, how she went on Shark Tank, how she's building the business. It's basically raw and real. She posts a video and then she goes to bed. The next morning, her phone is on fire. 7,000 views in 24 hours. 50,000 likes. 15,000 new Instagram followers overnight. Here's actually what matters from an e-commerce perspective. Sales jumped 200% in one day. $180,000 in revenue in 48 hours just from that one video. So they literally cannot keep up. They run out of inventory. They're working until 2 a.m packing orders. Now here's the thing with viral content. Most people want it, but most people are not really ready for it. Overall, if you look at how they handled the situation, Poppy was. Their website could handle the traffic. Their fulfillment was ready to scale. And this is critical because authentic founder stories beat polished ads every single time. Psychologically speaking, people don't really connect with commercials. They connect with real people solving real problems. That's really what converts. And after this viral video, she of course didn't stop posting. More authentic stories, behind the scenes, customer reaction, product creation, flavor testing, and many more other things. So by the end of 2021, they had more than 1 million TikTok followers. More than 500,000 Instagram followers. Social media was driving 25% of their entire website traffic. And $15 million in annual revenue. That's the power of story driven marketing. Another thing that they mastered was email marketing. Build an email list that prints money. By 2022, email was generating 30% of Poppy's total revenue. That's over $60 million from email. But here's a funny thing. Most of these emails weren't even selling anything. They were more about educating, building relationships, and overall community. Now let me show you their three core flows. First one is their welcome series. Email 1 is Allison's personal welcome email with 15% off. Email 2 is education on prebiotics and why Poppy is different. Email 3 is a flavor quiz to help them choose the best flavor. Email 4 is recipe ideas, mocktails, and overall how to use Poppy beyond just drinking it. And last but not least, email 5 is last chance urgency. Something like your discount expires tonight. Results? 35% of new subscribers make a purchase within 10 days. And look, if you're not doing this, you're leaving money on the table. A welcome series is the highest conversion email you'll ever send. Email 1 should be a founder story plus an offer. Email 2 to 4 is all about education and engagement, not sales. And email 5 is where you create that urgency feeling. Now let's take a look at their email strategy when it comes to abandoned carts. So they use three type of emails to recover lost sales. Email 1 is at the first hour, simple cart reminder, no discount. Email 2 at 24 hours, sharing social proof and reviews. And finally, email 3 at 48 hours and now you offer a 10% discount. Their cart recovery rate, 28%. The industry average is 8 to 10%. So the key here is not to give the discount right away. Make them wait for it a bit. That 48-hour window is where the discount has the most impact. So another thing that they do great is post-purchase emails. So let's take a look. Let's say that a customer ordered. The first thing they get is an order confirmation. Then a shipping notification. Let's say that they have the product now. They receive an email about delivery check-in and review requests. On day 7, recipe ideas and cross-sell. And on day 30, so by the end of a month, subscribe and save 20% off email. This flow turns 35% of their first-time buyers into repeat customers within 60 days. So their email machine goes as follows. Welcome series, 35% conversion. Cart abandonment, 28% recovery. Post-purchase, 35% repeat customers. And their total email revenue, 30% of business, over 60 million. And surprisingly, most of this runs on autopilot. Another thing that Poppy is super amazing at is influencer seeding. Use influencer seeding for organic reach. Here's the playbook. Target micro-influencers with 10 to 100K followers. Focus on niches. Health, wellness, and lifestyle creators. No contracts required. Just send a free product. Let them post organically. Only if they genuinely love the product. And track performance using UTM links or discount codes. By following these strategies, Poppy even got Kylie Jenner posting about their product. And actually, it wasn't a paid deal with Kylie. She just genuinely happened to love the product. So she made a video about it and posted it. And that alone shows the power of seeding. Poppy built a $2 billion brand by using these four e-com strategies. And that's why PepsiCo bought them in March of 2025. So PepsiCo didn't see just a soda company. They saw a brand with proven demand, a loyal fan base, and a growth engine built entirely online. Poppy had already validated their product. Scaled fast-fit social media and email. And created a community of repeat buyers. And that's exactly the type of brand any major company would like to acquire. The same strategies that helped Poppy can also help your e-commerce store grow. And as orders increase, tools like ZipChat can handle your support 24-7. So you can focus on scaling and build your brand. If this breakdown helped, hit subscribe. And let us know in the comments which brand should be analyzed next. Now go build your own success story. We'll see you on the next one.