This entrepreneur with no beverage experience just got his new drink on Whole Foods shelves. Here's
- Hibiscus water brand Ruby launched this year. It sells DTC as well as at Whole Foods stores.
- But founder Noah Wunsch had no CPG experience before founding the brand.
- Wunsch told Insider how he's using lessons from the art and sneaker world to build a beverage brand.
Noah Wunsch spent years in the art world working for auction house Sotheby's. But toward the end of 2019, he decided to jump into an area he knew nothing about: beverages.
The drink he chose to run with was hibiscus water, something he had made for himself for years as an alternative to sugary beverages and a drink that he thought was underrepresented on supermarket shelves. "I sat down with anyone who would speak with me to tell me how to start a beverage company," he said of his early efforts to break into the industry.
After signing a contract with John Schiaroli, a food and beverage consultant, and gleaning some industry knowledge from other professionals, he started working last March on what would become Ruby hibiscus water — right as the pandemic shut down society.
"When I signed my contract with John, it was March 7, 2020," Wunsch said. "I remember calling John... and he said, 'People are still gonna need to eat, and they're still gonna need to drink.'"
"I took that to heart," he added. "Literally, all of this we built during the pandemic."
Last week, Ruby got on the shelf at Whole Foods Market stores in the Northeastern US. Ruby also sells at some independent grocers as well as through a direct-to-consumer operation. Even today, Ruby is still a small operation: Wunsch himself spoke to Insider as he was driving between order deliveries in New York City.
Learning the ins and outs of the food and beverage world took time. Wunsch said he had to learn the basics of manufacturing, and he spent the early part of lockdown experimenting to find the best variety of hibiscus flower to use for the mass rollout of Ruby.
But there were a few things he was able to apply to the nascent brand from his previous life. At Sotheby's, Wunsch had been senior vice president and global head of e-commerce. In that role, he had overseen auctions including a sale of rare sneakers organized with Stadium Goods in 2019, which put the established auction house before a whole new group of buyers than its traditional painting-and-furniture-focused clients.
Lessons from streetwear, sneaker, and art culture are evident in Wunsch's marketing for Ruby. In addition to the hibiscus water itself, Wunsch created a series of trading cards based on characters he created around the brand — all of whom live in the "Rubyverse" — that ship with the beverage. That's a choice Wunsch is making as the pandemic has brought new interest in many collectibles, including trading and sports cards.
The cards, along with most other marketing materials for Ruby, are drawn in a style Wunsch said is inspired by artist Ken Price, giving them a vintage 1960s look.
Ruby also operates a store on Depop, a platform most often used to buy and sell used apparel, featuring items from the imaginary Rubyverse as well as vintage furniture, books, and other items.
"You need to make sure you're communicating with your audience in their language," he said. "There are all these little Easter eggs that we love building out that we want to go deeper on."
The brand also got a boost when it was featured in an episode of HBO's Euphoria, though Wunsch said he isn't sure how the beverage ended up on the show. "We were shipping a number of cases out to the west coast for sampling, and were kind of shocked, and hugely grateful when we saw it on that episode!"
Ruby is currently looking to raise its first funding round from investors, Wunsch said.
Funding for startups, including many food startups, kept coming during the pandemic, with the total amount invested hitting records. Generally, though, investors favored making fewer but higher-value bets, according to Reuters.
Wunsch said that he pitches Ruby to retailers as "coconut water without the sugar." Unlike most coconut waters, Ruby's mainstay beverage derives its only sweetness from the hibiscus flower. That makes it a healthier version of coconut water, Wunsch said, since it has many of the same health benefits that coconut water does.
He even drew inspiration from Zico founder Mark Rampolla's book, "High-Hanging Fruit," which mentions hibiscus as one of the early ingredients that Rampolla experimented with.
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