Building a Sparkling Water Brand One Can at a Time
Meet Juliana Casale — a tech marketer turned self-funded CPG Founder
Hey, it's Alex!
This week, we're chatting with Juliana Casale — a tech marketer turned sparkling water mogul who created Balloon, a premium sparkling water brand with real ingredients and real sugar (just a touch!).
From driving her favorite American brands across the border to building a passionate community on LinkedIn, Juliana opens up about navigating manufacturing hurdles, the reality of early-stage CPG economics, and finding joy in the journey despite having "no business being a CPG founder."
If you've been wondering what it's like to bootstrap a physical product business while paying your mortgage, this one’s for you.
Dive in below!
Balloon Quick Stats:
🥤 Business Model: Premium sparkling water brand (CPG)
💰 Annual Revenue: $15,000
🛍️ Retail Locations: 6 stores
📊 SKUs: 3 flavors (4th & 5th coming soon)
👤 Team Size: 1 (solo founder + freelancers)
⏳ Time In Business: ~1.5 years since pre-orders (Oct 2023)
💸 Funding: Self-funded (bootstrapped)
👩💻 Background: Tech marketing
The tech marketer who became a beverage founder...
I have no business being a CPG founder – I've been a tech marketer my entire career. It's all been digital products, in the cloud, so to speak...
I've done all sorts of marketing for B2B SaaS – blog posts, ebooks, landing pages, website copy – just very digital.
It's not like I decided one day to be a CPG founder, it's just all these moments in my life that finally added up, but the first reason I did this is I've been a sparkling water fan for a very long time. I'm one of those nerds who sees a new brand, sees a new flavor, has to have it.
I'm part of a Facebook group of thousands of fizzy drinks fans where we all compare notes. "Oh my gosh, LaCroix just came out with this Sunflower flavor" or "Polar just dropped a new seasonal line."
There's this natural affinity people have – you either are one of those people, or you know someone who is. When they love it, they really love it.
I'm not doing this because I think it's a hot category with a giant total addressable market that's on the up and up. I wanted to do it because I love it, and I feel if you're not passionate about the category you're in, it's going to be really hard to stay motivated.
If it was just dollars being dangled in my face, maybe it'd be a different story.
But I'm doing this because I love it, and I hope that comes across when I talk about it.
Second, I moved to Canada from the U.S.
All of a sudden all the brands I was used to – Hal's New York, Polar, Nixie, Waterloo, Target brand, Trader Joe's brand – I couldn't find any of it.
It felt like I'd moved to a seltzer wasteland.
I'd go home to Boston, go to a bunch of grocery stores, and then have to lug a 60-pound suitcase on the subway. That's the level of commitment I had.
Third, I was marketing at two different companies where the target audience was e-commerce founders. In both cases, my job was to network and be in the community of founders to understand their pain points.
My LinkedIn feed got invaded by these founders, and I just got to hear their stories – it was super inspiring.
One thing that stood out was a lot of them didn't have CPG backgrounds or MBAs. They just had an idea, were passionate about it, followed up on it, made it happen, were super persistent, and just kept pushing until they reached success.
In the back of my head, a seed of thought formed: "Oh, this is possible for people who aren't 'qualified' to do it."
The last kicker was going through my fourth tech layoff…
One of the last projects I worked on before being let go was creating a fake Shopify brand to see how our app integrated with Shopify. I picked a sparkling water brand and named it Balloon.
Then suddenly I had free time, severance, and a fake Shopify store.
I thought, "I could try to jump into my next tech job, or I could take a minute and try to build this and see if I can actually make it happen."
I was just tired of being everybody else's employee. So I started doing some freelance marketing to keep income coming in. Then I started building the brand – it was an idea in a notebook, then a spreadsheet, then me talking to other founders asking pretty dumb questions...
Then it was doing a pre-order campaign with friends and family, lining up the designer for the cans, finding a co-manufacturer, figuring out how to fulfill orders from a Shopify store.
Then launching in Canada, then the US, and now retail stores.
I kept saying, "How far can I take this?" And the answer was always, "To this next step."
I never set out to be a CPG founder – I never thought it was a path I would take. I just love the product and love people's reactions when they try it. It validates that maybe I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing.
I have no idea what I'm doing. But that's kind of the fun part too – just figuring it out.
It's crazy to me that I spent a year getting it made into a can, and now I have to spend maybe the rest of my life trying to sell it.
Finding production partners when you're still tiny...
Pretty early on I joined Suzie Yorke’s Founders Helping Founders WhatsApp chat. It's an incredible resource – if you search for literally any term in CPG, someone's talked about packaging sources, how to get a UPC code, which grocery store chains are friendly to local business. There's so much in there.
I think I probably asked, "Who does small batch co-manufacturing?"
A lot of it was just asking questions.
There's also the Startup CPG Slack Group, another free resource. You just sign up and there are all these channels where people can ask questions.
One challenge is that so much of the resources for CPG are US-based. But it kind of makes it easier to find Canadian resources because there's so little – it's not like you have a million co-manufacturers to choose from. But in a funny way, the less choice you have, the easier it is to make decisions or try something.
I researched maybe eight co-manufacturers, and ended up working with Lost Craft Brewery in the Junction. I was actually their first contract project – they had never done it before.
It was so manual – I had all the ingredients in the can shipped to their production facility. The head brewer mixed it in the tank, and then he was just feeding cans into the canning machine. He was just feeding cans into the canning machine. It was a very small production, but perfect for me because they were like, "We'll do a thousand cans per SKU."
That was enough inventory for the first six months of my business because I didn't have much demand yet. I could store it in my house – my husband wasn't thrilled, but it was in our basement and garage, and I could fulfill all the orders myself.
It was the perfect fit for what I needed.
The people in my fizzy drinks Facebook group were my first customer surveys about what flavors they wanted, and my friends and family were the first to find out I was doing this.
Every month I'd give them an update – they were my stakeholders.
It was a lot of research, a lot of spreadsheets, a lot of talking to someone who would refer me to someone else who could answer any question.
And I think what's great about not having an ego is that's basically my whole vibe – I'm not afraid to look stupid, ask questions, or approach people who are way above my success level.
The CPG community is amazing — everyone's so willing to help each other because it's so hard, and no one's going to succeed without assistance.
It's literally a matter of being comfortable feeling uncomfortable, and asking someone who's "accomplished" for their help.
Balancing freelance work with building a brand...
I'm in a weird middle ground where half my time is freelance marketing for other companies. I do consulting for content marketing at a Shopify agency and have a portfolio of e-commerce brands that I do ad and email copy for, so I have a steady trickle of income that I can use toward Balloon.
I don't really track every dollar in/dollar out — it's more like, "I'm going to spend $4,000 to get the cans made, then $5,000 to rebrand because I'm panicking that it looks like Bubly, then $3,000 at this trade show..."
Then I'll spend whatever on warehousing and logistics once I make a bigger batch.
I see how much money I have in the bank account and know how much I can spend. Once I hit a steady situation with a co-manufacturer, ingredients costs, can costs, and retail sales, I'll have more formal forecasting, but it's been experimental so far.
It's kind of like, "Let's just try this, go to the next stage, go to the next stage."
My husband has a lot of data analysis in his background, which has been a godsend.
He's a cancer research scientist, so his whole life is spreadsheets and numbers.
He did force me to sit down and plug in all my expenses so he could say, "Your cost per can is this…" That's been invaluable for figuring out how much to sell to retail stores.
If I didn't know the cost of goods, it would be almost impossible to figure out because I'm not a data person.
I know my costs for flavor essences, cans, production with the co-manufacturer... Then there's the one-off cost of batches, the monthly subscription fee for Shopify and other apps, and variable shipping costs.
Someone makes an order from the US, that's one cost…
Someone orders it to Ottawa, that's different…
There are all these costs that are completely variable – some recurring, some one-off. I don't know how anyone arrives at a real number because there are so many factors.
And the exchange rate fluctuates daily, so cost of goods versus profits can widely vary too.
Thank God I have a husband who says, "Just give me everything you've ever paid for and I'll give you a number." *laughs*
The marketing expert who can't do all the marketing...
As a marketer, I know what I'm supposed to be doing, but I also know what I have time for.
Because I'm doing this all by myself, it hurts because I'm like, "I should be building abandoned checkout email flows in Klaviyo…I should be posting to TikTok."
I have this list in my head that's a mile long of best practices, but I don't have the time to follow through on them, so I have the bare minimum in a lot of categories.
Even just switching to LinkedIn as my primary organic marketing channel meant I've abandoned the email rapport I had built with my audience before.
I know what I'm supposed to be doing, but I don't really have the time to do it myself.
I've gotten to the point now where I know I need to get help. I've been very fiercely a solo founder, but you can only get by so long doing everything. I just onboarded a social media person, because that's one giant, glaring hole that has been hurting me the most.
I used to post pretty regularly on Instagram, then it was dead silent for over a month…
Recognizing I'm not the person to be the social media manager, I found someone who very kindly offered to help me.
She gave me this amazing pitch deck, saying "I really want to work for your brand. Here's what I would do." I was like, "Yes, start tomorrow. Here are the passwords. Go nuts."
She's Gen Z, so I'm like, "You're native to the channel. I have no idea what I'm doing – I'm 41 – so please go at it."
I just need help on all the logistics and supply too – that's just not my area, and it's so complicated. I know I'm doing it wrong and am paying way too much for shipping anywhere.
I have flat rates on my Shopify store, and every time a large order comes in, I'm taking a hit.
I'm working with an incredible ops consultant named Steve Dontigny who's helped scale carbonated beverages in Canada. His company The Forge helps CPG brands get supply costs down, find the right co-manufacturer, negotiate contracts and connect with distributors. He's been a total game changer for me by handling a ton of the infrastructure stuff that I just don't have the time or knowledge to tackle.
I'm sure I could figure out whatever it is, but it's going to take so much longer, so the shortcut is working with experts.
What's been great is because I've been so upfront with my story and confessional in all my LinkedIn posts, people want to help in a way that's almost too good to be true.
People are reaching out saying, "How can I support?" And I'm like, "What's the catch here?"
Navigating e-commerce vs. retail...
I think the 2010s were the heyday of strictly direct-to-consumer brands – "I'm going to build a brand online, it's going to be online only." But the more I have sales online, the more I realize the cost for shipping heavy cans of sparkling water is destroying me.
Maybe a 3PL situation would make sense financially, but right now it doesn't – I haven't explored that avenue. E-commerce served a great purpose for getting prototypes out there so people could give feedback. It's been really good for having a digital business card. But it's a nut I haven't cracked in terms of profitability.
If I could get shipping costs down, it would probably be worth continuing to invest. But when you look at the costs, D2C is already too expensive if it's over $2 a can.
But at retail, people don't bat an eyelash if they're at a cafe or bakeshop spending $3.50-$4 on a can, because they're already in a high-end situation where a mocha is $7.
It positions the product in a way where people are less price sensitive.
I am pretty staunchly against going with grocery store conglomerates, at least for a long time.
You hear about so much complexity with brokers and distributors, and then there's all these fees and free fill and chargebacks.
I can see why people do it – obviously, the more production and inventory there's demand for, the cost per unit goes down and you're more profitable. But there's so much more you have to deal with at that level of production. I'm very hesitant, and I don't have investors or anyone breathing down my neck to scale fast.
There's no reason to scale fast aside from ego.
I think the flip side is I can take my time and be very thoughtful about where I'm showing up. I don't see a reason why not to focus on coffee shops, health food stores, yoga studios, or cold plunge places – where people spend a bunch of money and are less price sensitive.
I feel like once I'm in a giant retail situation like Sobeys or Loblaws, then I'm up against the $0.40 a can conglomerates like Bubly and Perrier, and it's harder to justify the cost. I'm just trying to be super mindful about what makes sense.
The surprising economics of sparkling water...
I think no consumer understands this. I used to be the consumer who was like, "How can you charge $3.50 for a can of water with a little bit of ingredients in it? That's insane!"
But because I've been so small batch, I'm paying a lot per can to make it – I think my cost of goods is like $1.35.
That's because I worked with someone who was literally hand-feeding cans into a machine.
The cost of labor is very high because my minimum order quantity for the cans to be printed and the ingredients to be shipped was very low. Once you reach a certain scale of production and ingredients, you get price breaks.
So if it's $1.35 for me to produce a can, then you look at the shipping costs for direct-to-consumer, I have to drive down the cost as much as possible for the product because the shipping is so expensive.
But I also have to make it worth my while to sell it.
If I'm looking at $1.35 per can, I'm trying to get it to $2 a can or less for ordering online.
With retail, if I sell it to them for $2, then they add a dollar to cover their overhead and it's $3…
It gets really high up there pretty fast.
It’s not up to me what retailers mark it up to – I provide the suggested retail price, but they can charge whatever they need or want to.
What's good though is there's a lot of opportunity to cut my costs. I've been paying so much per can, but as soon as I scale up, I'm going to save probably 25-50 cents pretty easily. I can either translate that cost to the consumer and drive down my costs, or have the extra buffer.
That's just the really easy math.
If I had a broker and a distributor, I've heard the broker wants like 5%, the distributor wants 40%.
I'm coming from a pretty pure place where I'm literally the one dropping off cases at stores, but as I scale up, there will be middlemen and more middlemen, and it's going to get insane.
At that point, I don't know how anyone makes money, because it's like you scale and then that scale helps drive your costs down. But at the same time, the scale necessitates having the broker, the distributor, warehouse, and fulfillment team.
Building a brand with a unique approach...
When I got into the R&D process, I thought, "I have to compete with the AHAs, the Perriers, the Bublys – zero calories, zero sugar." Then my husband was with me at the tastings and said,
"Devil's advocate: why don't we put real sugar in this? Like, a few grams?"
Then it tasted really great.
I was like, "Wait a minute. There's almost nothing in between the zero calories, zero sugar and the sodas." There's a few with some juice, or maple sweetener, but there's really not much in the middle.
Giving people something that tastes more like a soda but isn't a soda, and isn't functional (it's not trying to do anything with your gut or your head) – there's nothing in it aside from clean ingredients.
Just something that tastes good.
This is great for social events, for pregnant women who don't have to Google the ingredients, for kids because it's got low sugar (not as much as a juice box).
I want to see it at music festivals, in vending machines replacing soda as a hydration option that tastes good, at Porter Airlines, at concerts, at parties where people are celebrating.
It's called Balloon for a reason – I want it to be part of happy occasions.
I think there's a lot of room for building excitement and vibrancy around that. It could be a very good social drink.
My husband's a scientist, and he went on a rant: "People literally need sugar to live. Sugar is not bad – having a lot of sugar is bad."
I was like, "Yeah, why are people tying themselves into knots to avoid sugar?"
And some studies show whatever sweetener is in Diet Coke is a neurotoxin. I get tricked into drinking these fake sweetener drinks – I don't look at the label and it says zero sugar.
And then I drink it and I'm like, "What is this?"
A different kind of success measure...
I didn't set out to be a successful business.
I didn't pick this category because I think there's a giant opportunity for the next billion-dollar acquisition.
I'm doing this because I want to learn, I think it's fun, I love the category, and I just want to see how far I can take it.
My goal for this year is simply "get into retail."
It's not about X amount of cans or X amount of dollars in orders. I SHOULD do that as a business owner, but it's literally just "how many retail stores can I get into before I maybe qualify for a distributor that can then get me into something like Sobey's Local program?"
I think as I become bigger, have more demand, and need to button myself up – maybe make an informal board of advisors – I'll get to the stage where I have actual financial goals or milestones. But because I'm so early on and I've only been doing this for a year and some change, I'm just asking, "What's the next natural step the company should take?"
On being a solo founder...
Maybe having a co-founder would have been better…
I feel like so many companies that do well have co-founders. You've got twice the amount of brainpower, accountability, and probably a complementary skill set. It looks more confidence-inspiring to have two people.
I haven't tried to look for one. It's kind of just been my baby, and I've been very protective about that. It's been easier to make decisions when it's just me, whether they're the right decisions or not.
But maybe I wouldn't have gone through the whole motivation struggle in December, January, and February if I had someone else keeping things going.
Finding motivation without external pressure...
Because I'm doing this for fun and learning, I don't have that motivating "I need to get this to this financial standpoint." And being a founder is not fun a lot of the time – at least 50% is contracts, co-manufacturers, suppliers, the back end, keeping track of financials.
What demotivated me over the winter was a little seasonal depression…
Sales were going down because it wasn't sparkling water season anymore.
I took a break for the holidays, and then lost a lot of that energy I had put into it. That's really tough to figure out because I don't want to say I should never take a break – that's not healthy.
But taking a break had a big negative impact on whatever routine I had established.
There's a lack of accountability in being a solo founder…
If I don't do it, no one's going to do it.
The next step being a question mark – I knew I needed to produce another batch, but there was no real force to do that. Now that I've got big orders coming in, there is that pressure to figure things out quickly.
Maybe it was the seasonality of the business that tripped me up, or the fact that the things I needed to do to take the next step weren't the fun things.
One thing that ignited me again was the thought of a rebrand, because I love the creative aspects of the business. As a marketer, I love translating my vision for the product into what it looks like, telling the story in a few lines of copy on a can, aligning the tagline with the branding.
In tiny letters, it says "flavor that pops" on every can.
Everyone asks, "How is this different than Bubly, AHA, Perrier, LaCroix?"
And that's not really answered on the can or website…
People also ask, "Why is it called Balloon?"
There are so many dots I haven't connected yet, and that's really exciting from a storytelling perspective.
I'm working with a super talented graphic designer on a rebrand, and that's really exciting and motivating. Finding a co-manufacturer so I can get into retail more significantly is exciting too.
Attending events where I talk to other founders gets me excited and inspired.
Having a creative project makes me willing to do the grunt work because it'll support the rebrand and launch.
The more people involved who ask "Did you do this thing?", the more milestones I want to hit, the more people excited about trying the product and giving great feedback – that's all the stuff that makes me think, "Okay, I'm going to keep going."
From tech layoffs to entrepreneurship...
I have really poor separation between my personal self-worth and my job. I've worked in startups where you get so invested in the company, product, customers, and mission. You drink the Kool-Aid and pour yourself into it
What's great is you're energized every day, very passionate, and willing to do whatever needs to be done to get to the next stage.
Then one day you're on a call with your boss that popped up on your calendar out of nowhere, and they're like, "We're eliminating your role. Here's your severance package."
You go from caring so much and connecting with the customer base and coworkers to being a LinkedIn referral.
"We're on to the next stage of the company, and you're on the sidelines watching us do it."
Going through that so many times is like – I don't own anything. I have my portfolio of content written for these companies, but at the end of the day, I'm back to the drawing board.
It taught me that you only own what you build for yourself, whether that's a business, your family, your network, friends, or colleagues. That's all you have.
Why keep pouring myself into building someone else's dream if I'm expendable?
I need to build for myself because I cannot pour myself into another situation where I'm a line item they can just chop.
Especially in marketing – can't you just be a ChatGPT prompt?
Tech is a total hot mess right now – the job market is crazy.
And I've been de-risking the entrepreneurial journey by leaning on my freelance marketing work. I have the best of both worlds – I can take on projects as needed to keep finances coming in, but I can build my dream until it becomes justified to do it full time. I'm still not taking that full leap that a lot of entrepreneurs do, and I've probably reached the point where I need to.
But I still have my toe in the water, having some income coming in because of mortgages, daycare, all that.
No one talks about the "not raising money" thing.
I was at a panel a few weeks ago, and one founder of a beauty brand said, "No one talks about freelancing while you're doing this, but it certainly helped me get off the ground. There's no way I could bootstrap if I didn't have a steady stream coming in on the side."
The power of building in public...
The whole reason I started posting consistently on LinkedIn is I was at an e-commerce panel last May where Jake Karls from Mid-Day Squares and Mike Fata were speaking about sharing authentic content online.
Jake said, "If you're a founder, you need to be telling your story on LinkedIn. I know this sounds weird, just go do it."
With my lack of accountability, I wondered if I'd actually post consistently and what I'd even say.
A few of us at the event – Andrea Grand from Barbet, Steve Ballantyne from Station Cold Brew, Stephanie Nieto from Mojo, and me – started a LinkedIn DM chat. "We're each gonna post X times per week, and if we don't, we yell at each other. If we do, everyone can comment and like."
I think I was the only one who ended up consistently posting.
Some people were okay for a few weeks then dropped off, and one didn't post at all.
But I started posting twice a week, then dropped off over the winter during my pit of despair.
For the most part, for almost a year now, I've been doing it.
A post I did about branding two weeks ago got over 45,000 impressions and over 150 comments.
My DMs were totally tanked.
Now every time I post, it's like 3,000-5,000 views. I've gotten over 11,000 followers.
People might ask, "What are your sales like? Is it driving sales?" That's not the point – I'm not trying to sell.
I just want to make people feel better about what they're going through as a founder, or on the consumer side, help them understand what it's like and why supporting local is so important.
It's okay to struggle and not know what you're doing.
LinkedIn is my biggest source of organic traffic to my site, but it's not converting to sales most of the time. The side effect is people want to be consultants to help me, or interview me for podcasts, or retailers reach out.
But it makes me feel less alone as a solo founder and builds a community naturally for the brand.
So many people say, "The internet sucks – it's ego-driven, there are trolls."
But I've only seen support – people who want me to succeed and are willing to tag others to help.
There's no way I'd be in a worse position building organic awareness over 12 months, even if I couldn't attribute a single sale. Revenue versus profit – every time I read a success story about someone making millions, I wonder, "Are they in the red? Are they being floated by VC?"
That's my cynical side, but it protects me from the comparison game of "Everyone's crushing it but me," which probably isn't even true.
Even if it is…good for them, but I have to stay in my lane.
If it flops – I'm 40 and just reinventing myself now. I'm a different person in a different position than a few years ago.
Who knows where this will go, but it could be really awesome.
It's weird because it's business, and I have to pitch it to VCs or retail chains.
I need financials, value propositions, and a target audience.
You can build a community and customer base on vibes, but you also need an analytical, data-driven approach. It's interesting to play both sides, and I'm not naturally the pitch person – I'm the vibe person.
But people buy the vibes. I think it could be profitable because people really love it and believe in it and it tastes good.
Everyone's forced to have an innovative angle to their product, but why can't it just taste good?
Why can't that be enough?
That’s it for this issue!
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