The Weekly Bev - 19th Edition

🌞 Leisure Day

I want to use this week’s newsletter to highlight Steve, Alex, and the Leisure team. The reason why will be evident by the end… 😊 

We first met in early 2022, and what started out as a great business relationship has turned into much more…It really has been the fairytale brand relationship in a lot of ways. First, it started organically. Alex reached out to me around day 120 because he loved the vlog (true OG). Then, I got to try the product and I loved it. I gave the product to my friends at Coachella (more on that later) and they loved it. Finally, I was able to invest! (More on that story here). I’ve worked with Steve and Alex so much and spent so much time with them, I can say that I genuinely consider them brothers of mine. Leisure x Jack is forever.

Everything with the Leisure boys has always been extremely authentic. It is quite hard to find that, and I want to hold onto it for many years. I think one way you can tell where a brand’s heart is is by seeing how they react to you interacting with a different brand in the same category. Steve and Alex pass this test with flying colors. Neither of them have ever cared that I feature a different chilled, canned beverage in my vlog because they’re extremely confident in their own product.

Prime day is coming up tomorrow and Wednesday, and the Leisure boys are joining in with some great offers. They even put together a special one for the Weekly Bev crew…If you buy two or more cases on the Leisure site with the “Buy With Prime Button” you get...

• Your very own Leisure hat (Summer '24 Exclusive)

• 30% off all cases

🎸 Coachella 2022

While we’re on the Leisure topic, I’ve been meaning to dive deeper into the pivotal Coachella trip that they fueled back in 2022. It was Day 195 of the vlog. Originally, Mallory and I had tickets for Coachella in April of 2020, but obviously that event never happened 🦠. Luckily, our tickets rolled over and we ended up going with a group of friends that we made from living in LA for those couple of years! We all rented a house together, packed up our stuff and set off for the desert— a quintessential LA experience.

Being almost 200 days into the daily vlog, I was itching to see some growth from it and I couldn’t help but think about the festival as a huge opportunity. There were going to be so many great acts, art installations, dancing, and singing, I had to make something of it. I rented a Canon R5 for the weekend along with two lenses. I knew professional cameras with detachable lenses were frowned upon at the festival, so I did my best Danny Ocean impression and managed to sneak it into the show (cleverly hidden in a t-shirt).

Harry Styles was the first big act, and boy was my intuition right…I captured some of the best footage I could across his hour-long set, turned it into a bunch of clips, and posted them on my TikTok and IG. They must have really resonated with his community because they took off. A couple of them got picked up by some fan accounts and racked up over 50 million views across IG and TikTok 🤯 I should’ve charged $1/view.

My strategy was this: Every night, we’d return to the house around 2-3AM, and I’d go to my car and record the voiceover for the vlog before going to bed. At 6:30AM, I’d wake up, chug some Leisure, and chop everything together. This way, by 9AM the vlog was posted for everyone to see as they woke up. I would have a full recap of the previous day posted, which worked really well for the algorithm. Anyone who was interested in Coachella could be interested in watching my vlog, and I was right about that! My day 1 recap got over 200,000 views on TikTok, which was 100x my typical views per video. I tried to treat the weekend like a professional and take full advantage of it. It reminded me of my days at Auburn shooting for the football team where speed was everything. Sports games and concerts often have fleeting moments, and capturing and posting them quickly is essential. War Eagle btw.

It’s awesome to think Leisure played a pivotal role through all of it. And they hadn’t even had their first production run yet. We were all drinking it out of jugs! It was very “Michael’s secret stuff” vibes.

The vlogs that came from the legendary 2022 Coachella grind marked a step function in the size and engagement of my audience. Right after the festival, I went to the first Leisure production run in Vegas, was invited to shoot Stage Coach by Meta, and then ended up at F1 Miami for Alpine. A wild month and a half! Maybe I should go to Coachella more often…