Liquid Death is a canned water company.

That sentence should not work. And yet Liquid Death has become one of the most talked-about beverage brands of the last decade. It has millions of social media followers, sells merchandise people actually want to wear, collaborates with musicians and tattoo artists, and has built a marketing machine that feels closer to a media brand than a bottled-water company.

The product inside the can is water. That is the point.

Liquid Death did not win because it made water meaningfully different. It won because it made water mean something different.

Format is a message

Before a customer reads the name, before they see the price, before they pick the product up, they have already made a judgment. The shape of the package tells them something. The color tells them something. The copy tells them something. The typeface, even subconsciously, tells them something.

Liquid Death understood this better than almost any brand of its generation. It did not try to sell water on water’s merits. It sold water on water’s vibe.

The tall can looked like a beer or an energy drink. The skull looked like a band logo. The name sounded like a dare. “Murder Your Thirst” felt like a provocation that was also somehow completely coherent. Every element of the package acted as a signal: this is not for people who buy “premium water.” This is for people who want the identity cues of something louder, funnier, more culturally loaded, and more self-aware.

That reframe was the product.

And it was deliberate from day one. Founder Mike Cessario has said the idea came after seeing concertgoers pour water into Monster Energy cans to stay hydrated without breaking the aesthetic. The question behind the brand was simple: why hasn’t anyone marketed water like an energy drink?

That is the real lesson. Not “be edgy.” Not “use skulls.” Not “be funny.” The lesson is that packaging can completely reposition an otherwise ordinary product by changing the cultural frame around it.

Liquid Death scaled from roughly $3 million in 2019 to an estimated $333 million in 2024, a nearly 110x increase in five years, while reaching a reported $1.4 billion valuation in March 2024. The product did not change much. The meaning around it did.

Cannabis has the same opportunity and, the same problem

Walk into most dispensaries and the category sameness is immediate. Muted greens. Earth tones. beige-adjacent palettes. clean sans-serifs. abstract logos that hint at nature, wellness, or geometry without committing to any one point of view. Product after product feels as though it is trying not to offend anyone.

The result is that almost nothing says anything memorable.

And that is a problem, because cannabis is not one consumer. It is a spectrum of emotional needs and identity cues. Some people want clinical precision and control. Some want irreverence and fun. Some want luxury. Some want softness and ritual. Some want nostalgia. Some want something that feels underground, discovered, and a little bit subcultural.

Most cannabis packaging tries to appeal to all of those people at once.

It ends up reaching none of them.

The idea is not decoration. It is positioning.

Liquid Death did not accidentally become culturally relevant. It made a very deliberate creative decision: take the most boring beverage in the world and sell it with the aesthetic language of heavy metal, skate culture, and energy drinks, completely straight-faced.

The idea was the differentiator.

But the idea worked because it communicated something real. It said: this brand has a perspective. It is self-aware. It is not corporate. It understands the cultural codes of the customer it wants to attract. Humor and exaggeration were not garnish. They were a targeting mechanism.

That is where cannabis has so much untapped opportunity. The category is already full of ritual, absurdity, counterculture, pleasure, taboo, subculture, and emotional texture. It is one of the richest categories in the world for building a distinctive point of view. And yet much of it is packaged like a neutral supplement.

The issue is not a lack of stories to tell. It is a lack of commitment to telling one clearly.

Buoyant Bob and Florette prove the point

This is where the conversation gets practical.

Because the real takeaway from Liquid Death is not just that branding matters. It is that different brands in the same category should be allowed to build entirely different emotional worlds  and the packaging should be the clearest expression of that choice.

That is exactly why brands like Buoyant Bob and Florette matter.

On paper, both sit within cannabis. Both operate under the same broad regulatory and retail realities. Both have to communicate product, dosage, trust, and compliance. But creatively, they should not look, sound, or feel remotely similar because they are not trying to do the same job in the customer’s life.

Buoyant Bob: the pack is only the opening scene

If Liquid Death taught the market that water could be sold with the visual codes of heavy metal and energy drinks, Buoyant Bob shows what happens when a cannabis brand pushes that same logic further: the packaging becomes the first artifact in a much bigger entertainment universe.

Buoyant Bob is playful, loose, character-led, and culturally alive. It does not behave like a product line trying to look respectable. It behaves like a brand with a personality that has wandered off the shelf and into the real world.

That is what makes its packaging strategy so effective. The name already does half the work. “Buoyant Bob” feels light, weird, social, optimistic, and a little off-center. The visual world and tone of voice reinforce that feeling. The pack does not need to explain the brand in a rational way because it is already telling you, instantly, what kind of energy you are buying into.

And crucially, Buoyant Bob did not stop at the pack.

The brand extended itself into music and branded entertainment through The Man Who Got So High, a campaign that turned the brand into a literal performer rather than just a cannabis SKU. That matters because it shows the packaging was never meant to sit alone. It was the front door to a larger world — one that includes character, storytelling, humor, and repeatable cultural cues. The pack is not the whole strategy. It is the invitation into a bigger one.

That is the real connection to Liquid Death. The can was never just a can. It was a signal that the brand world extended beyond the product. Buoyant Bob works the same way. The pack is the opening scene; the music video, the character, and the absurdity are the rest of the story.

   

Tony Billmeyer, CMO of Show-Me Organics, the parent company behind Buoyant Bob, has championed the importance of creativity in building cannabis brands that people actually remember. And that is exactly the point. When a brand commits to being entertaining, memorable, and culturally specific, the packaging stops behaving like a compliance container and starts behaving like media.

Florette: softness can be just as strategic as irreverence

If Buoyant Bob proves that cannabis can be playful, weird, and entertainment-driven, Florette proves the opposite side of the same argument: softness can be just as distinctive as irreverence, provided it is specific.

Approved

Florette is not trying to be loud. It is not trying to be comedic. It is not trying to borrow the codes of skate culture, music culture, or countercultural parody. Its power sits elsewhere — in ritual, cultivation, femininity, calm, and emotional intimacy.

That matters because cannabis packaging often confuses “premium” with “anonymous.” Too many brands flatten themselves into tasteful neutrals and sparse layouts that communicate polish but no real emotional point of view. Softness becomes shorthand for generic elegance.

Florette has the opportunity to do something much more disciplined than that. It can use packaging to create a feeling of ritual, tenderness, self-possession, and everyday elevation — not as vague lifestyle language, but as a specific emotional promise. In that sense, it is not the opposite of Liquid Death’s lesson. It is simply another application of it.

Liquid Death used aggression and absurdity to turn water into culture. Florette can use softness, beauty, and emotional specificity to turn cannabis into ritual. The mechanics are identical even if the aesthetic outcome is completely different.

That is why Bri Delgado’s perspective is so useful here. In speaking about Florette, Bri has framed the brand around cultivation artistry and around making everyday moments feel elevated and intentional. That is not just a nice founder sentiment. It is a packaging brief. It tells you the job the brand needs to do: not simply sell cannabis, but frame cannabis as a more intentional, more emotionally resonant part of daily life.

If Buoyant Bob says, “Come have fun with us,” Florette says, “Slow down, take care, and make this moment feel beautiful.” Both are forms of targeting. Both are forms of shelf differentiation. Both are examples of packaging doing far more than carrying the product.

Tone is a targeting mechanism

This is the piece many brands miss.

Tone is not just how a brand sounds. It is how a brand chooses its customer.

When someone puts Liquid Death in their shopping cart, they are saying something about themselves. When someone picks up Buoyant Bob, they should be saying something about themselves. When someone picks up Florette, they should also be saying something about themselves – but something entirely different.

That is what great packaging does. It allows people to self-select into a brand world that reflects how they want to feel, how they want to be seen, or what kind of experience they want the product to sit inside.

A brand with a specific voice, irreverent, warm, playful, absurdist, luxurious, romantic, clinical, nostalgic will naturally repel the people it is not for and attract the people it is. That is not a weakness. That is the entire job.

Generic packaging does the opposite. It avoids making a decision, which means the consumer has nothing meaningful to respond to.

The product inside may be similar. The world around it should not be.

This is especially important in cannabis, where legal constraints are real and product differences can be subtle. There are only so many claims you can make. Only so much language you can use. Only so many ways to explain a gummy, a vape, a pre-roll, or a beverage before the category starts repeating itself.

That is precisely why the packaging matters so much.

If the product architecture is constrained, the emotional architecture becomes even more important.

Liquid Death turned water into a cultural object by wrapping it in a world people wanted to participate in. Cannabis brands have the same opportunity, but the answer is not to imitate Liquid Death’s aesthetic. The answer is to learn from its conviction.

Buoyant Bob should not look like Florette. Florette should not look like Buoyant Bob. Neither should look like the generic middle of the cannabis shelf.

Each should feel like a fully formed universe with its own language, posture, rhythm, and customer promise.

That is the real lesson.

Not that packaging can make a boring product exciting.

But that packaging can make a product specific — and in crowded categories, specificity is often the whole game.

Before someone reads the label, they have already decided how the brand makes them feel.

Make sure the packaging is making that decision for you.

At Flowerpot, that is the standard we hold ourselves to. Not just making cannabis packaging look good, but making it say something unmistakable before the customer ever reads a word.

Miles McKirdy, B.Sc., MBM, MBA, is the Creative Director and Owner of www.flowerpot.nyc, an award-winning branding, packaging, sourcing, and manufacturing agency for cannabis and CPG brands. A founder, CMO, and operator across beverage, cannabis, and consumer goods, Miles helps brands build sharper packaging systems, protect margin, and create products people notice, remember, and buy again.