When we first formulated our drink we thought it was perfect. As we grow and tell our story we welcome more people into our extended team: brokers, distributors, formulators, ingredient manufacturers, co-packers (facility that helps us blend and fill our cans), warehouses, logistics. We learn so much from everyone we talk to at demos, trade shows, events — hundreds, maybe thousands of people — and through all of this we’ve discovered better ways to do things, better ingredients, refined our taste buds, and obsessed over every detail.
We source every ingredient ourselves — buying barrels of powders and liquids, empty cans and even the ends, printed sleeves, trays, and booking semi-trailers to lug our materials back and forth from LA to Vegas. We need legal paperwork and contracts, insurance, documentation, certificates of analysis of every ingredient. The number of moving parts involved in creating this single end product is... a lot. It’s also extremely capital intensive. We’re a two-person team, but the total number of people who touch this process could be in the hundreds. We were naive getting into this, but maybe that worked in our favor.
We ran this batch with a new co-packer in Vegas — one with a much better and bigger facility — but because our run was so small they had to squeeze it between larger jobs and couldn’t tell us exactly when it would be. They called us at 9am to tell us they’re running it at 3pm, so we packed ourselves in the car and drove 6 hours to Vegas. The run ended up being at 2am because their CO2 tank blew up.
As many would understand, we want to make things “perfect” before we put it out. Every little thing needs to be 100% just right. It’s tough to let go of this, but we’ve learned along the way that it’s actually better to put something out into the world and redesign and adjust as we go. MVP (Minimal Viable Product) allows for a greater capacity of feedback and consumer input. It’s just a V1. There’s going to be V2, V3, V4…
By no means is this journey complete, but we are happy to share our most recent iteration of the OEM Rehydrating Drink. After demo’ing our drink in grocery stores and events, we got valuable feedback about sugar preferences — we reduced our sugar to 5g, refined our electrolyte and mineral blend, and still kept our great taste. We also made the decision to remove CBD — an incredible ingredient, but also an expensive one that forced us to charge customers more. By removing it we’ve been able to lower our prices by 30% to $3.49 a can, making them more accessible. Without the CBD, we can also sell our drink to more retailers, making it easier to buy off-the-shelf.
Recently we’ve been fortunate enough to be part of amazing local shops like Psychic Wines, Ancient Ritual, Canal Market, Sip Snack, Regent Coffee, and more. The support we’ve had from a small group of people has kept us wanting to continuously improve our drink — it never gets old when someone tells us it’s the perfect drink.
“I truly believe we’re only put on this earth to hang out.” — @arjununcle
Thank you to the old friends who followed our journey, the new ones who stoked the flames, the virtual ones who boosted our algo, and the friends of friends who just came for a good time. Seeing your face, shaking your hand, hugging you, made this all more real than it has ever felt before.
Love, OEM
We’ve been a little MIA over the past 2 days because power was out at our place. While it definitely made life a little more difficult and stressful, it also forced us to slow down and appreciate our non-digital world. You might have noticed us pushing this “listening to incense” idea throughout the launch. This notion is very special to us and even more so when we had no internet and no cellular, freeing up our senses to really appreciate this practice.
Incense is intricately tied to the introduction of Buddhism to Japan in the sixth century. With this came the Buddhist practice of using incense in ritual and spiritual pursuits. Those in charge of formalizing the practice adopted the term koh o kiku 香を聞く, or mon-koh 聞香 — to listen to incense.
The idea of listening to incense becomes clear when you consider the holistic values that incense brings. When we smell incense we open up our mind to all the stories it has to tell. We experience the ingredients and the journeys they made as materials that grew from the Earth. We experience the traditions of incense making that date back thousands of years. Finally, if we listen close enough we can let the fragrance free our mind of the past and the future, and guide us in this present moment.
We chose to feature Hinoki wood in our incense because of its rich, high quality fragrance known to calm the nervous system and slow down heart rates. We hope that in lighting your incense you find much more than a fragrance, but an opportunity for a meditative reset — an opportunity to find peace and clarity, to purify the mind and body.
OEM-003
OEM-002
OEM-001
