Today, they distribute to seven markets and have committed to hand-delivering Nectar Hard Seltzer to any city that gets 300 people to text into their Community, demanding their product.

‍ Shortly after, they used the same distribution strategy of aggregating demand in a market by texting their Community, and successfully dropped Nectar Hard Seltzer in San Diego and Orange County. The next day, lines formed outside of each store and Nectar Hard Seltzer sold all units in under one hour. That night, they texted their Community the locations stocking the seltzer. After the video went viral, Kim and Dalsey approached two family-run liquor stores in Los Angeles (where they are headquartered) with this data in hand and persuaded each to stock 150 boxes of the product, referencing the texts as a measure of demand. To gain local insights, Nectar created a TikTok video including their Community number, asking fans to text purchase intent for Nectar Hard Seltzer in their city. This was important to them because most distribution avenues, like bars, and experiential activations were off limits due to Covid-19. Drawing from these learnings, Kim turned to Community to build a highly engaged customer base and to assess demand for Nectar Hard Seltzer in different markets. Having worked in music marketing, Kim saw how ineffective email was in reaching fans and knew how successful text message marketing was in driving engagement for artists. Despite producing flavors that differentiated them in the highly competitive seltzer market, their bootstrapped business and launching at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic required thinking outside of the traditional marketing box. Drawing on Kim’s heritage, they created the first seltzer inspired by the flavors from his childhood, including lychee, mandarin, yuzu, and Asian pear.

Friends Jeremy Kim, John Dalsey, and Brando launched Nectar Hard Seltzer in December 2020, and it has since become the number one Asian hard seltzer in the world.

Nectar hard seltzer lychee