Imagine this for just a second. You are just finishing high school, and with a ton a schmoozing talent, a couple great ideas and a lot of luck, you just started your business. You and a buddy have started designing clothes, all with a slogan you came up with in the high school hallways, ironing onto t-shirts and packages. Things start off well – opening a small shop selling your wares, and you get the attention of some bigger players. Next thing you know, you are more in debt than you planned, an big investor in your company gets busted and now you have people who are counting on you to deliver. Well, in the case of Edon Moyal and Dan Fleyshman it was that times 100. The small shop? well, it was in a great section of New York City. The investor? Jordache – and the amount they were in debt was around a half a million dollars. That is some incredibly intense stress for kids barely old enough to drink.
Well needless to say they turned it around. They managed to talk their way into into developing a real brand name making a hangover remedy, some very solid company backing, and went public. At 23, Moyal might be the youngest CEO of a publicly traded company. Their clothing turned into licensing deals, and now we have Who’s Your Daddy energy drink, which, through more marketing savvy, is marketed and branded by Master P, the grammy winning super rich and super popular hip hop artist. Master P was focused on the sale, distribution, and marketing of this drink, and hopefully give it the extra added boost to get onto store shelves.
This is why I love rating energy drinks. These young businessmen worked harder than I can possibly imagine to get their brand this far – and to produce drinks which are new and unique. Sure, there are the rip off artists and the get-rich-quick schemers out there, but there is also a huge potential for some amazing success and opportunity.
Taste:8
You could tell that time and energy went into the development of this flavor. This isn’t any cheap knock off developed in Austria – it has some very real flavor. This drink surprised me in a number of ways, First, the drink is not a yellow citrus Red Bull clone, as I was expecting. Instead, this dink comes out a deep bold red – and the tasty fruit punch was quite unique too. Unlike many of the fruit punch energy drinks out there, this was not overpoweringly sweet like the NOS and Rockstar varieties were. While not revolutionary, these drinks were a very solid flagship for this brand.
Packaging:9
This is a wonderfully designed can, using the urban grunge motif, but still remaining pretty. The bright yellow can is full of fantastic design choices, from the Font choices to the slogans on the can. They also do a great job with info, putting on the website, toll free number and listing the caffeine content – all of which very appreciated. While not revolutionary, the art and function hold up well under scrutiny.
Nutrition:7
The is sweetened by High Fructose Corn Syrup, so all the fakiness of soda pop is definitely present. 1600mg taurine, 200mg caffeine, B Vitamins, inositol, and the other cast of energy drink characters. While not revolutionary in ingredients, I liked that they removed the scary preservatives from this flavor. Decent jolt from the caffeine, but the crash was pretty hard. I actually ended up having to take a nap about 4 hours after drinking the stuff.
Website – www.whosyourdaddyinc.com :5
What originally starts off as a nice clean site gets waylaid by a bunch of bad UI decisions. The site looks very pretty, even utilizing the apple-eque design of mirroring the top graphic under the bottom line to give the feeling of a reflection.While the background is a big stock-photo-grunge, it still fits into their entire motif. The overall design of the page is very lovely – with graphics poking out of frames and the entire scheme of power and extreme-ness.
The site falls apart at the categories though. There is no info on the drink themselves, instead taking you to a shopping cart for each product.There is a media button, which goes to a page where you can see a dozen ads overlapping and no interactivity at all. Same goes for nightlife and distribution – where a whole lot of information could be given, but instead we get one big jpg. The news page takes you off to their yahoo finance page – where yahoo does all the work for them. Their links page even has a link – back to their own site in a new window (wut??) This is also the only way to get to their blog, kingofbloggers.com – which does a much better job promoting themselves than this completely lacking website. Their code still shows Macromedia Dreamweaver tags all over the place. The size of the site is big for no reason – where their background image is over 250k by itself. These are OK missteps for a company where the drink is the focus – and getting a website of a decent quality itself is a challenge. But to hire an outside company and still have half a meg size and categories that mean nothing and can’t even tell you the nutrition information is pretty inexcusable. LiveCastMedia might have made it look pretty, but for all intent and purposes this site is completely useless.