The world expects a lot out of us humans, competing with machines. We strive to be better in every way but constantly need some sort of energy boost to keep up. Enter Proper Wild, a new line of clean energy shots by founder, Vincent Bradley. The shots, a newcomer in the rapidly growing nootropics market, estimated to be worth $5 billion by 2025 offer a healthier, cleaner, more sophisticated alternative to existing energy drink brands that are associated with music festivals and adrenaline junkies rather than meeting rooms.

We caught up with the Founder and CEO, of Proper Wild, Vincent Bradley pre-pandemic to chat about why he started the company. Let’s rewind back to when President Obama signed the JOBS (Jumpstart Our Business Startups) Act into effect in 2012, private companies could suddenly raise capital in all-new ways and Vincent was paying close attention. With a tech investor friend and mentor, he started FlashFunders, a tech-enabled investment bank in L.A. that would hire a total of 50 employees and raise hundreds of millions of dollars for hundreds of companies. In an effort to keep up with the demands of this fast-paced business, Vincent started drinking caffeine religiously but wasn’t happy about it. “I was drinking coffee and it was no longer doing anything for me,” he says. “I was getting migraines and I was getting super jittery and it was hurting my stomach.”

As an elite hockey player, Vincent had worked with a nutritionist, which gave him a lifelong awareness of what he was putting into his body. If he was going to enter the health and nutrition space, he was going to do it as cleanly (without preservatives and synthetics) and as efficiently as possible. “I'm very much about maximizing my day,” he says. “I’m really organized and very efficient and very process-oriented. But I started to realize that I wasn’t very efficient about what I was putting into my body. I started to think about healthy, organic, plant-based alternatives that could make us more efficient throughout the day.”

Proper Wild launched in 2018 as an all-day clean energy shot. They are competing against Red Bull, Monster, and 5 Hour Energy. The product comes in three flavors, blackberry, peach mango, and ginger, and are sold in packs of six for $3.99 a shot with only 25 calories! You also won’t find any preservatives or artificial sweeteners in the drink. Proper Wild is vegan, gluten-free, GMO-free, and dairy-free.

“By talking to our customers, we've learned things that we didn't originally think were that important,” Vincent says.

When it comes to their target market, women actually make up the majority of their consumers by a small percentage. “We’ve gotten a lot of feedback like, ‘I feel embarrassed bringing a Red Bull or 5 Hour Energy or Monster into my office’ and 'other energy drinks really hurt my stomach.' These weren't any value props that we thought were that interesting, but the campaign copy that drastically lowered our CAC was around ‘the energy shot for adults.’ I won't use customer names, but we interviewed a customer who is very high up at the Federal Reserve Bank very early on who felt embarrassed bringing Red Bull into the office. He's 55 years old and he was like, ‘You know, your brand is definitely younger, but it feels much more credible to me.’”

Furthermore, Vincent tells us how “you need to have really engaging, creative, multiple landing pages; it's not about throwing money at paid ads”. “You need to throw money at paid in parallel with influencers, in parallel with content, in parallel with the press. You really have to take that approach to it and you have to be very, very, very driven because it's so easy to spend money in the wrong direction really quickly.”

The Product Creation Process

“Talking to people was really important to us. We looked at creating a powder, and pill. I didn’t feel comfortable taking pills or carrying pills around. I don’t like pills. Powders on the other hand are very time-consuming. You have to pour them and mix them. And then shots, you take them on the go. They work 20 to 30 percent faster than a pill or powder, and your body absorbs it at a much higher rate. We interviewed 5 to 10,000 customers over a 6 month period. We literally walked around SoHo, NYC, and would approach people on the street and be like hey, can I give you a dollar and ask you a couple of questions. We also gave out a $20 Amazon gift card for surveys and ran ads to collect emails for video interviews. We would walk users through our wireframes, product concepts, and just about anything.

Vincent took it upon himself to navigate the production process and identify the flavor house and manufacturer he was going to work with. In fact, he even spent one week hanging out with them to learn the ins and outs. One of the challenges he faced was the shelf-stability of the active ingredients. “What we found out is that Rhodiola root and a lot of the actives such as mushrooms have no stability at a low pH. They burn off.” However, Vincent was able to solve this problem, making Proper Wild’s active ingredients truly efficacious. Fun fact: if you see a beverage that doesn’t have any preservatives in it, it is hot-filled.

The Childhood

If you ask Vincent where his industrious spirit comes from, he’ll launch into a story about his great-grandfather, “Black Bill” Tocco. “He came over on a ship from Sicily when he was 12 years old,” the story begins. “He became the largest bootlegger in the United States during prohibition in Detroit, and he was the head of the Detroit Mafia. My grandfather, ‘Black Jack’ Tocco, later took over for him. [Self-starting] is in my DNA.” Vincent has exercised his own entrepreneurialism since puberty when he founded Neighborhood Odd Jobs, surely making Grandpa Bill proud of what would come to be the racket of every young suburbanite’s dreams. As the 12-year-old CEO and founder of this venture, Vincent hired friends on his block to mow lawns and paint houses, raking in $30k during summer breaks. Though Vincent was born in Boston, the entrepreneur grew up primarily in Michigan—and it’s to this combination of locales that he attributes both his flat (what he calls “funky”) accent and his eventual pull to the East Coast, where he would later found Proper Wild, after years spent immersed in the L.A. tech scene.

Vincent attended the University of Michigan, pursuing an interdisciplinary degree that covered equal parts biological anthropology, entrepreneurship, economics, and art history. Of his academic pursuits, he says, “It was a very diverse background, which is kind of my skill set as an entrepreneur. Product, design, marketing, sales.” While in school, he found success setting up websites for small businesses including his mother’s private medical practice—a precursor to tech-heavy post-grad jobs including product marketing at Graphiq, where he learned how to grow tech teams while broadening his skills as a front-end engineer (talk about being a hustler!). But like most of our Makers, it would take Vincent another couple of software jobs—and one major failure with a would-be gaming site that raised $1 million but couldn’t get off the ground—before the bold leap into CPG with Proper Wild.

The Advice

When one of his early ventures failed to take off, Vincent learned the hard way that strong businesses start with strong research and a clear sense of who you are and what you’re able to add to the market. That is why it is important to really get to know yourself via therapy, or reflection to truly understand your strengths as an individual. Rather than fine-tuning your weaknesses, you should double down on your strengths! In fact, as a boss, you should be hiring for your weaknesses. Vincent shares his advice for those looking to start a CPG brand with us:

Before starting a business, take your time to figure out if that business has legs. Go talk to a ton of customers in the streets, via Facebook campaigns, or even with Kickstarter and Indiegogo.
Don’t micromanage! Hire smart people and let them do their thing.
Stay focused on your business, your initiatives, and track everything you are doing. Don’t chase a bunch of shiny objects and go in the wrong direction.

Proper Wild recently closed a $3M seed round and has grown over 600% since March 2020. They will be rolling out nationally into retail with 12,000 convenient stores in South Florida starting in November. Feeling the caffeine crash and want a little pick-me-up in your day? Shop Proper Wild here.

Photo courtesy of Proper Wild.