Kobe Bryant has a sports drink just for you
NBA star turned entrepreneur pours $6 million into Bodyarmor
Kobe Bryant has a sales meeting.
Across the table is a middleaged man in a blue suit who works at a large convenience store chain. He’s seated in the corner of a makeshift conference room in the Las Vegas Convention Center.
Outside are hundreds of suppliers of beef jerky, cigarette lighters, hotdogs, motor oil, potato chips, vape pens, beer and everything else you might expect to find at the annual trade show for the National Association of Convenience Stores.
Mom-and-pop vendors display nicotine toothpicks and pickle popsicles down the hall from where Coca-Cola, ConAgra, MillerCoors and other megacorporations have booths as big as houses, with stadium-style video boards and servers passing out free samples.
Monster Energy has a dance floor.
Hostess has someone in a Twinkie costume.
Bryant, in a quarter-zip grey fleece and dark jeans, is there to represent Bodyarmor, a sportsdrink startup looking to grab shelf space inside the gas stations and corner stores.
A few minutes earlier, he was standing in front of the Bodyarmor booth with Mike Repole, the company’s co-founder and chair.
Only bottlers and buyers who work with Bodyarmor were allowed behind the ropes to shake hands and pose for pictures. A crowd of gawkers gathered on the other side.
“I’d rather be in here,” Bryant says, now that he’s away from the smartphone-wielding mob waiting outside the windowless room. “But, you know, it’s all part.”
He’s been an investor in Bodyarmor since 2014, back when it was a three-year-old brand with stalled growth.
Today, Bodyarmor is a distant but fast-rising third in the U.S. sports-drink market dominated by PepsiCo’s Gatorade and CocaCola’s Powerade. Bryant has no title at the company; he serves as an unofficial consigliere to Repole (rhymes with “Tripoli”).
At this meeting, he appears to speak for the chair, who isn’t there.
“We’ve got to get to that next level,” says the store executive in the blue suit, who did not want to be identified in the private meeting. His stores already carry Bodyarmor and are on the way to selling a million cases a year.
Now he’s angling for preferential treatment with next year’s order. “The contract is one thing,” he says, “but we need over-the-top marketing.”
“Sure, sure, sure,” says Bryant, tapping the lid of a bottle on the table.
Meetings like this are happening all over the convention centre — people deciding what you will see the next time you stop into the corner store — but only Bodyarmor has a world-famous former NBA player handling negotiations.
One of two Bodyarmor managers sitting with Bryant, dressed in matching company polos, pulls up an illustration of a refrigerator case.
What’s known in the retail word as a “planogram” shows where Bodyarmor wants its new branded waters stocked in store coolers: At eye level, running across most of a full row.
The way Bryant sees it, though, the planogram is too timid. He cuts in with a different idea: “We want the whole f------ door now.”
Bryant played his last pro game in April 2016. During his 20-year career he made US$328 million in salary and a similarsized bundle in endorsements. He does not need to be at a trade show haggling over cooler space for bottled drinks.
He insists that he wants to be here.
“I love it,” he says later. “I love our team. I love our brand. I love meeting the people that are working every single day.”
His voice picks up heat as he talks, almost like this is a lockerroom pep talk. Does this scratch the same competitive itch that playing did?
“That’s assuming I have an itch to scratch,” Bryant says. “And I don’t. Not at all.
“But it’s the same mentality. You win one championship, you can go on vacation all summer long or be in the gym the next day working on winning the next one. That same mentality carries through to what we are doing today, to me being here now.”
Bryant was a couple of weeks shy of 13 back in 1991, when Gatorade debuted its first “Be Like Mike” advertisement with Michael Jordan.
Five years later, he had lived up to the tag line and was playing against Jordan. He had patterned his game so closely on Jordan’s — from the slashing drives and soaring fadeaways to the tonguewagging and swagger — that their first meeting was a highly anticipated chance to see Jordan play against his young doppelgänger.
With Bodyarmor, Bryant seems once again to be following and seeking to outdo Jordan.
The U.S. sports drink market, which is set to cross US$8 billion in sales this year, according to Euromonitor, has been a duopoly for three decades.
Gatorade, owned by PepsiCo, invented the category in 1965 and accounts for nearly 75 per cent of U.S. sports-drink sales.
Coca-Cola muscled into the market in 1988 with Powerade and now has about 18 per cent of sales. The barrier for entry isn’t high — almost anyone can put together a formula of water, sugar, vitamins and minerals — but it remains all but impossible to match the distribution and marketing of the two behemoth brands.
That hasn’t stopped Bryant and Bodyarmor from trying.
He’s poured about US$6 million into the company and owns roughly 10 per cent. He got to know Repole through Glaceau Vitaminwater, where Bryant was once an endorser.