In 2015, a curious object appeared in the photos of many prominent social media influencers. It was a sleek, aesthetically designed bottle strategically placed in the photos of people like actress Minka Kelly and fashion designer Pia Arrobio. Intrigued by the sudden appearance of the mysterious bottle, people began looking into the drink. They quickly discovered that the company behind the trend was none other than Dirty Lemon, a luxury health beverage firm. Since 2015, Dirty Lemon has sold over 2 million bottles and now has over 100,000 monthly customers, despite the expensive price of $10.83 per bottle. Zak Normandin, the CEO of Dirty Lemon, believes the company’s rise to popularity has a lot to do with its unconventional marketing techniques. In an interview with Fast Company in 2018, Normandin stressed that “the power of the brand is actually more important than a product.” 

Part of Dirty Lemon’s initial commercial success lies in Normandin’s strategic decision to use social media influencers to gain widespread recognition. However, the recent hype around Dirty Lemon comes not from its social media backing, but from its focus on its brick and mortar store experience. Currently, Dirty Lemon has two physical stores in New York City called The Drug Store and plans to establish 4 more stores. This transition to brick and mortar retail may seem counterintuitive, as prominent retailers such as Barneys New York and Topshop have closed many of their physical stores due to beliefs that consumer behavior has changed in favor for more online-based shopping experiences. However, Dirty Lemon believes that with the help of technology, physical stores can once again become the center of retail. 

The incentive for Dirty Lemon to focus more on brick and mortar marketing is partly due to the oversaturation of social media marketing. “It’s at a place now where it’s just unsustainable,” said Normandin in an interview with Mobile Marketer. “There was a point for us that it no longer made sense to spend millions and millions of dollars on Facebook and Instagram.” In fact, Normandin stated that one day of advertising on Facebook was equivalent to one month of rent for The Drug Store in Tribeca.

Normandin also believes that one of the inefficiencies of social media marketing is its lack of human to human interactions. Customers want to “actually experience it and feel the energy of what we were portraying visually online in a real environment,” says Normandin. In other words, Dirty Lemon believes that what customers want is an immersive retail experience. 

Dirty Lemon thus established The Drug Store to bring about a more direct company to consumer experience. The Drug Store was able to accomplish this whilst also standing out from other typical brick and mortar stores due to its unconventional use of technology. Dirty Lemon developed a SMS-based infrastructure that removed the need for human personnel. At The Drug Store, there are no cash registers and no staff. Customers can simply walk inside and take whatever they want from the store. Instead of paying on the spot, they are free to text the company whenever they want to pay for the drink. Given that the whole point of The Drug Store is to increase customers’ immersive experience, this idea of a humanless transaction system may seem counterintuitive. However, the text messaging based service actually increases company to consumer interaction, as customers are interacting with live customer representatives when purchasing and can ask the representatives questions live. Normandin says that Dirty Lemon’s customers actually “prefer conversational interaction” because it “eliminates all unnecessary steps” of a typical transaction process. 

In addition, the technology used inside The Drug Store also helps facilitate Dirty Lemon’s business by collecting data about transactions. The Drug Store uses “heat map trackers that monitor foot traffic and RFID-enabled refrigerators for inventory tracking” to collect data about the needs of their customers. The data allows them to see in real time how customers respond to the release of new products. “That’s something other beverage brands—Coke and Pepsi included—just don’t have a level of access to in order to make those decisions,” said Normadin. 

Although some people doubt whether Dirty Lemon’s honor-based payment system can truly be successful in the long term, Dirty Lemon reports only a 5-10% theft rate and is projected to generate $100 million in sales by 2021. Whether or not those results are due to the amazing taste of Dirty Lemon’s charcoal water, or their unconventional marketing strategies, the numbers are certainly something worth drinking to.

Thumbnail Image credit to Dirty Lemon