BGBS 064 | Bill Creelman | Spindrift |You Have to Be a Little Hardheaded

Bill Creelman is the Founder and CEO of Spindrift Beverage Co., Inc. and serves as its Chief Executive Officer. Prior to Spindrift, Bill co-founded Stirrings which sold to Diageo in 2009.

Bill grew up on a farm in Western Massachusetts where all the food was unprocessed, seasonal, and fresh. In 2010, he began making his own sparkling beverages to help him kick his soda habit. He wanted something refreshing, with real ingredients he could pronounce and enjoy with his young family. After much trial and error, he achieved this by combining 2 simple ingredients: fresh fruit and triple-filtered sparkling water. He named it Spindrift.

Today, Spindrift is made up of over 100 passionate employees dedicated to changing the sparkling beverage industry. Spindrift is leading beverages into a new age of innovation, transparency, and ingredient simplicity by offering a product with no artificial sweeteners, no natural flavorings, and no essences – just sparkling water and real squeezed fruit.

Spindrift was named to Inc. Magazine’s 500 fasting growing companies, is a two-time recipient of BevNet’s Product of the Year and was featured on NPR’s How I Built This in 2020.

Bill lives outside of Boston with his wife, Harley, and 4 kids.

In this episode, you’ll learn…

• Follow what feels right in the moment and push through the challenge. It might just lead you to your dreams.


• Tips that can make you stand out in a business, like utilizing consumer input as guidance and taking advantage of your packaging as your initial communication point with a consumer


• The bruises and scars you gain from challenge will become valuable knowledge in the future

Resources

LinkedIn: Bill Creelman

Website: drinkspindrift.com

Twitter: @drinkspindrift

Instagram: @drinkspindrift

TikTok: @drinkspindrift

Facebook: @drinkspindrift

Pinterest: Spindrift Sparkling Water

Quotes

[19:53 ] I just get so much pleasure personally out of working with farmers that are working with their hands and growing something that’s delicious, and then we get the opportunity to reimagine it as a sparkling water. There’s something about that idea that’s really exciting to me.

[32:54 ] I think in a sense, you have to be a little bit hard headed to this business…challenges, just broadly speaking, are an everyday part of what we do.

[52:38 ] (Packaging) is really is the main way you communicate with a consumer, especially early on. You have to have a package that has cuts through the clutter. That immediately speaks to someone that has a shopping cart that’s small, and a kid is screaming, and they’re on their cell phone, like even in that environment, it needs to speak to them somehow.

[59:31 ] I really think that even though it was a longer journey for me I’m sure than other folks who have done it more efficiently, I think those nicks and bruises and scars along the way ended up being so valuable now to help inform decisions and keep the boat rowing in the right direction.

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Podcast Transcript

Bill Creelman 0:02

I think I was 15 or so and one of the captains I was working with, I was the maid on the on the boat. Their charter fishing boat, told me about this word called spindrift. And it was you know, the weight we are getting pounded by surf coming back from grade point out of the car are headed to the island. And it was a beautiful sunny day, but we were soaking wet and he said, you know what this mist is that is blowing off of the top of these waves. And I didn’t get called spindrift and it’s referring to sort of the whitewash and the wave is as the wind blows, and it’s sheared the top of the wave off it for some reason. I just thought that word was really interesting.

Marc Gutman 0:50

Podcasting from Boulder, Colorado, this is the Baby Got Back story Podcast, where we dive into the story behind the story of today’s most inspiring storytellers, creators and entrepreneurs. I like big backstories and I cannot lie. I am your host, Marc Gutman, Marc Gutman, and on today’s episode of Baby Got Back story. We are talking about sparkling water. Not just any sparkling water, but flavored sparkling water. And hey, you, yeah, you the listener who’s a non reviewer, I know who you are. And seriously, what gives? You know that this podcast ain’t cheap. But we continue to produce it as a service to you. How about you turn that non reviewer frown upside down and rate and review us over at Apple podcasts or Spotify, Apple and Spotify use these ratings as part of the algorithm that determines ratings on their charts and reviewing is cool. Everyone’s doing it. Alright, let’s get on with the show.

Hear that? Cold, refreshing, sparkling water. Now today we have sparkling water easily accessible at our fingertips. We have all sorts of brands that are producing it non flavored flavored we have spiked sparkling water. We have all sorts of seltzers. But if you think about it, it wasn’t always that way. sparkling water is kind of a new thing. And today’s guest is Bill Creelman, the founder and CEO of spindrift. Yeah, spindrift that delicious Lee flavored sparkling water with real fruit juice. And he’s your hero on today’s show.

Bill is an entrepreneur and his journey has been anything but straight and easy. Today, spindrift is made up of over 100 passionate employees dedicated to changing the sparkling beverage industry. spindrift is leading beverages into a new age of innovation, transparency and ingredient simplicity by offering a product with no artificial sweeteners, no natural flavorings and no essences. Just sparkling water and real squeezed fruit. spindrift was named Inc magazine’s 500 fastest growing companies is a two time recipient of bednets Product of the Year and was featured on one of my favorite podcast the one that this baby got backstory. Whole podcast was based on NPR. Here’s how I built this in 2020. Bill lives outside of Boston with his wife, Harley and four kids in this is his story.

I’m here with Bill Creelman, the founder and CEO of spindrift bill, welcome.

Bill Creelman 4:11

Thanks, Marc. Appreciate the time.

Marc Gutman 4:14

Absolutely. And before we get into it, we’re going to hear all about Spindrift and how you founded the company. But for those listeners that may not be familiar with this delicious flavored sparkling water, why don’t you set it up a little bit and tell people what is Spindrift?

Bill Creelman 4:31

So we are we are the alternative challenger brand in a very big category called sparkling water. So, our point of difference, you know, among kind of a big, crowded categories, we offer real ingredients as the base for the flavors so, we go out and gather lemons, oranges, grapefruits, berries, from around the country and literally squeeze them and add them to sparkling water instead of using unnatural flavor, which is really where the category lives today. And the results of this sort of delicious you know, pretty full flavored a little pulpy, colorful alternative to sparkling water.

Marc Gutman 5:15

And I don’t want to get too far down this part of the story, but you said something that really caught my attention. And you said that we put real food and ingredients in the water because that’s so rare. Is that something that is just not happening prior to Spindrift?

Bill Creelman 5:32

It really is like, strictly from an ingredient perspective. It does not exist other than our brands. So you know, it, it seems like, it’s almost an absurd statement to make, like, how could that be true? So yeah, the category is really developed off of the back of the natural flavors, natural flavors, we don’t really know quite what these things are, there are 3000 ingredients that are regulated outside of the FDA, they could originate with a fruit they may not, you know, you really don’t know as a consumer. So we just kind of left that conversation, where it was and, and went with a product that we recognize, you know, fruit has color and has a little pub. And that’s where we’re kind of happy. You know, and that’s really our big point of difference in this space.

Marc Gutman 6:25

I’m sure we’ll get into this further. But it just blows my mind that this is something that we’re not all already experiencing or hadn’t experienced prior to Spindrift. And so we’ll talk about that. But as you know, you were a young kid. And as you were, you know, getting going probably around the ripe age of nine or something like that, did you think that you would be in the sparkling beverage category, as it were, was that something you had always dreamed of?

Bill Creelman 6:53

I not specifically that. I mean, I I was I was lucky enough to be exposed to food. at a really young age, both kind of where food c