3,793. That’s how many followers What A Melon has on their Instagram. Sure, it’s a long way off Brooklyn Beckham’s 11.5 million but, for context, this is a soft drink brand whose posts are almost entirely centred around a juice bottle in the colours of a watermelon. There’s a bottle on a pair of trainers. A bottle in a ball pond. A bottle sailing on an inflatable pink flamingo in a swimming pool with the caption, Come on in, the water’s fresh. It’s ridiculous – yet this feed, combined with What A Melon’s other canny social media games, is making serious waves in the expanding world of healthy soft drinks.
‘I was on the phone to the woman running the Waitrose bar two years ago, and she was beside herself. She said, ‘Olly, I’ve not enough time to talk to everyone, let along get back to them.’ The number of functional drinks, health drinks, flavoured waters and such was overwhelming’ – and that was then, says Olly Bolton, co-founder of Alibi, the soft drinks company which released the What A Melon two years ago. Today the soft drink space is busier than ever. Big corporations have cottoned on, with brands like Volvic and Danone all releasing flavoured waters to compete with those producers biting into their bottled water market. What Alibi and its brands What A Melon and Fact Water are doing, however, tells a different story: one with sustainability, traceability and community at its core.
