Oct 13, 2018 | Blog, News From the Frontlines
Rebbl, which makes coconut milk-based drinks with herbs and plants, is raising $20 million in funding led by Cavu Venture Partners, the brand said ahead of a formal announcement Friday.
Rebbl says it has $20 million to $50 million in annual sales and expects to be growing at a rate of 70 percent by the end of the year. The new fundraising values it at close to $100 million.
The company is led by Sheryl O’Loughlin, former CEO of Clif Bar and Plum Organics baby food, and co-founded by Palo Hawken and David Batstone.
The drink uses “super-herbs” and “adaptagens,” which Rebbl claims have benefits including a decrease in stress hormones. It makes elixirs like its Matcha Latte and cold-brew coffees with protein that promise to provide energy.
That puts them into a new generation of drinks that call themselves “functional,” often low or no-sugar beverages that purport to nourish better than the previous class of sugary or caffeine-fueled sports drinks. Among them is a rush of new kombucha drink brands or drinks like coconut-water infused BodyArmor that say they have more vitamins and fewer artificial ingredients than their predecessors.
Amid this uprising, PepsiCo’s Gatorade, which created the sports drink category and long dominated it, has ceded market share.
Read more about Rebbl market impact here:
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/18/rebbl-raises-20-million-from-cavu-venture-partners.html
Oct 6, 2018 | Blog, News From the Frontlines
What if you could reach into your refrigerator and grab a beverage that was not only smoothly delicious and wholly plant-based, but also packed with traditional herbal ingredients that could provide extraordinary benefits to your body and mind? And what if your purchase of that beverage also made you part of a social and environmental movement that promotes lasting good in communities throughout the world? Would you want to buy that product? Meet REBBL, a beverage company creating elixirs and protein drinks based on coconut milk and enhanced with adaptogens from Ayurvedic and Chinese medicines.
Palo Hawken and Sheryl O’Loughlin set out to create a healthy beverage—and in the process redefined success to include promoting lasting good in communities throughout the world.
“A Cause Looking For a Company”
The genesis of REBBL was unusual, to say the least. It started with Not for Sale (NFS), a nonprofit organization dedicated to eradicating human trafficking. NFS wanted to partner with a company that shared values and practices that would enhance its mission.
That’s when they enlisted Palo Hawken, an inventor who was enthralled with indigenous edible and medicinal herbology. Palo’s goal was clear: “To create the world’s greatest beverage company, while re-imagining the very DNA of what business is, from the ground up.”
Read more about this revolutionary drink here: https://www.betternutrition.com/news-flash/rebbl-beverage-company
Oct 5, 2018 | Blog, News From the Frontlines
Serving as the largest nonpartisan convening alongside the United Nations General Assembly, the 2018 Concordia Annual Summit was held on September 24-25 at the Grand Hyatt New York.
The 2018 Concordia Annual Summit heard from the following speakers: Jennifer Lawrence, Oscar-Winning Actor and Board Member of Represent.Us; Michel Temer, President of Brazil; Kristalina Georgieva, CEO of the World Bank; Bernard-Henri Lévy, Philosopher, Filmmaker, and Activist; Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO of Uber; Danilo Medina, President of the Dominican Republic; Dr. Tom Coburn, Former Member of the United States Senate; Bradford L. Smith, President of Microsoft; Luis Almagro, Secretary General of the Organization of American States; Lorena Castillo de Varela, First Lady of the Republic of Panama; Liz Schrayer, President & CEO of U.S. Global Leadership Coalition; Thomas F. “Mack” McLarty, III, Former White House Chief of Staff under Clinton Administration; Thomas S. Kaplan, Environmentalist, Philanthropist, and Investor; Andrew Liveris, Former Chairman & CEO of Dow Chemical; David Batstone, Co-Founder of Just Business, Not For Sale, REBBL, Dignita & Z Shoes Organic; Michael Sneed, Executive Vice President of Global Corporate Affairs & Chief Communication Officer at Johnson & Johnson; HRH Princess Lamia Al Saud, Secretary General and Member of the Board of Trustees at Alwaleed Philanthropies; Jan Saumweber, Senior Vice President of Responsible Sourcing at Walmart; Premal Shah, President & Co-Founder of Kiva; Jay Collins; Vice Chairman of Corporate & Investment Banking at Citi.
Read more about the event here: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/2018-concordia-annual-summit-to-feature-jennifer-lawrence-michel-temer-kristalina-georgieva-among-others-300709408.html
Oct 5, 2018 | Blog, News From the Frontlines
Over its first 40 years in the diamond business, Vancouver’s Spence Diamonds focused almost exclusively on a mass radio strategy featuring ads that many people loved to hate. While memorable, the ads resulted in negative perceptions of the brand, as some people “thought that the quality of the product was just as bad as the ads,” as a Spence case study puts it.
As Spence’s new CMO, Veeral Rathod plans to take the company in another direction. Named to the role a month ago, Rathod believes the brand can leverage its competitive advantage – an extensive product offering and customer-centric strategy – to further grow its business in markets across North America.
Rathod (pictured, right) co-founded American menswear brand J. Hilburn, which built its business around offering custom-tailored clothing for men, and sees many parallels between the apparel and diamond industries. He replaces Frank Hamlin, who became the brand’s first chief marketer in May, only to leave for a role with American video game company, GameStop.
While leading J. Hilburn, Rathod spent little on traditional paid marketing, choosing to focus instead on building a brand focused entirely on the customer. And he believes Spence has laid the groundwork for a similar strategy.
Read more about Not For Sale’s influence on this diamond business here: http://strategyonline.ca/2018/09/18/how-spence-diamonds-new-cmo-plans-to-grow-the-company/
Sep 25, 2018 | Blog, News From the Frontlines
The anti-human trafficking nonprofit Not For Sale has been working with victims around the world–from Thailand to Uganda to Peru–for nearly a decade, but after years of effort, its staff realized they weren’t helping solve the problem at its core.
“It really struck me that I could be building 10,000 shelters and I wouldn’t really address the root causes of trafficking, nor would I make a dent in the 30 million-plus people who were caught in the practices of human trafficking around the world,” says Dave Bastone, the nonprofit’s co-founder. “So I said, why don’t I come up with a more viable business strategy?”
In Lima, Peru, many of the children they met who had been thrown into the sex industry had come from the Amazon, where indigenous families were struggling as illegal logging and mining threatened their livelihoods. If the economy was stronger, Bastone thought, kids would be at less risk of trafficking. A brainstorming session led to an idea to spin off a new startup: Rebbl, a drink company that sources ingredients from the Amazon, and, later, from other impoverished parts of the world. “We wanted to create a profitable venture that would bring back viable economic platforms in the Amazon,” says Bastone.
Read more about Rebbl and Not For Sale here: https://www.fastcompany.com/90212399/these-health-drinks-are-also-fighting-human-trafficking
