Official Tennis Drink for Kids: The Toss
As an e-commerce brand, in-person activations sounds very unscalable. We're used to operating from a laptop. We're used to the algorithm being our sales floor. Talking to people for hours 1:1 feels extremely inefficient by comparison. So we didn't quite have an IRL strategy. But....
In Feb, we signed up for tennis lessons completely unrelated to the business, made some friends, and one thing led to another — we started sponsoring kids' tennis tournaments, and before we knew it, we were being invited to the AAPI Northeast Tennis Festival. Of course, we couldn't just show up. We had to show up on brand.
Our Butterfly Pea Flower Powder was literally made for this moment In tennis, the toss starts everything — one small motion that sets the whole game in motion. Add a lemon to a vivid blue drink and watch it turn violet right before your eyes.
We called our BUTTERFLY PEA LEMONADE • THE TOSS.
We couldn't have scripted it better if we tried. The kids lost their minds over it.
Not in a "that's cute" kind of way — in a "we worked non-stop for four hours" kind of way. We say four, but honestly it was six because the staff were already pulling us aside with questions while we were still setting up and breaking down too! But of course we kept yapping away because how could you not.
The color-changing Butterfly Pea Flower drinks were a moment. Watching the kids face light up when the colors start changing is not something a high conversion rate or high ROAS can replicate. That's something you have to be in the room for.
We genuinely did not expect that much love from our first event. It caught us off guard in the best way — the same way our first sell-out did. Queen Omi keeps surprising us, and we're learning to let it.
The Lesson
In-person is a completely different game.
Online, you're optimizing. You're A/B testing. You're watching numbers move in a dashboard. In-person, you're reading faces. You're having real conversations. You're finding out in real time what lands and what doesn't, what makes someone lean in and what makes them walk past.
It's a lot of work. It is also so fulfilling in a way that no TikTok view count has ever been.
And then — because the universe has a sense of humor — somewhere between the drink station and the cleanup, we met an investor from one of our competitor brands 😂
Only at a tennis tournament. Only in New York.
We'll leave the rest of that conversation off the record for now. But let's just say the board got a little more interesting that afternoon.
Summer 2026 is going to be a blast.
We're leaning into in-person in a way we didn't plan for at the start of this year. The tennis community opened a door we didn't know was there, and we're walking through it. More events, more activations, more moments that can't happen on a screen.
The toss has been made. Now we play. 🎾🍋
