Michael Kirban spent five years of his life painstakingly building his business from scratch. Then, his biggest rival struck a deal with one of the most popular brands in the world.
Kirban, 48, is the co-founder and executive chairman of The Vita Coco Company, which started selling its namesake coconut water in 2004. After just five years, the business was bringing in at least $15 million in annual revenue, leading the still-nascent coconut water category at the time, says Kirban.
The Coca-Cola Company threatened to abruptly halt that momentum. In 2009, the beverage behemoth bought a 20% stake in Zico, a coconut water brand that launched around the same time as Vita Coco. In 2013, Coca-Cola purchased the rest of Zico outright.
The rivalry between Vita Coco and Zico was already fierce, bordering on dirty. Kirban and co-founder Ira Liran had a choice: Do we find our own big-money partner, or fight one of the world’s biggest companies on our own?
Today, Vita Coco is a behemoth in its own right, sporting a $1.6 billion market cap as of Thursday afternoon. It commands nearly 50% of the U.S. coconut water market, according to the company’s U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filings.
Meanwhile, Zico struggled to differentiate itself under Coca-Cola’s massive umbrella. It was reacquired by its founder Mark Rampolla for an undisclosed sum in 2021.
Here, Kirban discusses the game-plan he built to take on a giant, how to create your own luck and why he wouldn’t change a thing.
Kirban: I was just stunned. Like, I was in shock. I put the phone down, grabbed a bottle of whiskey and a cigar, and went into the bathtub. I remember just sitting there, in this old apartment that I lived in at the time, thinking and thinking and thinking.
Somehow, I went from “Holy s—, we’re dead,” to “How am I going to tell people that work for me?” to “What are we going to do to counteract this? How are we going to remain in business?” to “Holy s—, let’s go and beat the s— out of them.”
I got out of the bath with that mindset. I didn’t know exactly how I would do it. But I’d heard stories when I was thinking about [finding] a strategic partner [like Coca-Cola]. Everybody would say, “You don’t want to do it too early, because there’s a lot of risks. They could not pay attention and you therefore could fail.”
I turned it into: That was going to happen to them, and we were going to keep on driving forward with 100% attention towards building the coconut water category. I started calling the team and telling them: “This is going down, but don’t worry about it. It’s going to work in our favor.”
One hundred percent. There is some delusion, potentially, at times.
But you believe it, right? You believe that you can accomplish this. I think that’s just the way it is — to have that type of confidence and to be able to rally an organization around a goal that might seem far-fetched.
I think that’s what creates success: Continuing to believe that you can accomplish what you want, even though everybody else tells you it’s never going to happen.
The game-plan was just: Fight. How do we grow this business? How do we grow distribution? How do we expand our consumer base?
We didn’t have an answer to that. But around the same time — within weeks, maybe — I was introduced to Madonna’s manager, Guy Oseary. We met for coffee. He had this idea: Madonna loves the product, she drinks it on stage, she talks about it in interviews, we should do a deal together.