One of the biggest stars of country music is starting over sports drink wars.
Bodyarmor announced on Monday that Carrie Underwood, the seven-time award-winning singer of the Grammy Awards, will be his first confessor of glamorous personalities as the sports drink maker wants to broaden his appeal. As part of the deal, Underwood will acquire an unknown stake in the company and will appear alongside James Harden in Bodyarmor Lyte’s very first television campaign, which debuted on Monday during ‘The Bachelor’. She will also be advertising for Bodyarmor’s premium SportWater product.
“I’ve probably been working on myself for the past 15 years and falling more and more in love with health and fitness,” Underwood told CNBC. “So it all ties together, and I love that I was able to create this great web of health and fitness things in my life.”
Underwood joins an impressive array of fans of the brand, including NBA star James Harden, PGA golfer Dustin Johnson, MLB Mike Trout, pro tennis player Naomi Osaka and soccer star Megan Rapinoe. The late Kobe Bryant was one of the original investors in Bodyarmor and helped take the brand mainstream.
Underwood said that while she’s obviously not a professional athlete (although she jokes that it can also be physically difficult to sing), she believes she can help open doors for Bodyarmor by reaching a new audience. .
“I can talk to working moms and people like me because that’s what I do and that’s what I know,” she said.
“Carrie is what we see in many consumers. … She is a mother and she is a woman. She has two children and she is on the run and she leads this hectic lifestyle and she has a need for healthy hydration , “says Mike Repole, CEO and founder of Bodyarmor.
Underwood said one of the things that is appealing about the deal is the fact that she is being offered a stake in Bodyarmor.
“You want to personally invest in the success of the business. It is definitely a motivator to just work and work in it and get its product to as many people as possible,” she said.
Underwood’s business portfolio has grown rapidly over the past decade. The country singer first gained notoriety in 2005 after winning American Idol. She sells more than 64 million records worldwide. She appears in television, film, is the voice of NBC’s Sunday Night football and is also a best-selling author.
She was also very active in the fitness space. Nearly six years ago, she ventured into fitness clothing with the launch of CALIA, a workout created exclusively for Dick’s Sporting Goods. The lifestyle brand quickly achieved success and became the second most popular brand for women for the sports retailer. In December, Dick’s launched its first branded pop-up stores.
This year, Underwood launched a fitness program called FIT52 in collaboration with her longtime personal trainer Eve Oreland. It’s inspired by Underwood’s passion for an active lifestyle, she said.
The singer’s latest partnership fits in perfectly with her personal mission to ensure that health and well-being are at the forefront of everything she does.
“I am so happy that I was able to build my passion for health and fitness into a business model and a personal brand that I can stand on and be proud of,” she said.
Bodyarmor was founded in 2011 by veteran Mike Repole, a businessman and liquor industry executive who previously helped found Vitcream Water, the maker of Glaceau. According to data from Beverage Digest, the brand is the third largest sports drink on the market, with 13% of the category’s sales.
Bodyarmor increased $ 1 billion in sales last year, 70% higher than in 2019, Repole said. Sales were helped in part by Coca-Cola’s acquisition of a minority stake in 2018, which led to greater visibility and distribution.
“It’s definitely one of the fastest growing sports drinks,” said Duane Stanford, editor and publisher of Beverage Digest. “They were actually able to maintain significant growth rates, which was really interesting.”
Repole’s goal is to dethrone PepsiCo-owned industry leader Gatorade, which controls 70% of the market.
“I wanted to be the number one sports drink by 2025,” he said. “I said that in 2011. A lot of people laughed.”
“Gatorade is currently five times our size,” he continued. “Ten years ago, they were 500 billion times our size. So we narrowed the gap, from 500 billion to five times our size.”
This is one of the ways he expects to get there to make more use of the brand through endorsements like those of Underwood.
“The other traditional sports drinks do not go beyond the athletics box, and you know Bodyarmor has always been innovative, has always been different,” he said.
Disclosure: Comcast’s NBCUniversal is the parent of CNBC.