For Nawty Water co-founder Michael Tones, getting a challenger beverage brand onto supermarket shelves is not about moving fast for the sake of growth. It is about making sure the business can deliver when the opportunity arrives.
Michael Tomes and Jason Reid Nawty Water co-founders. Image supplied
That approach has shaped the South African seltzer brand’s retail journey, which began with a deliberately measured rollout and is now accelerating following its listing with Pick n Pay.
The listing gives Nawty Water national retail reach, taking the brand from a presence concentrated in KwaZulu-Natal 12 months ago to a significantly broader footprint. Further listings with Checkers Liquor and OK Liquor are expected to take the brand from 560 outlets to more than 1,000 during the summer period.
For Tones, however, the real challenge starts once those doors are open.
“We have taken things slowly on purpose,” he says. “We saw brands come and then fall away, trying to break into this space and we set out to learn as much as we could from retailers about how to do things, and how not to do things.”
That learning-first approach has informed how Nawty Water has built its retail operation — from its first 20 stores to its current expansion.
Learning the retail game before scaling
Tones describes retail as a highly competitive environment where brands are fighting for both consumer attention and limited shelf space.
“We knew we had to stand out from the start,” he says.
Rather than treating its early stores as a test that could operate differently from a national rollout, Nawty Water aimed to establish the same standards from the outset.
“We cut no corners. We showed up in our first 20 stores the same way we are showing up in our big retailers.”
That has included building a team capable of supporting sampling, securing floor-standing units (FSUs) where retailers allow them and maintaining a visible presence in stores.
The approach also extends to the relationship with retailers themselves.
“We treat store owners and retailers as part of our community, not just a touch point,” says Tones.
A partnership with Smollan, which began in May, has subsequently strengthened Nawty Water’s retail execution, helping the brand improve its presence on the shelf while gaining additional expertise as it scales.
Nawty Water hard seltzers are now available countrywide. Image supplied
Turning national demand into national availability
The expansion also addresses a problem created by Nawty Water’s own marketing.
Until recently, the brand was available only in KwaZulu-Natal, despite generating consumer demand elsewhere in the country.
“Just 12 months ago we were only available in a single province, in KZN, but our marketing was getting demand for our product all across the country,” says Tones.
The result was a familiar frustration for an emerging brand: consumers wanted the product, but distribution could not yet match the demand.
“We had to keep saying, ‘We will be there soon!’”
The Pick n Pay listing changes that equation by giving consumers across the country a physical retail destination where they can buy Nawty Water.
For a beverage brand, that accessibility is particularly important. While social media and events can create awareness, the purchase still needs to happen somewhere.
“From the start, we knew retail was the goal,” says Tones. “Nothing offers better distribution and accessibility than being on the shelf, where people are ready to purchase.”
Protecting the brand while expanding the footprint
Rapid distribution can create another challenge for challenger brands: maintaining the personality and positioning that made the brand distinctive in the first place.
For Nawty Water, Tones says that has been a deliberate consideration from the beginning.
“We have a very talented core team, and our goal from the start has been to maintain exactly who we are and what we want people to connect to.”
The business has established a clear process for assessing opportunities against the brand’s positioning.
“When it does [align], we jump at it,” he says.
That discipline becomes increasingly important as the brand moves into larger retail environments, where scale can introduce new commercial opportunities but also place greater pressure on a brand to fit established retail structures.
Why community remains central to the marketing model
Nawty Water’s growth strategy is built around the philosophy: “Community first. Brand protected. Sales follow.”
For Tones, the model is fundamentally different from performance marketing approaches where spend can be linked relatively directly to clicks, conversions and other digital metrics.
“It’s a tough start and a slow burn,” he says.
“For them, you run an ad, and you have data to track. For us, you invest in people and hope you made an impact. That impact turns into conversation and that’s how our brand spreads.”
That has led the brand to place considerable emphasis on physical experiences and face-to-face engagement.
Nawty Water is currently involved in 30 to 40 events and activations each month, despite operating with a relatively small team.
Tones says that decision goes back to one of the company’s earliest hires.
“My first hire wasn’t a salesperson, it was an events and community manager, Christie. Her sole job was to make sure we show up at events and get drinks in people’s hands.”
The strategy reflects a broader shift in how challenger consumer brands can build awareness: rather than attempting to replicate the mass-media spend of established competitors, they can create repeated, direct interactions that turn consumers into part of the brand’s community.
Scaling the marketing engine
The move into national retail is nevertheless changing the demands on Nawty Water’s marketing operation.
The brand says its retail presence has grown nearly tenfold over the past six months, creating a need to execute its existing positioning at considerably greater scale.
Tones acknowledges that the business has reached a point where it needs additional specialist support.
“We are a small team, and we know our strengths,” he says.
That has led to the appointment of Retroviral to support the brand’s marketing execution ahead of summer.
For Nawty Water, the agency relationship is not about redefining the brand but helping translate an established identity into a larger retail environment.
“We have built our brand and brand positioning very clearly,” says Tones. “Since scaling nearly 10 times our retail presence in the last six months, we felt it time to lean on a bigger agency to execute at the scale needed for this jump.”
From 560 outlets to 1,000
The immediate priority is now less about securing the next listing and more about making the expanded footprint work.
Upcoming listings with Checkers Liquor and OK Liquor are expected to take Nawty Water from 560 outlets to more than 1,000 for the summer.
That represents a significant change in the business’s operating requirements.
“I think from there we will turn our focus to servicing those 1,000 outlets and making sure we keep showing up,” says Tones.
That emphasis on execution is notable. For emerging brands, securing retail listings can be treated as the end goal, but the commercial reality begins once products are on the shelf.
Stock availability, visibility, sampling, retailer relationships and consumer demand all need to work together if distribution is to translate into sustainable sales.
For Nawty Water, the next stage of growth will therefore test whether the community-led model that built the brand can operate at national retail scale.
The brand has moved from asking consumers to wait until it reaches their province to putting its product within reach of shoppers across the country.
The next challenge is making sure the brand continues to show up — both on shelf and in the communities that helped put it there.
