Only a year ago, scores of spry British tweens and their parents packed into grocery stores, stuffing their arms with bottles of brightly colored Prime. The drink—originally an electrolyte-spiked coconut water that expanded its offerings to include caffeine-loaded energy drinks costing less than $2.50 a can—was put on resale sites for 1,200 British pounds, or almost $1,500. It became so popular that last summer, U.K. retailers put security stickers on individual bottles of a new strawberry watermelon flavor to deter theft.
But as with the frenetic energy levels after chugging a heavily caffeinated drink, what goes up must come down.
Less than a year after the hoopla, Prime—founded by influencers and content creators Logan Paul and Olajide Olayinka Williams Olatunji, also known as KSI—had gone from $1.2 billion in projected 2023 sales to a product retailers have hardly been able to move.
In 2024’s first quarter, U.K. sales for Prime fell 50% year over year, raking in 12.8 million British pounds compared to 26.8 million in the quarter the year before, according to The Grocer, per data from retail and consumer platform NielsenIQ. X and Reddit posts show photos of Prime drinks on clearance, selling for 31 pence.
The drink company was humbled even more on Tuesday, after a class-action lawsuit alleged Prime contains excessive caffeine and “forever chemicals.” Paul responded on TikTok and Instagram, denying the claims.
“This ain’t a rinky-dink operation,” he said. “We use the top bottle manufacturers in the United States. All your favorite beverage brands…use these companies. If the product is served in plastic, they make a bottle for them.”
Representatives for Paul and KSI did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
Recent scrutiny of the brand has not been kind to Prime, but there’s another wild card variable that could be the nail in the brand’s coffin, experts say. It’s Gen Alpha, young people born in 2010 to 2014, who, now approaching 14, have an astonishing amount of spending power. The fate of Prime—and so many other content-creator-born brands—are in the hands of today’s tweens, Andrea Hernández, author behind the popular food-and-beverage Substack newsletter Snaxshot, told Fortune. The generation cycles through fads rapidly, chewing up brands and spitting them out.
“A brand cannot live on hype alone,” she said. “And the hype alone is not going to build the brand.”
The rush
Founded in January 2022, Prime was the brainchild of Paul, a 29-year-old influencer turned professional wrestler who boasts over 45 million followers across Instagram and TikTok, and KSI, a 30-year-old British boxer and entrepreneur with over 24 million YouTube subscribers.
Prime, with its built-in fan base of millions of young people, made $250 million in sales its first year. It was sustained by the celebrities attached to the brand—such as Kansas City Chiefs star quarterback Patrick Mahomes and New York Yankees slugger Aaron Judge—and limited releases of flavors that made the drink feel precious and rare.
“During the launch period, the sports drink gained immense popularity, causing a supply shortage that created an [air] of exclusivity for the brand and its products,” GlobalData consumer analyst George Shaw said in a November 2023 press release.
Indeed, shortages of the beverage line in Britain forced smaller retailers to mark up the prices of Prime and for grocery chain Tesco to implement a limit of three bottles per customer.
As the brand grew, catapulting past Gatorade in 2023 to become the most-sold hydration beverage at Walmart, so did its eyebrow-raising stunts: To celebrate $1 billion in sales, Prime launched a contest to win a $500,000 24-karat-gold Prime bottle. The company opened two pop-up stores in London and New York for 48 hours only.
“We have this thing called the cell phone that lets us reach every corner of the globe,” Paul told Bloomberg. “We’d love to have our footprint in every country.”
The jitters
Prime’s success is owed in large part to kids obsessed with the brand. Between its social media stunts and limited drops, Prime was built for the glued-to-their-phone tweens of today.
Those under age 8 already spend three hours per day on the apps, per Morning Consult’s March 2024 Growing Up Alpha report. The parents surveyed said YouTube was the primary entertainment source for 60% of Gen Alpha; Paul has over 23.5 million subscribers on the platform. In 2022, he was the ninth-highest-paid YouTuber, per Forbes. Gen Alphas are particularly susceptible to the “bandwagon effect” proliferated by social media and influencers.
“It’s really pronounced in that age group,” Mindy Weinstein, founder and CEO of digital marketing company Market MindShift, told the Washington Post. “They aren’t always sure where they fit into the world. But now by buying that [item] they feel like they fit in.”
The popularity of the drink and the initial status associated with it, however, are what paradoxically led to it slipping, Hernández said. Brands created by popular influencers and internet creators benefit from their founders’ large followings, scaling rapidly, but without putting thought into how to sustain the company. Airbnb fell victim to this pitfall in 2023 after an incredibly successful IPO. Sure, the company was growing, but it had a lackluster online platform and complaints from users saying they could just get a better experience at a hotel.
“We need to get our house in order,” Airbnb’s cofounder and CEO Brian Chesky told Bloomberg. “We need to make sure the listings are great, we’re providing great customer service, and we’re affordable. And I’ve told our team that we can get back to creating new and exciting things once we’ve fixed that foundation.”
Prime’s existential question, according to Hernández, is what its sustainability looks like. How will it retain the interest of an overstimulated generation with thousands of brands vying for its attention?
“Can this survive Gen Alpha growing up?” Hernández said. “I do think that we’re in that cultural convergence.”
The crash
With the recent controversies attached to Prime, Hernández doesn’t believe the company will be able to just shake off the bad press. The significance of the recent lawsuit about Prime’s packaging and caffeine levels isn’t the potential dangers of the product, Hernández said, it’s simply about notoriety.
“When you’re starting to get sued, and you’re just this big persona, it compounds,” Hernández said. “You get banned by schools, you start to get this sort of reputation, whether or not things actually turn out to be factual.”
Paul certainly has a reputation: In 2017, he came under intense criticism for publishing a vlog in Japan’s Aokigahara, or “Suicide Forest,” where he filmed a corpse. After posting a video of himself tasering dead rats weeks later, Paul was temporarily demonetized on YouTube, unable to make money off ads. In January 2023, Paul was slapped with a class-action lawsuit after allegedly raking in millions in cryptocurrency for promoting an NFT game that never came to fruition.
The company has been able to weather the storm this long, even amid the controversy. Hernández argues Gen Alpha may not always look at Prime’s cocreator so generously.
“[Prime’s] velocity relied a lot on hype—a lot on the interest of a lot of preteens that are now approaching teenagedom, where they’re like, ‘Oh, that was really dumb. Why did I buy this stupid drink from this YouTuber?’”
