Jetty Launches With $2.5 Million After $1.95 Billion Poppi Sale

By Nathan Brooks

Allison and Stephen Ellsworth have committed $2.5 million to Jetty, a new hydration brand launched one year after their $1.95 billion sale of Poppi to PepsiCo. Ellsworth says Jetty sells hydration powders and liquid beverages under the “literally everyday hydration” label. The money is self-funded.

Ellsworth describes hydration as crowded and declining, with Jetty going directly against Liquid I.V. and Gatorade. She sees an opening because major players, in her view, market toward men and athletic solutions. That leaves women who want hydration and flavor underserved.

Her timing data points to routine consumption. “The data shows when people are hydrating — say, drinking a Gatorade, a BODYARMOR, a Vitaminwater — it’s morning, lunch, and afternoon. It’s not even at time of sweat,” she said. “Seventy percent of consumers are doing it not while working out.”

Jetty is meant to become a coffee- or Diet Coke-like habit, regardless of whether a consumer has broken a sweat. That reframes the buying occasion from sports recovery to ordinary daytime hydration, according to Ellsworth. It is also the first of five lessons she is carrying from Poppi.

The Poppi playbook: finding an opening in a crowded category

Poppi began as Mother, a health tonic containing apple cider vinegar that chased a niche consumer in a small market. After receiving a $400,000 Shark Tank investment from Rohan Oza, the Ellsworths rebranded as Poppi and moved into the larger, noisier soda category as mainstream soda sales declined.

Ellsworth said Poppi targeted an underserved consumer with a better-for-you offering. She said the brand was different enough to seem special, but familiar enough for soda drinkers to embrace. Her lesson was that a struggling category may not signal falling demand; existing products may simply have stopped meeting consumers’ needs.

Why the founders are doing it again

Ellsworth said: “My kids asked me, ‘Mom, why are you doing this again?’” She answered: “And I was like, ‘Because I want to. I’m really excited to build again.’” The restart, she said, is a deliberate choice to build and show her children the value of hard work.

She tied that choice to instilling a work ethic in her children. “And I also think there’s something really important about showing my kids the work ethic of it all,” she said. “We don’t want them to grow up and think, ‘Oh, we don’t have to work hard.’”

Building Poppi carried enormous stakes. “It was like my life was on the line,” she said. “It was about generational legacy and wealth, and all of these things.”

Ellsworth says financial pressure is lower because the couple does not need to build Jetty for money. That lets them focus on the joy of building, but she says founders still need stakes that feel personal rather than relying on a good product alone. The couple’s pride and self-reliance now drive Jetty.

During Poppi, Rohan Oza’s beverage experience helped guide the Ellsworths’ growth, she said. Jetty has no outside investor: “It’s truly 100% percent on our own. It feels almost riskier,” she said. “We’re doing it truly alone, to prove that we can do it alone too.”

Personality before product claims

Ellsworth put benefit claims second on Jetty’s packaging. A bottle notes electrolytes, real fruit juice and a variety of nutrients, but the packaging is primarily colorful, flavor-forward and full of quirky messages. One message reads: “Hydrating just became your new personality.”

“People get really caught up on, benefit, benefit, benefit,” Ellsworth said, “but they wouldn’t think to make the largest callout just fun.” She wants Jetty to feel like an identity rather than a list of reasons to drink it. Her rationale is that lasting brands require emotional connection.

“Most of the time when you’re marketing, and you want to build a long-term sustainable brand that community connects with, you have to find ways to emotionally connect with your consumers,” she said. Data and health claims can inform a purchase, but the packaging has to carry the brand’s larger emotional appeal.

Build the company before the product

The Ellsworths initially focused heavily on Mother’s product, then scrambled to build an organization as the company grew. Jetty reverses that sequence. “When we decided to do this, our first exercise was to sit down and make an org chart,” Ellsworth said.

They modeled costs, funding needs and staffing projections years into the future before Jetty had a product. “If we’re really going to do this at scale, how do we skip the first two years of business where you’re doing everything yourself and trying to figure it out?” she said. “Why not surround ourselves with the most incredible team and do it right from the beginning?”

Amazon is both a storefront and a trust signal

Ellsworth treats Amazon as both a distribution channel and a trust signal. “Prime is in 90% of households in America,” she said. “We look at Amazon for the first two to three years as a marketing channel for trial.”

Under her model, a shopper spots Jetty at Whole Foods, checks reviews on a phone and treats four and a half stars and dozens of comments as the final purchase nudge. She says the review validation can drive the sale even if the transaction happens elsewhere.

Packaging changes to fit that behavior. Jetty’s powders come in a box for retail, where the format helps them stand out on shelves, but Amazon shoppers will receive a bag. “If you ship a box, it’ll get dented and you’ll get a bad review,” she said. Reviews, she said, are everything.

What does this change for consumers?

For shoppers, Jetty offers a daily-use alternative to workout-led hydration, in powder and liquid form. Retail buyers get shelf-friendly boxes; Amazon buyers get mail-ready bags. The brand also asks them to buy an identity and a mood before they parse the nutrient label, making hydration itself the entry point rather than exercise.

The near-term test is whether Amazon trial and shelf reviews convert into repeat demand in a category Ellsworth says is declining. If they do, Jetty will test her Poppi lesson in a new category: crowded markets can reward an underserved consumer and an identity-first product. If not, the self-funded launch leaves the Ellsworths carrying the risk alone.