Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - The True Story Behind Four Loko

Episode Date: August 20, 2025

Go to joindeleteme.com/Taylor20 and use my code TAYLOR20 at checkout for 20% off! SUPPORT ME ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/c/taylorlorenzBuy a subscription to my Tech and Online Culture newsletter, User Magazine to support my work!!!! 🙏 https://www.usermag.co Few beverages have left as unforgettable a mark on American culture as Four Loko. With a dizzying mix of alcohol and caffeine, it skyrocketed to success in the 2000s and became an iconic American brand overnight. Four Loko was one of the first brands to ever go "viral" and the brand understood internet culture before the internet was even mainstream. But that virality came with a cost. The company suffered government crackdowns, a media moral panic, they changed the formula of their drink and somehow emerged from it all more relevant than ever. When I met Four Loko CEO and cofounder Jaisen Freeman, I knew I had to talk to him for my podcast. We talk about how his scrappy college drink startup went from being nearly banned to one of the top-selling beverages in the country and how the brand has managed to transform online controversy into a business. Follow me:https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenzhttps://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz3.0https://www.tiktok.com/@taylorlorenz

They sent out a letter saying that this product may or may not be safe. So we were stuck with $30 million of inventory that we had to destroy overnight. Four Logo was one of the first brands to ever go viral. With its dizzying mix of alcohol and caffeine, it skyrocketed to success in the 2000s and became an iconic American beverage brand overnight. The brand understood internet culture before the internet was even mainstream. But that virality came with a cost. The company suffered government crackdowns, a media moral panic.

change the formula of their drink and somehow emerged from it all more relevant than ever. Today, I'm joined by Jason Freeman, co-founder and CEO of FourLoco to talk about how his scrappy college drink startup went from being nearly banned to one of the top selling beverages in the country and how the brand has managed to leverage online controversy and transform it into cultural currency. Jason, welcome to Power User. Thank you. Thank you for having me on. Appreciate it. Okay, so like many millennials, I've had a decent amount of Four-Loco in my day. And I think the first time I tried it was back in the 2000s in college. When did the company start? And how did you come up with For Logo? Well, we started in college. There was three of us. We were friends. We went to

the Ohio State University. You have to say they teach us. So one of the only classes that is good at Ohio State. And we had an idea to make a Red Bull and vodka pre-can product. And this was about 2006, 2007 is when we started. We're three young budding entrepreneurs that really thought we knew something but we didn't we didn't really know anything and we set off to take the world by storm how did you come up with a name for loco so there's four ingredients and it was a crazy blend of flavors you know we wanted the can to be really bright and vibrant so we came out with a camo pattern which is still kind of our iconic brand today but again it was just three of us sitting around like a kitchen table and being like this is what we're going to do what were those four ingredients it was caffeine

touring gerana and wormwood was the was the original four ingredients yes we obviously took caffeine out many years ago. Okay, so let's get back into the like late aught's beginnings of Four Loco. So you started it at college. You guys are getting this beverage brand off the ground. How did you market it and get the word out? I mean, there was no influencer marketing back then. You know, we didn't have big advertising budgets. We were obviously young college guys that, you know, just starting out. And you got to remember the time period of this around 2007, 2008, social media was just emerging. Because we were college students, we had access to Facebook. And so we did a lot of advertising on Facebook, showing the brand, showing to our friends.

And we haven't been able to confirm this. We're still trying to. But we believe we were, if not the first, one of the first brands actually promoted on Facebook. And so we were marketing online, marketing to our friends. And we're basically marketing to ourselves. I completely believe that because Facebook didn't even have like brand pages. I don't even think until 2009. And that was like official brand.

So if you're doing that in 2008, you were definitely early. Why do you think it caught on so fast? Everything is timing, right? Especially for brands. And I think we just hit the right time of being able to be a small brand and be able to actually talk to the masses, right? YouTube is just emerging. Facebook, obviously, Instagram, but it wasn't really there yet. But we were able to talk to everybody very quickly. And also we were marketing to ourselves. A lot of brands at the time, you know, it was older people trying to market to a younger generation. And we were literally marketing to ourselves and our friends, which made, you know, the brand have more appeal. be more hip and cool. Tell me how you grew the company. You guys are all at Ohio State, starting this beverage brand, cooking it up. Did you guys graduate and get an office? Like, how did you go about like producing this product? We didn't actually have an office till about 2012 or 13. We had a little PO box at a UPS store in Chicago, Illinois. And everyone thought that was our office, but it was like just a little mailbox about this big that we people could send our mail. This is a merging

like cloud technology. So if you call their 1-800 number, it just kind of rang to our, to our phone. So we could kind of appear that we were in this big company when it was just really three guys trying to, you know, figure this out day to day. And then I think from a, you know, from a growing perspective, we really didn't know. Like our original business plan was like if we could get to $5 million in revenue, we could retire. You know, we obviously surpassed that greatly. But, you know, we got a small SBA loan. You know, my partner, Jeff, his parents re-financed their house. My parents borrowed against their 401k. And we really had no choice but to be successful. So, Oh, my God. Your parents believe in you.

I don't even know what my mom would say if I came to her with a business idea in college. Okay, so tell me how it became this like cultural phenomenon. Because I feel like when you explain it, it's like, okay, you guys had this idea for this, you know, sort of energy drink. But it was such a phenomenon. And I feel like it just became everywhere in cultures. Can you tell me about that? Yeah, listen, I think a little bit is timing, luck, and a little bit is by design.

When we really started to really look at what the brand was, what we wanted to be. and we wanted to just be unapologetically like American is what I always our thought was we didn't want to pretend it was something that it wasn't and I think for us we really wanted the consumers to create the brand and a lot of brands will try to have these brand standards and all these things and tell people how it should look and we were like okay let's go out and look on Facebook on YouTube and see what how are people using the brand how are they talking about it and let's take that and make that the brand and how we communicate and really communicate with it with the consumer one-on-one you know there was was one moment where this rap group in Cleveland, Ohio, called the GWOP gang, they created a rap song called Loco for That Loco. And it became like this one of the first like viral hits on on YouTube. And it still to this day is on YouTube. It has millions and millions of views. And again, we didn't know these guys. They just like what we're doing like the brand. So we hit them up like, hey, how do we support you? You know, what can we do to continue to collab? And that's always kind of been our ethos. Even today when we work with creators or even entertainers, they're like, what do you

want us to do. We're like, we want you to be you. Let us fit into what you are doing as opposed to us telling you, okay, this is how you should look and this is how you should act. We really want people to be themselves and then figure out how our brand fits into that. For Logo was one of the first like viral brands. I mean, when we think about like the millennial internet, right? Like it was all over. And this was before Instagram even. Can you tell me more about some of those moments around this era? Again, it was just us every day, like how are we in the right place? How are we at the right parties? How are we doing the right things? As opposed to that time, you got to remember if you think about the time period, again,

the shift was really happening from like television advertising and radio and print, right? And so those were what the big companies were doing. And obviously, we didn't have the budgets for those. So also we were really doing hand-to-hand combat, whether in store or at parties or at events. And listen, things just started to happen there. I can't really tell you how it happened. It's like T-Pain all of a sudden had this big chain of two four local cans, right? And we're just like, okay, we're doing something well.

I don't know what it is. but let's continue down this strategy to try to be culturally relevant versus just like, here's our can and here's our ad and here's the vision, right? It's really like how do we ingrain ourselves in culture? And I think for us, it's like being at the right events, at the right places, at the right parties. And then obviously being at the right timing of social media booming without the algorithm, without you having to really, really try to get to the consumer, we were right there front

and center. Run me through some of like the big cultural moments that you guys were part of in Naira. I mean, Saturday Night Live did like a three minute. skit on four logo unsolicited that we didn't even know right it was showing up on bill mar it was showing up at night shows it shows up on the simpses it shows up on all the you know the cartoons and the tv shows as kind of a funny joke it still happens today and so for us it's a blessing and curse because we're not really controlling that but as things get bigger than you know other companies and regulars start to say okay what are they doing something bad are they doing something illegal which we weren't you know we were

doing everything above board but i think for us it was how do we be at the right right places with the right people in hand. And it's just making sure that we're in every, you know, relevant Lower East Side party, making sure Locos there, it's front and center. People see it like, oh, okay, I know what that is. And that's something that I really want to be, you know, be a part of my night. We did this skit with the influencer, the Fat Jewish. And I don't know if you know who the Fat Jewish is. He was very cultural irrelevant at this time. And his idea was, let's give away a whole bunch of money. And we're like, okay, what do you want to do? We rented a little space in Chinatown, and he sent out a post.

First person to bring me a loco wins $10,000. And so we didn't know what was going to happen. We didn't know who would show up. I think it was a minute and 37 seconds later, this woman showed up in this room with him with a four loco on her hand. And basically there was two strings attached to the ceiling. And one string was a whole bunch of like turkey and cold cuts. And the other string was $10,000.

And she had to pick one. And she obviously picked the right one and she was shower with $10,000. The brand allows us to kind of do things that normal brands wouldn't do. And I think consumers catch on to that and start to see that, oh, this is authentic. It's kind of weird, but I kind of like it. But it's not doing what the traditional brands are doing. And that's what our ethos has always been for Forloco. I think, like, in this era, as you mentioned, it became so relevant, so all over the place.

And so much, like, media attention around it that you guys were like on everyone's radar. I am thinking of this quote from Esquire around this time that said, For Loco is arguably the most insane beverage to hit the market since there was actually cocaine in Coca-Cola. And I feel like it was also like very early in terms of moral panics like online where nowadays we see like a new moral panic about everything where parents are freaking out. But this was like the internet was young. And I remember even I think like my parents, definitely friends parents would be like, be careful. You can't have that or you know, it was sort of seen as this like controversial thing. And I think the name fed into that.

So that got you guys on the radar of regular. Letters. Tell me what happened there. Back to your point, I think the notoriety and the increase in awareness and being on social media was a blessing. But then we started to get on everyone's radar. We weren't doing anything different. There was products that were very similar that were on the market. There was products that were adjacent. The ingredients, you have to understand, to get alcoholic product available for sale, there is many, many levels of approval, right? There's like federal approval, state approval. There's many agencies. So the fact that it was illegal or we're doing something wrong was kind of comical because of the steps that we had to get through to get

the product there. But I think what happened, and back to your point about the hysteria around the brand, we met with congressmen and authorities, I don't want name this person, but a little bit older gentleman. And I said, hey, there's no really difference in what we're doing versus a rebel vodka or a Kalua and coffee. And his response to me was, I don't see college kids shotgunning Kalua and coffee on YouTube. You know, so it really became, it really became like. okay that's a distinction right of how people decide to use it versus like this is what the actual product was and we kind of were like the first like cancel culture brand that became this mass hysteria and it was really hard to kind of sit there and take that because we felt like hey we're like these

middle class kids that came up built this from nothing bootstrap the american dream and we thought everyone would be happy for us and i think people are happy for you as long as you don't start taking away from their stuff and that's what we learned that's what we learned very quickly i remember this era because again, we were still like drinking this at parties and stuff. And I feel like there was a lot of anger. Like I mean, I remember people doing like petitions of like save for a loco and like, can you talk about the kind of like the fan response and the consumer response? Yeah, listen, most of the fan of response, consumer response was very positive, right? Like even we were going through the governmental issues and we took the caffeine out. There was a vigil in Union Square.

Eddie Wang, who, you know, right or fresh off the boat, he has a restaurant in the Lower East Side. and he decided to serve for loco and the authorities came in like prohibition style and like shut the place down right i think he lost his liquor license for like five years because of it so these all things that were mass hysteria over something that you know was was not that justified for mass hysteria was for us especially you know young people at the time just like what is going on why are we creating so much strife around all this but you know i think another story which we talked about our our office our office at the PO box, it was a UPS store, and we get our mail there.

And I remember the guy they're calling me, he said, hey, there's some people here protesting out front against Four Loco. And so protesters came to the UPS store because they thought it was our office with signs saying like, this is terrible, it's killing kids, right? And so you're just sitting there

and you're like, what is going on? You just figure it out day to day and just keep pushing, pushing forward. But the consumer was always there. We always knew we had the consumer because we were doing things authentically. And again, it sounds like, like we're some transformational brand, but we were just real. And I think people saw that for the

first time as opposed to trying to press a message on them. It's just like, hey, this is fun in a can. And we're going to be unapologetically that. So you guys remove the caffeine. I'm wondering kind of like how that affected your products. I know after that the brand had become, like you said, it was this seen as this like toxic thing by so many like adults or like older people and like parents. And like I feel like it was really hard to like get people. You know, I imagine it was hard to get in bars. How did you evolve and pivot in that era? We made the decision to remove caffeine. The government, they wanted us to prove to them that alcohol, caffeine and alcohol mixed together

was safe. And we realized we could fight the government, but we would eventually lose. So we thought, hey, we'll take the caffeine out. We'll make some new product and we'll move upon our merry way. Well, that's not really what happened. The FDA, who does not regulate alcohol, they regulate food. They sent out a letter saying that this product may or may not be safe. And so, you know, we have our big distributors in the places that sell.

They're like, can we sell this stuff? And we're like, we think you can, but we don't know. So we were stuck with $30 million of inventory that we had to destroy overnight. And we didn't have $30 million. We had just, just started making money. So we worked out a deal with our distributors because we knew the consumer was there. Our bank then kicked us out and said, we don't bank with people like you. So we didn't have a place to like collect deposits or even pay people.

So we found a bank in Chicago that, you know, has been a great partner with us for a very long time. And then we had over 90 lawsuits. filed against us like i hey i slip and fells because of for loco we even had a woman who was in jail for drunk driving and killed somebody saying after the fact that she had been drinking for a loco which there was no proof of so she was suing us from jail we had to pay 20 million dollars of lawsuits on top of not having a line of credit or any investment but the consumer was kind of always there and so we kind of just had to like get through this period of time where we could just you know filter through. We stayed low. We didn't do many interviews because we weren't going to really

get a good shot. Everyone thought we were kind of the devil or doing illegal things. And then we started another brand in 2013, 2014 called Not Your Father's Rupier, which was an alcoholic root beer. And it shot up very quickly. We had some great partnerships. And then Papp's Brewing Company wanted to purchase the brand. And that kind of helped us get out of all of our financial troubles and mess and allowed us to kind of refocus and move the business forward, you know, which we've been doing for the, for kind of the last 10 years, innovating new partnerships and new brands as well. Well, you guys, especially in the mid-2010s, I feel like we're really early influencer marketers. Like, you've always leveraged the internet and, like, been able to wield the internet.

And I feel like that's maybe what helped get you through that time, too, because, like, those first five years of the 2010s, I feel like it was rough. Can you tell me what brands you went on to launch next? Because I think you did, like, the Rose A or, you know, tell me about all that. Yeah, we had a great partnership with Josh O'Skrause, also known as the Fat Jewish. Him and his partners had this great idea to start a canned wine called Babe. And then another rosé called White Corrosay on top of that that was very successful. And they wanted to be kind of like, and it kind of was the first kind of internet social influencer alcohol brand. Obviously there's, you know, so many of them now. But he was really the pioneer of that. And, you know, we kind of worked

the back end. He worked and his partners worked the marketing. It was very successful and sold Danzer Bush a couple years later, which was great. We've had some failures as well, which I think you have to can't always talk about the highs but we had some good ideas there's a golfer called john daily we did a like a john daily cocktails with him it went pretty well it just didn't have the success of some of the other brands as far as influencer marketing or create creators you know we're always open to any of these people that makes sense that are authentic that are really doing things authentic and i think even when josh with the fat jewish went with through some issues himself we were like hey we're here we're supportive how do we work together and i think that's always kind of been our ethosos is like

We kind of feel for people that get the raw end of the cancel stick, as long as it's not, you know, something really crazy. We're always very supportive of that because we know that, you know, it can be misunderstanding sometimes. You still struggled even after two taking the caffeine out, right? I mean, listen, we still, and still to this day has happened, but obviously right after one of the big moments where we saw kind of society in itself come after us is there was a couple big after parties for Lala pluza, which, you know, obviously there's Coachella and these other events that have big afterpart. So we had an idea to have Lala Palooza talent at an after party for free for our consumers. And so we found this warehouse on the west side of Chicago. We had Little Luzzi Verds. We had, you know, major laser.

We had a whole much a great artist that we're going to come and play. You know, we didn't know if 100 people would show up or a thousand. About 2,500 people showed up at 5 o'clock for a 730 doors opening. So we were at capacity really quick. And as we let people in, it was, you know, free show, free for local. We have food and events. and activations and the police chief came down and basically said I wasn't aware of this event and I heard that Chief Keith was playing here. Now Chicago and Chief Keith, you don't know,

there's very bad blood. There's a lot of negativity around him, which wasn't true. He was just saying that. And it wasn't because of that. It was because it was us and that we were doing a free show. So they literally shut us down. And so people are showing up like artists and people are coming to our event and there's cop cars all around and sirens. So it kind of helped the brand a little bit. from a street credibility, but it kind of sucked because we had put so much into this party, and it got shut down basically on false pretenses when Red Bull was having a party, you know, half a mile away. I mean, you mentioned Little Uzi-Vird.

I feel like you guys also worked with a lot of music artists really early, right? I mean, can you talk about that? I mean, music has always been a big thing of us. We started four local records. We didn't do much around it, but we always knew that internet, music, alcohol, they're just intertwined. And how do we do well with those? Obviously, we talked about T-Pain, Little Uzi-Vird,

major laser. I think you guys worked with RIFRaf. RIF is an interesting one. We wanted to change the narrative, right? So I think this might have been around the same time about 2014, 15. Everything had gone social media. Television, it was like nobody was doing it. And so we had this idea because Vice had just started their television channel and they had some ad space. So we're like, hey, wouldn't it be crazy if we were like, we're so anti-doing commercials. We actually did a commercial. And so we did a commercial with Riff Raff that aired only on VICE. which was very fun. And he's, I mean, listen, he's, he's a walking for loco. Just, just everything about him is a walking for a local. So it was a perfect partnership. It got a little fanfare, but it was just,

it was fun and it's just something that we like to try a little different. Okay, so you guys are like doing pretty well. It seems like you sold off multiple alcohol brands and then COVID hit. And I feel like 2020 must have been tough because, I mean, I just know people in the beverage space, consumer product space had a really hard time. How did you navigate that? In the beginning stage, it was very tough because we didn't know. what was going to happen, right? Obviously, bars and restaurants shut down. Almost all of our sales are done in comedian stores, liquor stores, and package stores. So when they said that these are essential services, it kind of saved our business. A lot of brands are highly, you know,

relying on bars and restaurants. We are not. But, you know, it was hard because, you know, we have a lot of employees that this was their livelihood. You know, we didn't, you know, get rid of any employees. We kept everybody on at full salary. What we did is just changed our sales tactics. We went from, you know, people, making sales calls to calling people on the phone or sending mailers or sending emails until it was, you know, safe for people to go out. Our business actually expanded during COVID because of how our products consumed. And we weren't not really relying on restaurant and bars, really just liquor stores and convenience stores and package stores. And so it brought a lot of people to our category that may

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dot com slash Taylor 20 and use promo code Taylor 20 at checkout. That's join delete me.com slash Taylor 20 and use code Taylor 20 at checkout. Don't wait until it's too late to safeguard your privacy. Make sure your data and your families stays protected. I feel like also for Loco is now being embraced by Gen Z. And I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about that. Like how did you as like a brand that was so associated with millennials like also become such a favorite of Gen Z because I feel like it's really hard in a lot of those brands that

had so much early success around. the time that you did, like, they're sort of stuck in that era and they never really, like, evolved with youth culture. So tell me how you how you manage that. I think that you're completely right. And there are two different, obviously, consumers and the way they think. But I think what we've always been successful at is we want to make local like a right of passage. It's like, this is the thing you drink before you go out, right? This is the thing that you do. And I think us, again, back to music, our big partnership with Live Nation, always being at EDC. And rolling loud and there's these consumers are coming in as they're becoming illegal drinking

agents and they're seeing us and we're really staying in that place where it's cool to drink or part of history as opposed to where you see a lot of brands they start to get spokespersons or people that look like the people that they want to market to and we've really stayed away with that loco is just unapologetically like this is what we are if you want to have a night good night in a can that's what we are and so i think not getting too specific the best thing it happens for me and people think I hate it is when some older millennials are like, oh, wait, I thought that was banned. And I was like, yes, because you shouldn't see any of our marketing. If you're seeing our ads and we're doing something very, very wrong, right? And so I think for us to stay relevant,

you have to stay relevant in culture. You have to stay relevant in music. And you have to stay relevant with who are the new and interesting creators that are coming up. And I think we consistently do that well. Yeah, well, talk to me about how you've like navigated also just the internet now. Because when you started, like, it was so much smaller and, like, having a viral video on YouTube was, like, life-changing. And now it's like TikTok. There's millions of viral videos all day. So how do you approach social media now as a brand? Yeah, listen, I think it's very important. We have a great team of people who their only job is to scour the internet day and night. You know, we had posts that trend on Twitter without any paid media, right, which is very rare for a brand. But I think we're constantly on top of what's

happening, right? As opposed to us creating content, it's like, what's the topic? of the day. Like Harambe is back now in the conversation, right? So we're going to do content around that to be relevant around that. So I think it's finding out what is the conversation online, because that is their conversation in real life as well. And how do we insert in part of that as opposed to trying to being the conversation? You guys also launched a bunch of new flavors, right? I think a couple of years ago, what happened is every flavor we launched, our competitors would copy, right? So it's like, okay, we have a blueberry, you know, smash. And now the next brand has the same thing. And so we step back and we're like, how do we create kind of like a platform

that not only works on the can, but works in the internet and then works in real life. You know, we started that with for local gold. There's a lot of play around gold. We had gold chains. The can is gold. And everyone's like, well, what's the flavor? And that's kind of the great part about it. You kind of get to like discover what the flavor is. And if it works for you, it doesn't. So that was like the number one innovation in our category. And then we followed up with USA for local USA. And people like, Well, what's USA? It's like, it tastes like freedom, right? So it's like playing off of that being fun. And then we did a great partnership with Warheads Candy where we had a Warheads flavor, which was obviously very successful. You're seeing a lot of non-alcoholic brands kind of extend into alcoholic brands.

And we thought that this was a great kind of merge and play. And then our last is for local Camel, which we've owned Camel for a long time. Camel, obviously from fashion to hunting, it just become this big thing. So we're kind of on trend and we're like, hey, we own this. like, why don't we really own it? You know, our merch has been selling out and we've been sending stuff to people, even our partnership with Faze. Like, they love wearing our, our camo kind of merch.

So it's, it's been a good kind of ride on doing these partnerships of flavors. But the hard part is we have to figure out the next one. Well, also, I'm curious, like, how you navigate the beverage landscape today, because it seems like there's this also focus on, like, health and, like, cleanliness. Or you know what I mean? Like, it's all about, like, this is a natural. And when I think of Forloco, I kind of think of, like, JollyRour. ranchers like in a can. Like it doesn't seem like it's like clean drink that you would drink on the way to Pilates or something. So how have you sort of navigated that like boom and sort of like wellness, I guess? Or do you just sort of ignore that and you're like, that's not my consumer? Yeah, I think it's a really good point. It's something that we consistently talk about, right? I don't think for Locos never going to be all natural, low calorie, low sugar. It's just not the DNA of the brand. But what we did is we created a brand called Mamitas with Brody Jenner, which is one gram of sugar, 95 calories,

all natural healthy ingredients tequila based right so that is our foray into that with a loco i think people are more informed but i still do think people are you know inclined i mean you go to starbucks you know people ordering frappuccinos that are a thousand calories right you go to the bar you order margarita like that that has a lot of sugar it's not that undifferent than for loco so i think people do want some balance in their life most people and they want a little bit of that release and not only do they get a release from Loco, I guess in the healthy eating way, but I think the brand actually says something for people. So I think anything in moderation is important. But I think for us, the health and wellness is creating different brands to target that type of consumer.

Tell me about what your business looks like now. I mean, you guys have evolved, I think, from a PO box in Chicago. So how, you know, where is the company operating? How many people do you have? And what does it look like today? Our main office is in Chicago, an actual real office, which I'm at today. We have about 200. 5,300 employees. We have office here. We have office in Monterey, Mexico. We have one in Ireland. What's happened through this and what happened through kind of all the negative publicity and media is international attention started to come upon us. And we spread through Mexico, South America. Before locals become like the number one RTD and like a lot of these central

own South American markets. It's number one RTD in Ireland, Scotland, Northern Ireland. And Now we're now moving kind of south through UK and eventually will be the number one RTD in the United Kingdom, which we're spreading through Europe. And we just launched Australia, which is a completely different market, but very similar, obviously, with English speaking. And so we're using our same playbook in these markets, you know, finding the real interesting creators, you know, that are up and coming, heavy social media presence and, you know, really unapologetically American. We are pitching that. And people resonate with that a lot, whether it's in Asia, whether it's in South America, or whether it's in Europe, you know, we're staying to that like, this is the American brand and people love it. It's interesting because it's managed to be this like hyper American brand.

And you're right. Like when I think of it, I think of like American culture, I guess, because it's like party culture and like, I don't know. There's something like you said, it's very like American. Like, I don't want to say trashy, but like, you know, it's like that fun. You can say it. But like, but it's not like toxic. American. Like, you feel like now, especially as brands are so politicized, it's not seen that way. You know what I mean? Even though it is like hyper-American at this time when like there's so much controversy over nationalism, like it's kind of avoided that. And I don't know how you've been

able to do that or if that's been intentional. We're for everybody, right? I'll give it a prime example. So we made these hats, which were red hats, very red. And they said, make America loco again. And I would wear this hat in the airport. And I would get scowls at me, just people staring at me, not happily, right? And then they would. actually read it and they would start laughing. But then they're like, wait a second, are you for this? Are you against this? Are you here? But we're, it's for everybody. We're for everybody that just wants to have a good time. I mean, we're still for decency. And like, we do have values, but it's also, like, if you're a decent person, we're for everybody. Well, you're not like an overtly political brand,

right? And I think that that's been really hard actually for brands to navigate. I mean, you're talking about cancel culture. Like, one of the biggest examples I can think of is like Bud Light and them doing the single wrong influencer marketing ad and like being targeted, you know, how do you manage to not, like, have the internet come for you in that way and have like people, lawmakers getting involved and things like that? Well, I think we want the internet come for us because it's fun for us. There are a brand. The internet should come for us. Like, if we would have been but light, it would have been fine, right? And I think that's kind of the point. We're not so serious. And we don't pretend to be this, you know, Midwestern American brand. We're not. We're just, we're unapologetically

American. So I think what happens is when you're not authentic and then, you're, you're not authentic. you try to do something out of authenticity that's not authentic that's when people come for you but for us you look at our history we've worked with with everybody right again as long as you're not like completely breaking the law or doing something against values like we're open to it if you said something wrong okay like maybe you just said something wrong that day you know what i mean like i think it's more about the person and i think me and my partner jeff we meet all these creators like there's no one that we've done business with we don't go through an agency to find someone based on their metrics like Everybody they work with, we sit down and have dinner with and we have a conversation with them.

And we want to be connected with them in that way. And so we have a pretty good filter. Like, is this one of our people or is it not? Right. I think that's the difference where what happened with Bud Light, they just outsourced this thing to this agency. And they had no idea what they were doing or who they were working with until the backlash came. Like, I know who we're working with. And if there's backlash, okay, we're ready for it, right?

This is a good person. They made a mistake. Well, it is rare that companies meet the creators, especially the CEOs. meet the creators. Like you said, I think so many people have want to leverage the internet. They just outsource it because they're like, oh, we feel like we should be doing influencer marketing. So like we're going to just outsource that. And that's where I think even our social media team is, I'm looking at them right now. You know, they're like creating Harambe content right now. Right. So like we do everything internal. Yes, we have outside partners that help us with ideas.

But I think if you really want to be part of the conversation and part of the internet, it has to be internal and has to be part of the culture. And I think those brands that do that are the brands that win. Okay, so Four Logo has been on such a roller coaster of a company's story, but where do you guys see the brand going next? And what do you have planned for the future? Let me get my crystal ball out, right? The world domination, I guess, is kind of it. No, but I think for us, it's continued to grow the brand. It's continuing the Four Logo brand to be cemented into pop culture like we are, but it has to stay relevant and you can't just sit back on those laurels. So we are expanding. We have new partnerships coming up, new brands,

We absolutely a big partnership with Faze Klan, which is in gaming, something that we have never done before. And then international expansion. We're in about 30 countries now. We want to double that in five years. So that is really understanding the intricacies of all these different countries. And then again, back to your conversation about health and wellness. We have our brand Mamitas. We have some other different brands that we're working on.

And so for us, again, Jeff and I, we own this company. We run it. I have a great partner who's, you know, my best friend. And we're having so much fun. And I think we're going to keep doing this. we're done having fun and pissing people off. And we want the internet to come for us. So if they're not coming from us, then we're not doing something well.

So I think that's, that is the ethos of Forloco. It's, it is kind of like, well, fuck you. Well, okay, yeah, you, okay, now we're good. We're friends, right? So I think that's, you know, what we want to continue to create and create a great place where people enjoy working and doing fun stuff. Well, Jason, thank you so much for chatting with me today. Thank you.

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