When Celebrities Jump on a Train, Check Where the Last Train Went

George Clooney launched a non-alcoholic beer in March, and the coverage wrote itself. The celebrities are coming for non-alcoholic drinks. Tom Holland has a beer. Elton John has a sparkling wine. Charlie Sheen has a lager called Cold Gold, John Mulaney fronts a brand called Years, Lewis Hamilton has an agave spirit, Katy Perry an aperitif, Kylie Minogue a zero percent rosé.

The list is real. What it proves is nothing, in either direction. A wave of famous names entering a category is not evidence the category is the next big thing, and it is not evidence any of their brands will work. We know because we just watched this movie with tequila, and everyone remembers only the ending where three founders split a billion dollars.

Five years ago it felt like every celebrity had a tequila or a gin, and the reason was two exits. Clooney, Rande Gerber and Mike Meldman sold Casamigos to Diageo in 2017 for seven hundred million dollars plus an earnout that could reach a billion. Ryan Reynolds sold Aviation Gin three years later for up to six hundred ten million. Those two deals are the entire mythology.

Now walk the graveyard, because almost nobody does. Justin Timberlake had a tequila with the maker of Sauza. Toby Keith had a mezcal that was the best selling premium mezcal in America within six months of launch. Blake Shelton had a vodka backed by Pernod Ricard, one of the largest drinks companies on earth. As of this week, two of the three websites are dead, and the third silently redirects to the corporate parent's tequila page, the brand scrubbed on arrival. Not one of them ever announced it was shutting down. Drake's whiskey sold thirty thousand cases in year one, tried to raise thirty million dollars from the public, never closed the offering, and its website is still frozen in 2016, promising an album that came out a decade ago. Travis Scott's spiked seltzer entered the top five of its segment in its first week and was discontinued nine months later. David Beckham's whisky sold so slowly that Diageo launched a half price version two years in; he exited in 2023.

That is how a celebrity brand dies. No press release, no farewell post. The website stops resolving, the Instagram goes dark, the retailer listing says backordered forever. The winners were famous twice, once for being celebrities and once for winning. The losers were never famous for losing, because a quiet death makes no noise, and that silence is why every new wave believes the last one went well.

The cleanest experiment the boom ever ran happened inside one company. Diageo owned Casamigos and it owned half of DeLeon, the tequila it ran with Sean Combs, one of the most famous men alive. Court filings from their 2023 legal fight put the numbers on the record: Diageo had put more than a hundred million dollars into the venture, and DeLeon reached about 3 percent of possible US retail outlets while Casamigos reached 34. Same owner, same category, same years, megafame on both bottles. One got the machine. One didn't. The partnership ended with Diageo paying about two hundred million just to take full control and close the chapter.

The industry's own analysts reached the same conclusion politely: IWSR found celebrity brands outperform when a category is rising and lose the advantage when it turns. Fame is an amplifier. It amplifies whatever the distribution, the price and the product were already going to do.

The category's actual proof has nothing to do with any of these people. Non-alcoholic crossed a billion dollars in American retail while alcohol slipped, a story written on shelves years before the celebrities showed up. They are not leading that migration. They are following it, the way they followed tequila's numbers a decade ago.

The non-alcoholic wave is young, but it already has a scoreboard, and it looks like tequila's.

Tom Holland is killing it. BERO did roughly ten million dollars in its first year, became Target's best selling non-alcoholic beverage launch ever, and raised money in January at a reported valuation north of a hundred million. It is built like a real company: Holland is publicly sober and spent a year in development, and the chief executive is a twenty year beverage operator.

But for every Tom Holland there are a few Blake Livelys. Betty Buzz, one of the most publicized brands of the wave, quietly stopped operating last year; its website now redirects to her other company, which sells canned cocktails with alcohol in them. The same death signature as the tequila graveyard, down to the silent redirect. Kin Euphorics, the tonic Bella Hadid joined as co-founder, tried crowdfunding last fall with a minimum target of one hundred thousand dollars and debt reduction in the use of proceeds; in January the offering was withdrawn without reporting a dollar raised. A Real Housewife's non-alcoholic rosé faded the moment she stopped posting about it.

And the biggest group sits in the middle: Hamilton's spirit has Pernod Ricard money and, after nearly three years, no published sales figures. Sheen, Mulaney, Clooney, all a year old or less. All bets. They are wagers that fame plus category growth equals a business, which is exactly the equation tequila just finished grading.

Celebrity launches are the best free advertising this category has ever had. Every one, winner or body, spends millions normalizing the idea that a grown adult orders a serious drink with no alcohol in it. If you run anything in this space, and we do, you root for all of them.

You just don't confuse the advertising with the verdict. Whether Clooney can do it twice is a live experiment, and this version of the trick is harder: tequila came with a built in effect, and this product has to survive on what it tastes like. Ryan Reynolds, the other man who turned a bottle into a fortune, has not jumped in yet. I notice that.

The defining factors will be the same ones the graveyard already settled. Who runs the company. What it costs next to the thing beside it. Whether anyone orders it a second time, because the name on the can gets you the first order and is not in the room for the second.