A Hard Tea Brand Went Hunting for Growth

At a store this fall, a stack of bright yellow cans sits beside a set of Twisted Tea deer antlers and a full lodge fireplace scene. Some of the cans are wearing camo. The cooler aisle has been moved into a hunting cabin, and nothing in the display pretends otherwise. 

Twisted Tea and Realtree announced on September 28 a limited-edition fall collaboration that puts Realtree’s APX camouflage on Twisted Tea packaging for the first time. Team Realtree logos appear on Original 12- and 18-pack wraps, a limited-edition 24-ounce can wears the full pattern, and a merchandise line runs from hoodies and beanies to chairs and duck calls. A national Tea Drop campaign spans TV, streaming, social, bars, restaurants and retail, and senior brand director Erica Taylor said teaming up with Realtree “felt like a no-brainer.” 

What actually happened is less spontaneous than a fall collab looks. On its second-quarter earnings call in July, Boston Beer told investors it would run its Tea Drop college football ads this season and launch Realtree camo national packaging and promotion. The camo was a line item in a recovery plan before it was ever a can. The long-running campaign kept its spine, and the collaboration gave it a new surface for the shelf and the bar. 

Realtree has done this many times over. Its licensing pages count more than 2,000 licensees selling over 30,000 products, an estimated $4 billion a year, from bags and boots to a camo deep fryer, and its business site features a Nike SB release among recent products. That makes Realtree less a licensor than a working identity other categories rent. 

Name the mechanism plainly. Twisted Tea did not buy reach. It bought an occasion. Realtree already owns the autumn, outdoors, truck-bed version of many Twisted Tea drinkers’ lives, and the collaboration lets the brand show up inside that world rather than advertise at it. Borrowed identity is cheaper than built identity, and it arrives with the audience’s trust attached. 

The mechanism alone does not explain why now, though. Boston Beer’s second-quarter results show shipments down 4.5%, with Twisted Tea among the brands driving the decline, even as advertising, promotional and selling expenses rose 16.4%. On the same call, management said Twisted Tea faced declines and market share challenges, that much of its lost volume moved to spirits-based hard teas, particularly Boston Beer’s own Sun Cruiser, and that improving share trends in hard tea is a key priority for the year. A new chief marketing officer, Allison Stransky, starts on October 12. This is a category leader playing defense against a newer format, part of which it sells itself. 

That is the part worth sitting with if your flagship product is losing ground to a newer format, especially one your own company launched. Anchoring the older product in a use case its buyers already care about, through a partner that owns that use case, gives it a reason to be chosen that the newer format has not claimed yet. 

What does distinctiveness look like here, concretely? It is a pattern that travels. Camo works on a can, a case wrap, a hoodie, a duck call and a retail display, and each of those carries the same signal without a line of copy. A partnership asset that only fits a logo lockup on a slide does none of that. 

Run the test on your own company. List your last three co-marketing partnerships and ask, for each one, whether a customer could spot the collaboration without reading a word, or whether it was two logos on a webinar page. Most B2B partnerships are the second kind, which means they borrowed a name and none of an identity. 

The antlers and the fireplace are a store display. The strategy behind them is not. When a newer format is pulling buyers away, the answer may be changing the room your product sits in.