Grooovee
Co-Founder & Creative Director (In Progress)
01 / Context
Grooovee began as the inverse of Confess.
If Confess was about reverence, Grooovee was about release.
It was born from the same curiosity—how do we make something that heals?—and evolved into a study of joy, digestion, and design.
Grooovee is a functional, non-alcoholic lifestyle drink that helps with gut health, reflux, and calm—without asking you to compromise taste, beauty, or vibe. It’s not a supplement. It’s not a soda. It’s a reset in a can.
I wanted to create something playful and grounding at once—a drink you’d keep next to your skincare minis and matcha powders. Something that makes you feel better and feel cute.
It’s for the ones who light candles after work. Who romanticize their routines. Who love a solo night-in as much as a girls’ night out.
A little fizzy. A little flirty. A lot soothing.
02 / What I Walked Into
The functional beverage shelf was already full—Poppi, Olipop, De Soi—but few felt personal. The category had split in two: sterile health claims on one end, aesthetic irony on the other.
The gap wasn’t flavor. It was feeling.
Most “functional” brands spoke to the body but ignored the ritual—the emotional comfort of pouring something that looks good, smells good, and feels like care.
The challenge was clear: build something that merges function with flirtation.
A drink that heals but still has personality.
Grooovee’s ambition isn’t to outcompete—it’s to outfeel. To take the rigor of functional beverages and the intimacy of self-care and merge them into something beautiful.
Every brand promises wellness. We wanted to promise delight.
03 / What I’m Actually Doing
We are building Grooovee by hand—literally. No lab, no investors, no production line. Just notebooks, kitchens, and curiosity.
Concept Development & Early Testing
Wrote the foundational thesis for Grooovee: a non-alcoholic, functional drink that soothes the gut, restores calm, and makes care feel glamorous.
Designed the initial flavor families—Glow, Fix, and Dream—each pairing function with mood rather than just ingredient.
Created kitchen-grade prototypes using herbal infusions (ginger, fennel, peppermint, lemon balm) to test flavor balance, carbonation, and emotional response.
Documented every trial in a shared lab notebook—recording ratios, reactions, and reflections to build the groundwork for future formulation.
Built the competitive and sensory landscape, studying both health and cultural dimensions of Poppi, Olipop, and De Soi to identify what’s missing in tone and truth.
Brand Architecture
Defined Grooovee’s emotional jobs to be done: comfort after chaos, indulgence without consequence, calm that feels cute.
Built the brand pillars around three truths—Warm, Cheeky, and Trustworthy—anchoring function to feeling.
Created the naming language and early tagline playground (“Hot Girl Stomach Fix,” “Pretty & Unbothered,” “Nap Date”) to map emotional resonance per SKU.
Designed early packaging direction—matte slim cans in pastel-block palettes, tactile typography, and tone that feels like your funniest, most self-aware friend.
Cultural Mapping
Tracked where Grooovee would live: not the supplement aisle, not the soda shelf, but the fridge beside skincare and self-care.
Documented rituals—Sunday resets, after-dinner wind-downs, FaceTime catch-ups—and mapped them to product use cases.
Defined the visual world: modern diner meets vintage apothecary, skincare fridge meets 70s girl band.
Grooovee will become a new category of its own: retro-functional, emotionally intelligent, and quietly scientific.
04 / How We Did It (The Work)
Grooovee was never a moodboard project—it was fieldwork in motion. Every batch, every spreadsheet, every note was an experiment in how systems thinking, storytelling, and taste could coexist.
Step 1 / Research like a marketer, cook like a scientist
I treated every prototype like a live campaign test—an A/B experiment for the senses. Each brew had hypotheses, metrics, and post-mortems. My kitchen became a lab; my Notion boards, a CRM for flavor.
Mapped each formula against desired emotion → body response → ingredient logic, building emotional analytics before data existed.
Logged pH, temperature, taste decay, carbonation tolerance, and comfort feedback as if they were growth KPIs.
Built recurring “tasting sprints,” tracking how context—time of day, mood, lighting—affected perception and recall.
Step 2 / Treat brand architecture as product architecture
Before the recipe, there was rhythm. I built the brand like a product backlog—each naming idea, each tagline, a ticket with reasoning and ROI.
Created a living system of tone archetypes: Cheeky → Warm → Earnest, used to calibrate every piece of copy.
Designed a modular visual system—color = function, typography = mood—to align future SKUs without creative drift.
Built Notion schemas linking ingredient sourcing, packaging decisions, and marketing angles so the product narrative could scale as gracefully as the drink itself.
Step 3 / Prototype for palate and pattern
As an experimental baker, I’ve learned fermentation is timing disguised as intuition. I applied the same discipline here.
Developed micro-batches focused on texture memory—how the mouthfeel changes the story.
Designed tasting frameworks scoring aftertaste, refresh rate, satisfaction curve, and social shareability.
Recorded chemical vs. emotional feedback to train future formulators on how taste converts to trust.
Step 4 / Build operations like a campaign engine
Even in R&D, I thought in funnels. Awareness → Interest → Desire → Delight.
Built end-to-end operational templates: sourcing trackers, compliance logs, creative briefs, and QA reports.
Used growth frameworks (activation → retention loops) to plan sampling, seeding, and future content distribution.
Treated brand rituals—unboxing, first sip, post-taste share—as conversion moments, designing emotional retention into the workflow.
Step 5 / Lay the groundwork for scale
Grooovee is still pre-factory, but the infrastructure already exists.
Drafted co-packer readiness checklists, FDA/COFEPRIS documentation, and early-batch costing models.
Built supplier matrices prioritizing traceability, ethical sourcing, and low-waste logistics.
Designed a version-control system for formulas and creative assets, so growth never erases the craft that started it.
Grooovee may be pre-launch, but nothing about it is premature. The scaffolding is set; we’re just waiting for the first pour.
05 / What Comes Next
Grooovee is moving from concept to craft.
The blueprints are ready—now we build with experts.
Recruiting our first formulators, chemists, and pilot labs across Mexico and the U.S. to translate our kitchen base into commercial-ready recipes.
Beginning controlled experiments on shelf stability, sweetener alternatives, and carbonation profiles that preserve taste without additives.
Expanding our botanical and prebiotic network to partner directly with ethical growers and local suppliers.
Developing the Grooovee Playbook: a full R&D to Brand to Community framework so each launch feels as intentional as the product itself.
Building an advisory circle of nutritionists, food scientists, and marketers who believe in “science with style.”
We’re not rushing to be first on shelves—we’re designing to be the one people remember long after they’ve taken the last sip.
06 / Learnings & What I’m Still Learning
Grooovee has been a mirror of my career—brand, ops, and alchemy all in conversation.
What I’ve learned:
That R&D is just marketing in slow motion—every iteration is a campaign for truth.
That taste is both sensorial and symbolic—the first flavor you feel should match the first word you read.
That operations are how you protect art from entropy—without structure, beauty spoils.
That systems thinking translates between industries—mezcal fields, trades software, and functional drinks all run on ethics and iteration.
What I’m still learning:
How to speak both languages at once—creative intuition and food science.
How to build teams that treat flavor as UX and process as design.
How to scale joy without sacrificing integrity—to make every Grooovee moment still feel hand-poured.
How to turn a drink into a movement without forgetting why it exists: to care for the body and the girl who owns it.
Grooovee is teaching me that branding, like brewing, is a form of fermentation.
You build the conditions for something to be alive—and then you wait until it’s ready to shine.
