How a home invasion turned into marketing gold for Owala

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In 2024, Binoy Zachariah, a musical artist and tennis coach living in LA, said he experienced an attempted home invasion. Luckily, he thought quickly, fighting off the invaders until they left.

How did he fend them off, you ask? He grabbed the nearest weapon he could find: an Owala water bottle.

In October of this year, Zachariah recounted the rather unbelievable story in detail on his TikTok and Instagram accounts, with the videos on TikTok racking up 13.7 million and 19.4 million views. The posts caught Owala’s attention, too, and within a week, the company sent Zachariah a custom PR package featuring a safe filled with Owala water bottles (dubbed the “Sipcurity Safe”) as well as an all-expenses-paid weekend trip to a destination of his choice.

It was a scenario neither party could have ever predicted, but one that Owala’s marketing team felt they had to respond to, according to Chad Sorensen, brand director for Owala.

“We recognize that this is truly wild,” Sorensen said. “So we wanted to recognize the human side of things and not just something for the brand to take advantage of.”

Cue the waterworks

Sorensen credited Owala’s social team’s social listening efforts for catching wind of Zachariah’s story and bringing it to the larger marketing team’s attention, paving way for them to brainstorm ways they could get involved.

Sorensen said his team crafted their response to toe the line between being “fun and playful…and helpful.” While the giant safe made for good social fodder, the weekend trip was meant to help Zachariah “decompress [and] get out of that environment for a little bit,” Sorenson told us.

Wild as it may be, this is not the first time a water-bottle brand has been involved in a customer’s personal traumatic event. In 2023, a woman shared a story of her car being destroyed in a fire via a video that showed the charred remnants of her vehicle—plus her Stanley cup, largely intact, with ice still inside. That video brought in more than 60 million views.

Stanley, which did not provide an on-the-record comment, also got involved at the time, gifting the Stanley cup owner new cups and a new car. Other brands and founders, like Kat Von D and Paris Hilton, have also found themselves mentioned in moments of unpredictable personal traumas, and responded in their own ways.

Commenters on Zachariah’s video were quick to reference the car-fire incident, with one calling his response to the break-in attempt “better marketing than the Stanley cup fire.” Sorensen said his team was “familiar with the hydration landscape,” but ultimately, he said, Stanley’s viral moment didn’t factor into how Owala responded to Zachariah’s video.

“[We’re] not looking for any sort of competition or anything like that, just legitimately looking at individuals and trying to find ways to, honestly, blow their minds,” Sorensen said.

On the whole, Sorensen said that Owala approaches gifting and customer stories on a case-by-case basis, and while some opportunities, like Zachariah’s, might be apt for a bigger response designed to be memorable, other moments are handled more quietly.

“If it felt private, we’ll respond privately,” Sorensen said. “If it was obviously posted on social media with millions and millions of views and the person who posted seems like they would respond well to something like that, then we would probably match it in a very different way.”

That could help explain the fact that, according to Zachariah, after he sent Owala an email describing what happened in 2024 after the break-in attempt happened, he received a 15% off coupon in response. According to the company, its customer service team handled his initial email, and the larger team wasn’t aware of the break-in story at that point.

Double duty

The break-in story didn’t only serve as marketing material for Owala. Zachariah told us he made the videos about the experience as part of an effort to build his own social following, suspecting that it could be useful content for the company as well as himself.

“At the start of this year, I was really committed to just posting more on TikTok. I am a musician, an artist by profession, and it’s obviously a huge part of being in the music industry,” he said. “That comes with the pressure, the expectation, to post multiple times a day and try and figure out what your voice is.”

The idea to post about the attempted break-in story came to him as he tried to hold himself to a daily posting quota, and it quickly took off. As the comments rolled in, Zachariah said he was “amazed” to see the number of comments from people writing that they were learning of the brand for the first time or expressing increased loyalty to Owala. By the time the Sipcurity Safe package arrived, he said, he recognized the marketing gold he had helped create.

“As I was filming [the unboxing video], I just thought to myself, I’m gagged by this, so surely anyone seeing this would be equally as gagged,” Zachariah said.

While the viral videos helped bring Zachariah a surge of TikTok followers, he said he is looking for ways to convert his newfound following to engage with his music, too. For now, he’s continuing to feed the Owala-fueled hype while keeping an eye toward longevity.

“I almost view it as a really crazy and lucrative side quest that I sort of decided to step out on,” he said. “At the end of the day, I am just ultimately grateful for it all. I just don’t want to be the water-bottle guy, you know?”