Candlemaking, tarot cards, yoga, and more: Inside Recess’s event-centric strategy

Making candles, reading tarot-card, arranging flowers.

Those aren’t just hobbies that the kooky lead of an early aughts rom-com might have. In recent weeks, they’re some of the many, many events from Recess.

Throughout May, the relaxation beverage brand, part of the burgeoning category of non-alcoholic drinks that pitch consumers on wellness over inebriation, produced six of its own events and partnered with almost 80 others in cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Austin. The company kicked things up another notch last month, with event totals nearing 120.

It’s all part of a new events-focused marketing strategy from CMO Zech Francis, who joined the company in March. The goal is simple: “Get cans in hands,” he told us. So far, the company has distributed some 4,500 cans to some 20,000 attendees at these events, which includes both the events Recess has produced or co-sponsored, as well as through gifted products in exchange for social posts.

Recess “quadrupled our budget for community,” this year, Francis said. Before this year, “we really didn’t have a robust budget for events in general,” he told us “IRL events, it really wasn’t a line item on our budget, so I dedicated…[a] low single digit of our total marketing budget into events.”

Throughout May, that budget went to bringing Recess to events, including a floating sound bath, a run club, golf outings, and an influencer night.

“With the size that we’re at, we have meaningful budgets, but I’m trying to spread it as wide as we can,” he said of the strategy. “If you view any of these micro-events that we’re doing, the point of it is we’re entertaining our core consumer.”

Community-first

Recess is zeroing in on offline, in-person “community-building,” as Francis put it, at a time when other brands like Pinterest and Heineken have also presented in-person connection as a brand differentiator, and other brands have leaned into reality over technology.

It’s a move that could help brand affinity as consumers tire of marketers’ AI obsession. “Every brand needs to build experience into how they go to market,” Allen Adamson, co-founder of brand consultancy Metaforce, previously told us. “The more different that experience is, the more it’ll be shared, the more it’ll be relevant.”

For Recess, the hope for differentiation centers on being a part of a wide variety of smaller experiences instead of a few big ones.

“I think what makes a brand special is if you can find these high-touch, special moments that are more intimate that you can bring your community into…it does create a very special brand experience that’s unique today,” Francis said.

The in-crowd

While it’s early days for the new events strategy, the company has three buckets those events should fit into: wellness, with events like yoga and Pilates, and meditation; creativity, with events like candlemaking and pottery; and socializing, with dinners for influencers and ambassadors and happy hours.

To pull off the events, Recess has two full-time events staffers, and the company works with production partners when necessary.

Currently, the majority of the micro-events are those that Recess is either donating products to or co-sponsoring, but the company is working on a larger event sponsorship for later this year or 2027. It’s all part of a growth strategy for the brand and, maybe, the category.

“We want folks to lean into the relaxation, the calming, the unwind occasion,” Francis said. “We view ourselves as like a third category in that kind of space, but the ambitions for the brand are to become a worldwide, ubiquitous product that can be picked up from Target and Walmart all the way to a convenience store.”