How Mom Water got hot, and the answer to, 'Am I the best person to be CEO?'

The canned cocktail known as Mom Water, created by a husband-and-wife team in a small Indiana town, sounds like one of the purest mom-and-pop success stories in state history. The only part of the narrative that doesn’t seem to fit is that Mom Water doesn’t pop, per se—it’s non-carbonated, which set it apart from alcoholic seltzers. Jill and Bryce Morrison created the beverage and the brand several years ago, and it hit the shelves of a few local retailers in March 2021. It's now available in 40 states at retailers including Target, Walmart, Meijer and Whole Foods.

The Morrisons didn’t set out make this their careers, but Mom Water’s quick success persuaded them to quit their day jobs. A couple of years later, Bryce decided he needed to step aside as CEO and install a new chief executive to handle day-to-day operations while he and Jill looked at bigger-picture strategy while gathering input from customers face-to-face. They are our guest on the IBJ Podcast this week, and, as they tell it, they’re more of a seat-of-your pants enterprise run by gut hunches than one that invests in megabytes of market research. They also discuss their leap of faith, the wisdom in handing over the CEO reins, and the creation of their new product based on unsweetened tea.