Bai Reviews

In the beginning........Bai was a fabulous place to work. I began in 2013 just before the first national push. It was exciting to be part of a vibrant company with a great vision and great product. The company was willing to promote from within, and give people a chance to shine in roles where they maybe never occupied previously. I was one of those, along with several others who were pushed to excel. It was a great atmosphere, a great team to be a part of. We launched Tanzania Lemonade Tea, the initial Bai Bubbles line and Antiwater. There was a true vision and eagerness to take over the beverage industry. Then.....it all changed. Sometimes you can't pinpoint a particular date or event when things started to sour. In this case, there is a definitive moment when it all started to come undone. That moment was when DPSG invested their first dollar in the company ($15 million of them to be exact, for 3% equity for a valuation of $500M). It all changed after that. It became about image. The office was remodeled so many times you'd have thought the CEO was an interior decorator, not the entrepreneur he claimed to be. The first unachievable sales goals were established (9,164,839!!!!!). They began to require you to wear Bai "flavor" (aka branded shirts that were once free, now you had to pay for since the company was going to sell them to the masses. That failed miserably because they insisted on doing everything in house and had a a creative team that marketed to what they thought was "cool" and "hip"). Wearable Wednesdays and Flavor Fridays were born! If you didn't suit up, you'd get asked why (I don't know, maybe because it's 20 degrees outside and all you have for men are t-shirts?). The best part......THE DOG TAGS! Nothing says "I own you" like making everyone wear dog tags with the aforementioned unachievable sales goal stamped on them. Civets got special gold ones to stand out..... The Civet Society! You can't tell the Bai story without mentioning the Civet Society. At first it was five people selected (two were the CEO's sister and uncle, so really only three). It was initially framed as a Bai "Hall of Fame", so it should be something to strive for. Instead it quickly turned into a cult within the developing overall cult. Silly emails going around in a special "coded" language, had to address them as "Civet", they received special Civet "blazers" (we're selling drinks here, not winning The Masters or anything). It became crazy. And it became clear that you couldn't cross one of these Civets; if you did, you'd soon be gone. Looking back, it didn't have to be that way. We could have stayed on the path, perfected what we did well and innovated at a reasonable pace. Instead, money made peoples heads and egos explode and the wheel was reinvented a million times (too much innovation too soon, formulation changes, art changes, etc....). God bless the indoctrinated Kool Aid drinkers who have stayed on; they bought it all and sold their souls to do it.