On February 2, 2006, Coca-Cola opened New York Fashion Week with a party for an energy drink. It came in a skinny pink 10.5-ounce can with the old Tab logo, and Coca-Cola described it in one sentence: “a deliciously pink 5-calorie energy drink created specifically for women with a sense of style and purpose.”
Tab Energy was gone from American shelves by early 2008.
On February 20, 2025, Celsius Holdings announced it would buy Alani Nu, an energy drink from Louisville, Kentucky, for $1.8 billion in cash and stock. Founded in 2018, Alani Nu comes in a slim, colorful 12-ounce can, with flavors called Cotton Candy, Sherbet Swirl, and Strawberry Sunrise.
It did roughly $600 million in sales in 2024.
Same category. Same customer. One lasted twenty-two months and the other sold about $1.6 billion at retail in the twelve months ending March 2026. In between, the industry spent twenty years trying to sell energy drinks to women, and never worked out why it kept failing. So what did Alani do different?
Unleash the Beast
Energy drinks were made for men, and nobody had to say so.
Red Bull began as a drink for physical work. The original version, Krating Daeng, was an uncarbonated tonic sold in Thailand to truck drivers and laborers who needed to stay awake. When Red Bull arrived in the United States in 1997, it became a different drink. It came in a narrow 8.3-ounce can at $2 a pop, skipped most advertising in favor of handing out samples, attaching itself to nightclubs and to extreme sports. It sponsored cliff diving, motocross, Formula One, and in 2012, a man jumping from a balloon 24 miles above the earth. A 2004 Wharton write-up said the company had become more famous for its image than its product, and that the image was built for “young people who identify themselves with risk-taking and overcoming challenges.”
Men took to it. In focus groups run in 2007 with 18-to-29-year-olds, the men knew the drinks well, drank them mostly in bars and clubs mixed with vodka, and said they delivered “sustained energy beyond the caffeine buzz” of coffee. The women in the same groups said the drinks tasted bad, asked for lower-calorie versions, and “did not find the current branding and imagery appealing to them.”
Beverage Marketing Corporation’s 2021 report on the category says Red Bull “quickly drew a torrent of rivals numbering in the hundreds,” with “an edgy, macho positioning intended to strike a chord with the key target demographic: young males who hang around convenience stores.”
Monster launched in April 2002 in a sixteen-ounce black can with a claw mark and the slogan “Unleash the Beast.” It sponsored Supercross and the UFC, and for three years its name appeared on NASCAR’s top series. Newsweek, profiling the company a few years later, called the branding “testosterone-friendly” and reported that CEO Rodney Sacks wanted new products that reached deeper into “the key male market of 18- to 25-year-olds.”
In 2015, Ronald Levant and colleagues at the University of Akron surveyed 467 men. They found that energy drink use rose with how strongly a man endorsed traditional masculine norms, especially among younger white men. In the study's press release, Levant said that for these men the drinks “may be a means of performing masculinity,” “a way to raise masculine capital,” by “demonstrating that one is consuming products that are associated with the engagement in extreme sports or an otherwise active and competitive lifestyle.” Mintel’s 2010 survey found that about one man in five drank energy drinks and about one woman in nine.
The industry had a straightforward idea of its customer, and for years, the numbers supported it. The category grew 54 percent in 2005, then 36 percent across 2006 and the first half of 2007, according to IRI data. But by June 2010, year-over-year growth had slowed to 3.1 percent. In September 2009, a Mintel report on the UK market said growth had come mostly from “young male converts” drinking more often. Analyst Jonny Forsyth told the trade press that brands would need to target women to keep growing.
So, to continue growing at the rate they’d become accustomed to, the industry decided to turn their focus toward the other 50% of the population.
Pink It and Shrink It
By September 2005, a company in Hollywood, California was selling HER Energy as “the first and only energy drink formulated specifically for women.” It was pink lemonade in a slim pink-and-white can, and its CEO was Brett Jacobson. It was still on sale in 2009. It disappeared some time after that.
Damzl Fuel came out of Seal Beach, California, in the mid-2000s, from two sisters who rode off-road motorcycles and sold extreme-sports apparel for women. The tagline was “Not for Dudes!” The multipack came in a “pretty-in-pink” shrink sleeve with a silver tiara in the logo, and the flavor was built to taste like a Shirley Temple. “And what girl doesn’t like that!” a founder, Heather Birdwell, told Packaging World. They too closed up shop a few years later.
24-year-old Ryan Custer founded Cougar Energy in 2009, while living in his parents’ house in Texas. The target was women 30 to 55. The pitch was that it was “great for hair, skin & nails” and good for “hormonal balance.” In May 2012, Custer took it on Shark Tank, asking for $150,000 for 30 percent of a company that had sold $60,000 of product in three years. Barbara Corcoran tried it and said it “tasted like chalk.” Nobody invested. It was gone by 2014.
Rockstar Pink arrived in the United States in January 2011, in a 12-ounce can with a straw attached. One reviewer observed that if women earn 77 cents on the dollar, apparently their beverages should be scaled down to match. In May, A.G. Barr, which then held the British franchise for Rockstar, launched it in the UK as “the perfect choice for active women.” It came in a 355-milliliter can instead of the usual 500, because, as Barr’s head of marketing, Adrian Troy, explained, “many females are put off by the high sugar content of 500ml cans.”
Rockstar Pink was later renamed Rockstar Perfect Berry, and the straw was dropped, which is to say the label came off the can. It was discontinued by 2021.
There was Perfectly Petite, an energy shot that promised, per a 2013 Pacific Standard roundup of the genre, that you could “burn 100 calories by ‘just sitting pretty.’”
But it’s Tab Energy that caught my eye, because it’s the one that had the power (and pockets) of Coca-Cola behind it. It launched in February 2006 with a party that opened New York Fashion Week, and Lindsay Lohan, Nicole Richie, Fergie, Missy Elliott and Pamela Anderson were photographed with the can.
The strategy was never a secret. When the Associated Press got hold of the launch plans the previous fall, it summarized them in a sentence: “Coca-Cola is hoping to hook women with Tab Energy’s dark pink cans.” The campaign then said the same thing itself. The commercial premiered during the Oscars, and the print ads… well, see for yourself.
For a new drink, it performed reasonably well. In its first full year on the shelf, from mid-2006 to mid-2007, it sold $13.9 million in supermarkets, drugstores and mass merchandisers, more than double its sales in the months after launch and enough to crack the category’s top ten.
But over the same year, Full Throttle, a male-focused energy drink Coca-Cola had launched about a year earlier, sold $47.7 million. Red Bull sold $307 million.
In December 2007, people started posting online that they couldn’t find Tab Energy anymore, and in May 2008 one of them reported that they had called Coca-Cola and been told it was discontinued in the United States. By the start of 2009, the drink’s own website was returning errors.
Maybe Women Hate Energy Drinks?
The obvious explanation is the one the industry had started with: women just don’t drink energy drinks. If the demand wasn’t there, no can was going to conjure it, and the graveyard of pink cans was just the market telling the truth.
Then Nielsen looked at who was actually bringing the cans home.
On August 13, 2013, Nielsen published a piece by Katie Clemency under the headline: “Moms Are Consuming More Energy Drinks Than You Might Think.” Clemency had looked at the panel of households that scan everything they bring home from the store.
Households with busy mothers and young kids were buying energy drinks at one and a half times the national rate. Adults just out of college, who were supposed to be the core customer, were a little above average. Singles in their twenties and thirties were below it. Nielsen’s conclusion: “busy moms appear to represent another heavy user category, akin to young males.”
“For many of these busy mom consumers,” Clemency noted, “use of the product is hidden, with energy drinks concealed in the pantry and consumed as a quick afternoon ‘pick-me-up’ before the kids come home from school.”
The piece closes with a wish: “there’s hope that at least one manufacturer will dare to succeed where few have before: creating energy drinks that women proudly drink out in the open.”
So women were drinking energy drinks, in secret, in quantities that put them alongside young men as a heavy-user group. The question was never why women didn’t drink energy drinks. It was why they wouldn’t drink the ones with their name on.
Calculators (for Women!)
The beverage business never answered that. A team at Harvard Business School did.
The paper, by Tami Kim, Kate Barasz, Leslie John and Michael Norton, is called “Calculators for Women”. In the first of its five experiments, 321 people at a university lab were told they might be asked to do a few math problems and could pick a calculator, purple or green. With nothing written on either, 51.1 percent of the women chose purple. When the same purple calculator was labeled “for Women,” only 24.1 percent did.
Asked how much they liked the color, women in both groups liked purple equally. The label alone did it. Men leaned the other way. 31.9 percent picked the purple one unlabeled, and 47.3 percent picked it when it said “for Men,” a difference the authors call marginal. The authors had predicted that the label wouldn’t bother men, who are “typically neither marginalized nor presumed to like the color purple.”
A second experiment with 183 women found the label backfired only among women who believed others regarded their gender poorly. The researchers called the mechanism categorization threat: the feeling of being unwillingly sorted into, and reduced to, a single identity.
And it lingers. Later in the same experiment, everyone picked a marker, purple or green, with nothing written on either. Women who had seen purple paired with the label chose purple 61.9 percent of the time, compared with 77.6 percent for those who hadn’t. The color stays tainted after the words come off.
To see this play out in the real world, look no further than Bic. In 2012, Bic was selling a ballpoint pen called Cristal for Her. It was the ordinary Bic Cristal in pink and purple with, as the listing put it, a “thin barrel designed to fit a woman’s hand.” Nothing about a pen is specific to women, and women were already buying Bics. The color and the label were the whole product.
That August, Amazon shoppers wrote hundreds of reviews in the voice of the woman the label described. “I am writing this in the kitchen.” “Someone has answered my gentle prayers and FINALLY designed a pen that I can use all month long!” In October, Ellen DeGeneres did a segment on them: “just like regular pens, except they’re pink, so they cost twice as much.”
John summed it up: “In many cases, these labels are not smart marketing. Companies might actually be depressing their demand for products. More subtle appeals might be the better way to go.”
There’s another, simpler reason a label costs so much: people don’t like feeling like they’re being marketed to. In 1994 Marian Friestad and Peter Wright published what marketing researchers call the persuasion knowledge model: consumers carry a working theory of what marketers are up to, and the moment a message is recognized as a tactic, it gets processed as a tactic instead of as information. “For women” on a can is legible as a tactic from across the store. A claw mark isn’t.
Go back through the graveyard with that in hand. “Because women need a different kind of energy.” “Not for Dudes!” “Created by women for women.” “Great for hair, skin, and nails.” A tiny can with a straw. Each one was a purple calculator with a label. Each one told the customer what she was, and most of them threw in the stereotype for free. All of them were tactics you could read from the door.
From Protein Powder to Pink Slush
Alani Nu was founded in Louisville in 2018 by Katy Hearn, a fitness coach with a large Instagram following, and her husband, Haydn Schneider. It started with protein powder and supplements built around what the women Hearn coached asked for. The energy drinks came late that year: 200 milligrams of caffeine, 10 calories, zero sugar, and biotin, a vitamin commonly sold for hair and nails.
By the time the brand took off, three things were true of the drink that weren’t true of anything else in the cooler.
The cans were cute. Aesthetic. Instagrammable, even. Each flavor gets its own color, hot pink for Pink Slush, an orange-to-pink sunset for Orange Kiss, mint for Juicy Peach, with the name Alani in big script across the front and the fruit or the candy painted across everything else: strawberries, peaches, flamingos, a tuft of cotton candy. The names sound less like a hardcore energy drink and more like the dessert counter at a carnival: Cotton Candy, Pink Slush, Sherbet Swirl, Hawaiian Shaved Ice.
The flavors were fantastic, which, frankly, was new for sugar-free drinks. The first sugar-free energy drinks, Red Bull Sugarfree among them, used aspartame and acesulfame potassium, which made them taste like diet soda. Sucralose came into the category over the following decade. Red Bull added it to Total Zero in 2012, alongside the other two. It has less of the bitter finish. Alani Nu uses sucralose and acesulfame potassium and no aspartame.
But there was something else. As I browsed the website, I noticed that they never once called it a drink for “women.” The word appears only in the caffeine warning on the product pages. I mean, it was obvious who they were targeting. The sparkles, bright colors, and liberal use of the word “bestie” made that clear.
The About page gives the brand’s own version of the category’s history. It describes an energy aisle that was “only for dark cans, extreme sports & flavors that fell flat,” and then says: “for a lot of us, the vibes just felt off.”
Us. Not “women”. The company isn’t describing women from the outside and offering them a product. It’s describing itself as one of the people the old cans weren’t for.
Every earlier drink for women did the opposite. HER was “formulated specifically for women.” Rockstar Pink was “the perfect choice for active women.” Tab’s small print explained what women need. All of them addressed women as a customer group where the customer could see it. Alani doesn’t, and I suspect that’s a big part of why it escaped their fate.
The company does say it elsewhere. A 2020 press release announcing its launch in Target calls Alani Nu “a premium women’s wellness brand that is strategically designed for women.” That sentence was written for a retailer and the trade press. It has never appeared on a can or on the website.
One review on the site reads, “it’s not just a drink, it’s my identity.” The brand’s own copy says, “you turned a drink into a community.” There’s a fan inbox where customers send in flavor ideas, merch ideas and collab requests, under the heading “full of ideas, bestie?”
In 2013, Nielsen found women hiding energy drinks in the pantry. In 2026, a quote on Alani’s college ambassador page reads, “When I see a girl on campus holding an Alani? I just feel immediately connected!”
$1.8 Billion Later
Alani Nu’s US sales grew 69 percent year over year in the last quarter of 2024. Celsius announced the acquisition that February. From March 2025 to March 2026, Alani Nu’s retail sales nearly doubled, to about $1.6 billion. In the same year, Rockstar, Reign and Bang each lost sales.
Of course, the can and copywriting weren’t the only reason Alani Nu grew. Congo Brands, its majority owner, distributed it through Anheuser-Busch’s beer wholesalers. In a 2025 Goldman Sachs survey of about fifty beer distributors, 93 percent said Alani Nu was still a top priority. The brand also had Hearn’s audience and the ambassador program behind it.
Nevertheless, Bloomberg chalked up much of Alani Nu’s success to how it “moved away from the male-focused vibe of Red Bull and Monster with colorful packaging, fruity flavors, being sugar-free, and health attributes from vitamins.”
Michael Bellas, CEO of Beverage Marketing Corporation, told Bloomberg that women had been a tough target for Monster and Red Bull. Alani Nu, he said, got “the sugar right. They had the flavors right. They targeted the female consumer with a healthier positioning.”
FLRT with Disaster?
Other brands noticed. And they decided to get in on the colorful can action.
On its earnings call on November 6, 2025, Monster announced FLRT as “a female-focused brand.” At its investor day on December 2, its CEO, Hilton Schlosberg, said that “one of the major segments that we don’t service on a more comprehensive basis is the female segment,” and its chief marketing officer, Dan McHugh, told the room the company was “marketing to 18-to-24-year-old females,” and said of the team behind it, “we don’t have males working on (FLRT).”
That didn’t stop the backlash to the daisy cans. Reactions from Monster fans more or less fell along the same lines:
- “Monster already has drinks for women. Its called monster.”
- “I’m not convinced Monster knows their own demographics, all the people I know that are addicted to it are women”
- “Um….im pretty sure there is already a monster energy for women. Just ask all the empty cans in my room”
- “It just feels condescending”
The day after the announcement, the FLRT homepage read: “energy should be as vibrant, fearless, and fun as the women who drink it.” By February 6, 2026, the same sentence read: “energy should be as vibrant, fearless, and fun as those who drink it.” By the March 16 launch, it had changed again, to “the people who drink it.”
It didn’t help, for two reasons. The first is the one the Harvard study predicts: the internet had already seen the label, and the “color” stays tainted after the words come off.
The second is the name. FLRT is the label. It’s a come-hither word printed on the can, with flavors called Strawberry Fling and Berry Tempting. The internet called this out immediately, with posts asking “So it has to be sexy…?” and accusing the brand of “boiling down women to sexuality.”
The Impulsive Buy, a snack-review site, noted that the cans look “like something that would have been marketed to a preteen girl in the 90’s,” and the brand is “trying a little too hard to be girly and not trying hard enough at being creative.”
Monster doesn't report FLRT’s sales separately, so nobody outside the company knows how it's selling. The closest thing to an answer came on the August 6, 2026 earnings call, when an analyst asked how FLRT was doing. Schlosberg said the company felt it was “reaching the right target audience” and was “working on repeat, but building a base.” His summary was, “Overall, we really do think it’s too early to tell, but we remain committed to the brand.”
Notes for the Next Pink Can
Here’s what I’ll be carrying into future projects:
Treat the new audience the way you treated the first one. Red Bull and Monster never printed “for men” on anything. They built a product men recognized and let them pick it up. When the industry went after women, it dropped that standard and started labeling.
Find the customer before you invent her. The industry assumed women didn’t drink energy drinks because it couldn’t see them at the counter. Nielsen’s household panel found households of busy young mothers buying at 1.5 times the average rate and hiding the cans. The visible customer isn't the only one.
Naming the customer isn’t the same as connecting with them. HER was “formulated specifically for women.” Rockstar Pink was “the perfect choice for active women.” Tab’s small print explained what women need. Every one of them named its customer, and every one of them died. Alani Nu never put it on the can and sold $1.6 billion of it.
A label should be a spec, not a sort. The Harvard paper’s own example is underwear: women’s underwear fits women better than men’s, so the label on the package is a useful specification for her. Nothing in an energy drink is specific to women, so the only thing a “for women” label could ever do on that can was sort her into a category. And the calculator study shows what sorting costs: the share of women choosing purple fell by half, from 51 to 24 percent, though they liked the color just as much, and they kept avoiding purple after the label was gone.