Area man pours brainpower, money into product

10:15 PM Saturday, November 7, 2009 Caffeinated bottled water seems like a rather simple idea, but when Brian Pitzer wanted it, he found he had to make his own.

Now he’s CEO of Vitality Distributing, which produces Avitae, a bottled caffeinated water that recently found its way onto store shelves.

Company headquarters are located at 7003 Post Road in Dublin.

The 1997 graduate of Greenon High School started the research and development process 21/2 years ago, after trying to modify his college habit of tossing caffeine pills into Gatorade.

“I needed an energy boost and the caffeine in the Gatorade worked. When I graduated, though, I went from 225 pounds of muscle to 250 pounds of nonmuscle and it was in large part from the sugar in the Gatorade,” said the former Ohio State University football player.

He tried putting the caffeine pills into bottled water, but said it was “gross, like tossing an aspirin which turned the water cloudy.”

A marketer and advertiser by profession, Pitzer started working to figure out how to solve his problem and create a product he could market, all while working a full-time job to support his family.

“I found out the U.S. soft drink industry makes $75 billion in sales, so I figured there’s got to be one in 1,000 people who would want to drink water with caffeine in it,” he said.

Avitae was released in June. The product is being sold regionally at Kroger, Speedway and Walgreen’s. “We targeted those three retailers because each is the biggest and baddest in its segment of the market,” he said.

Expansion plans will take Avitae into most of Florida and Texas by the end of the year; by the end of 2010, it will be in much of the rest of country.

“There’s no other product out there like it. It has 45 milligrams of caffeine, about the same as a diet soda, and the body has no problem metabolizing it because it’s such a clean product,” Pitzer said.

Figuring things out

To get started, Pitzer created an 800-page business plan.

“I’m not going to be the guy who gets out-thought,” he said, “I didn’t want to be the guy who says ‘I wish I would have.’ Succeed or fail, I was giving it my best shot — I wanted to do something revolutionary.”

Then, he researched everything — water quality, amounts of caffeine, bottle shapes, label design, packaging and demographics.

He came up with four distinct groups he believed would be interested in Avitae:

Enthusiastic nurturers: Health-conscious females, with children or not, who run in 1,000 directions at 1,000 miles an hour.

Social butterflies: Females from ages 16-30 who have few cares in the world, are health conscious and set trends.

Executives: Professionals who drink coffee in the morning, but drink water or diet soda in the afternoon.

Educated athletes: Professionals who test themselves and seek out physical and mental challenges such as triathlons or hitting the gym hard. They understand that caffeine can boost their performance by 15 percent.

He also realized that his product can be sold right next to coffee, since many morning coffee drinkers resort to other caffeinated beverages throughout the day.

“We’re not trying to compete with coffee at all. We can create partnerships with coffee sales outlets because you’ve got a group of people who are drinking caffeine and you’re not going to cannibalize your coffee sales,” he said. “When people stop to buy a latte, they might grab a four-pack of Avitae on the way out for the afternoon.”

Conversations with family friend and mentor Richard Kuss, retired president of The Bonded Oil Co., which became Speedway SuperAmerica, focused on creating a strong business plan, finding a good staff, creating an all-around quality product and test marketing.

Pitzer knew Kuss through a family relationship that started with his grandparents, Elwood and Betty Pitzer. One day he decided to pick up the phone, which started a relationship that has taught him a great deal about business.

“Brian did his homework and teamed up with knowledgeable people,” Kuss said. “This is a unique product so he needed to pinpoint his audience and do some marketing analysis.”

Kuss, whose company was one of the first in its niche to merchandise soft drinks, talked at length with Pitzer about the importance of packaging and store placement, especially with a new product.

Pitzer listened.

Throughout the development process, he and his designers have worked through 14 label revisions, with a few minor tweaks still to come. The four-pack carton also has evolved.

“It was important for us to have a bottle that looked good and stood out on the shelves because we’re entering very competitive landscape. We knew we had one shot, so we didn’t want to launch prematurely,” Pitzer said.

To be sure Avitae has every chance, Pitzer has poured about $350,000 of personal money into the project. “It’s everything I have — I’m broke, but hopefully it will come back full-circle. At the end of the day, I’m really proud of this product,” he said.

Investors are now on board — some on Avitae’s Board of Directors — and employees are receiving paychecks, something Pitzer sees as a success and a promise fulfilled.

“I made a promise to the board that we wouldn’t start paying ourselves until we started selling product,” he said. “We wouldn’t use investors’ money to pay salaries.”

Support system

Pitzer is quick to credit everyone around him for making what he deems his “simple idea” a success.

“It’s about the people who have helped me along the way,” he said. “I came up with the idea, but it’s the Dick Kusses, the Speedways, the people who started the company with me and have been there through thick and thin who need to take the bow. Without their support, I’d be just another guy with an idea.”

He’s depended on his wife, Melissa, for moral support and her own professional expertise in human resources.

“Without her, I don’t know whether I’d have been able to do it. She’s been the greatest thing on earth. No matter what comes from this, we both see it as a learning experience and we’re going to be better off for having tried,” he said.

He credits the “tenacity and gumption” to keep going despite many nay-sayers to his parents, Dick and Amy Pitzer, and his grandparents, all of Springfield.

“Growing up around my grandparents and seeing the success they had, I learned you can do whatever you want in the world — it’s all about seizing the day. I saw no reason to give up. Why stop? Why quit?,” he said.

And he has no plans on slowing down anytime soon.

Right now, Pitzer uses co-packers in Dallas and Florida, with one in Chicago that can be turned on quickly if necessary.

He’s got two others that can be utilized as distribution grows, so total capacity could be around 300 to 400 million bottles per year.

“We’ve got some of the biggest retailers and distributors in the country asking for our product,” he said. “We’ve got a lot of huge stuff on the horizon and 2010 is going to be insane.”