Swing Juice, a locally manufactured energy drink, started with a passing joke.
In 2004, Jon Mason was planning to play a round of golf with friends. They had an early tee time – maybe too early for some – and Mason called to remind one of his friends.
“I’ll be ready,” Mason recalled the friend saying, “I’ll just have my swing juice.”
“And the second he said that, I thought, ‘Hey, what a great name for a sports energy drink,” Mason recalled recently. “This was at the time that Vitamin Water was just starting to come out and Red Bull was really becoming a force in that world. It was really just the beginning of the energy-drink category.”
Up until that point, Mason had never considered creating a sports drink. But because he liked the name so much, he started that day working on getting it trademarked. For the next six months Mason, who was working in real estate and doesn’t have a background in food or beverages, researched the drink-making process in his free time.
About four months after he decided to pursue it, he had a small batch of samples – about 70 bottles – manufactured from the formulas he thought up. He hadn’t told anyone but his wife, Tina, until the samples were in hand. “The way I looked at it was that, to me even, it was such a wild idea,” said Mason, who lives in Lincoln. “What are my friends going to say? What’s my family going to say? But once my wife gave me the go-ahead” we started telling people.
Now, just a few years later, Mason has quit working in real estate and is working full time to build the brand.
Swing Juice has three employees and is selling between 1,000 and 2,000 cases – a case has 12 bottles – each month. That’s a drastic increase in volume from the estimated 100 cases that he was selling 18 months ago, he said.
Last year, he had about 40 retailers selling Swing Juice. He’s pushed that number to almost 100 now and hopes to keep growing this year.
“And I thought, ‘how much is this going to cost me?’” Mason said.
A few weeks later, he was pitching Swing Juice at a PGA merchandise show in Las Vegas. “And the Sony tournament’s director came up to the table and said, ‘Are you Jon Mason?’ ” He invited Mason out to the tournament – Sony chooses a few small companies each year to showcase their products for free at the tournament – and Mason agreed. He had Swing Juice on the course the whole week, making it available to players, promoters and the media.
Building off that success, Mason created a Web site – www.swingjuice.com – and spent more time figuring out the distribution and production process. He changed the branding and created a new logo and label – he had originally been cutting out and gluing the labels by hand – and started building a retail business.
He started with golf courses and pro shops – as far away as Washington and California – but has in the last year tightened his focus. He’s operating out of a Cranston warehouse and trying to get Swing Juice into as many Rhode Island, Connecticut and Massachusetts retailers as he can.
From the beginning, Mason said, the product was a “great tasting” drink made of all-natural ingredients – Whole Foods is now stocking it.
He started with lemonade flavor and now has Orange Mango and Pomegranate flavors. In the next few months, he’s gearing up to introduce Diet Lemon and Diet Pink Lemonade, too.
“I had always been an idea guy. I would say, ‘Wouldn’t this be a good idea?’ ” Mason said. “With this, I became so obsessed with it, I decided to take it to that next step.” •
