Nick Shackelford brought a performance-marketing playbook to Brēz. It got the drink into Sprouts, Wegmans and Total Wine.

Brēz is a low-dose cannabis beverage infused with lion’s mane mushroom, positioned as a functional alternative to alcohol. It was founded in 2023 by CEO Aaron Nosbisch. Nick Shackelford, a co-founder of the performance marketing agency Structured, joined as a partner at Brēz focused on retention, subscription and lifecycle, bringing a paid-media and lifecycle discipline that is unusual to see applied this directly to a beverage brand’s retail expansion.

The brand scaled through direct-to-consumer before pushing into retail, and it is now reported to have surpassed $60 million in profitable revenue with placement in more than 2,000 doors, including Sprouts, Wegmans and Total Wine and More. In a category still working out its regulatory footing state by state, reaching that many doors that fast is the part worth studying.

A regulated category adds a step most CPG brands never face

For most food and beverage brands, the retail readiness question is margin, supply, case pack and paperwork. For a THC beverage, there is a step before all of that: whether the retailer’s legal and compliance function will allow the category on the shelf at all, and under what state-by-state rules. That question has nothing to do with velocity or story, and no amount of DTC proof answers it.

Total Wine and More, Sprouts and Wegmans are each a different answer to that compliance question, which is why the door list looks the way it does. A specialty grocer, a beverage-focused big box, and a wine and spirits retailer each had to independently decide the category belonged in their format before the product story mattered at all.

What lifecycle marketing discipline does for a retail launch

A brand built by operators with a performance marketing background tends to treat retail distribution the same way it treats a paid acquisition channel: measured, attributed, and cut if it does not perform. That mindset, applied to a physical door instead of an ad account, is unusual in CPG and it shows up as discipline about which doors to add next rather than adding doors for the sake of a bigger footprint.

A door that does not turn is the same as an ad set that does not convert. The instinct to kill it fast, instead of hoping it improves, is the transferable skill here.

What a brand in a less regulated category can take from this

If a THC beverage can reach 2,000 doors while navigating state-by-state compliance, most brands reading this are not actually blocked by regulation. They are blocked by not treating door count the way Brēz treats it, as a metric to defend, not a milestone to collect. Fewer doors that turn beat more doors that do not, in any category.