Andy Pearson is the VP of Creative at Liquid Death, the canned water brand that changed the game on how a brand gets built, breaking nearly every best practice the industry holds sacred and doing the things most people would call the wrong move. Before Liquid Death, he spent years at Crispin Porter + Bogusky in the agency’s golden era.
Today he leads the in-house team behind award-winning work like the e.l.f. Corpse Paint collab, the Tony Hawk blood skateboards, the Travis Barker Enema of the State kit, and the public firing of The Deep.
We sat down with Andy for almost three hours and covered a lot of ground, trying to get at how he and his team keep making work that looks nothing like advertising. We got into how he works, both as a creative and as the person making the calls and leading the team.
Andy gave us the unfiltered version (with bits like how hating Nike forged his creative style) and we went deep. Below are a few of the highlights. The full thing goes well beyond them, on the site as a single 52-minute breakdown with only the best moments of our conversation.
Like always, the clips here are just a piece of the whole conversation. The full thing lives on METHOD’s site. In the complete breakdown, Andy also gets into:
Break the Pressure Into Little Pieces
When You’re Insecure, Fake It Until You Make It
Fake Your Way Into Being Decisive
Make the Best Thing Someone Sees That Day
A Space With Zero Rules, but All Self-Constraints
Think About How the Audience Will Receive the Idea
Think of a Sticky Name for Your Idea
Make Something People Would Pay to Watch
On Being on the Brand Side
It’s Not Always Comfortable, but Be Unreasonable
Make the Team Own the Work
At Liquid Death, Craft Is Creating Room for Fun
Agencies Should Operate More Like Comedians
On Helping the Team Do Their Best Work
Liquid Death’s Not So Secret Formula
Just Make the Brand Act Like a Real Person
The Magic Comes From Making Stuff
On the Beauty of Working With the Same Team
Find the Type of Work You Want to Make
If you found Andy’s thinking inspiring, you will probably like some of the other conversations in the METHOD archive. Here are a few clips from other breakdowns that pull on some of the same threads Andy did.
BIANCA GUIMARÃES (Partner / ECD at Mischief)
Andy makes the most irrefutable case he can for the dumbest idea in the room. Bianca Guimarães, who runs Mischief in New York, works from the same nerve — she leads with confidence even when the idea feels risky, because that conviction is what gets it made.
KEVIN MULROY (Partner / ECD at Mischief)
Andy would rather fail big than ship something okay. Kevin Mulroy, also at Mischief, treats failure as part of the job, not the thing to dodge. It is the only way to make work anyone bothers to talk about.
The whole point of METHOD is to bring clarity on how great creative work is actually made. We hope you walk away with at least one thing you can put to work in your own method.
Also, a breakdown like this is just the start. It gets better the more people pull it apart and talk it through. So if a line stuck, or you see it differently, drop a comment. Pass it on to a creative who would want to think it through with you.
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