“What we really want this category to look like is traditional alcohol,” Angus Rittenburg, CEO and co-founder of Wynk manufacturer Wherehouse Beverage Co., told SND. “When we put up billboards or do wild postings, do local events, it’s all to make the product familiar and exist in the places that people expect to see alcohol.”

Rittenburg cites recent Chicago activations as examples of what the company is aiming to do, with Wynk recently taking over a billboard that previously advertised Modelo, as well as the brand’s presence at the West Side Street festival where Wynk was sold alongside some of the biggest names in beverage alcohol. “This opportunity to seed the products at a trusted event in town, but also alongside the most trusted brands in the world is really huge,” he says.

The campaign, which Rittenburg says represents a spend in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, will run across Wynk’s 15-state retail footprint (the brand has DTC availability in 37 states) with a particular focus on Chicago, one of the company’s strongest markets. In addition, “Get Together” billboards and digital signs will run outside Fenway Park in Boston, on the streets of downtown Minneapolis, and along the highways of northern New Jersey, with additional digital signs running in Nashville, Tennessee and Ohio.

“Get Together” comes amid major expansion for Wynk, with the company reporting 300% year-over-year growth in June. Rittenburg says there’s been considerable buy-in from the on-premise in 2024 with, for example, 35% of Wynk’s Chicago sales in bars and restaurants. “In Chicago, for on-premise accounts, the lower dose drinks—the 2.5-mg.—are what they prefer,” he says. “It’s really creating strong demand for the very low dose products, which I think in the long run will be the highest volume product.”

Beyond Chicago, Rittenburg says New Jersey and Connecticut are strong for the brand, with Nashville and wider-Tennessee as new markets that he has high hopes for. Maine, he adds, is an exciting market, too, since Wynk will begin to be sold outside of the dispensary channel beginning in August. Over the rest of 2024, Wynk plans to add six new markets, including Florida. “We’ve been holding back for Florida to find the right distributor,” he says. “We wanted to go with a very legitimate one. We found them and we’re planning that launch, and I think Florida will probably be one of our largest markets in time.” When asked who Wynk’s distribution partner would be, Rittenburg said it was too soon to announce but that their partner was well known.

With sky-high ambitions for the brand, Rittenburg says Wherehouse is prepared to scale on-demand. The company owns its own production and canning facility in New York. Currently, the canning facility offers co-packing services for non-cannabis brands, but Rittenburg says he hopes to see more of the facility’s production headroom dedicated to Wynk. The facility can operate on a national scale, according to Rittenburg, who estimates that it will can 15-20 million cases of product this year. “Hopefully we eat more and more of that capacity up with Wynk, and we have the option but not obligation to do so,” he says. “That business can run just fine as it is, but the more Wynk we sell the better the outcome.”—Shane English