This year marks a decade of Salacious Drinks ten years of water tastings, warehouse juggling, brand hunting, late-night labeling, wholesale headaches, and unexpected triumphs. And to kick off the celebration, we sat down with The Waterlady to ask the question everyone should ask a founder at least once: “Why did you name your company that?”
She laughed immediately which is always a sign you’re about to get the real story, not the LinkedIn version.
“Oh, I love this question. What’s in a name?” she started. “Our name is Salacious Drinks. We came up with that name in the beginning when we were trying to be… you know… edgy.”
Now, let’s pause right there.
Most brands start this way: fueled by creative adrenaline, convinced they’re building the next Supreme meets Soho House meets #AestheticEverything. So when she says edgy, she means edgy.
“At the very beginning, we actually decided to do the phonetic spelling of the word salacious,” she explained. “We thought we were being so clever.”
Spoiler: the market had other plans.
“We heard people try to say our name like maybe one or two times,” she said, “and I will tell you we immediately pivoted. Thank goodness. It’s one of those things where you’re like, what were we thinking? Because people still sometimes are like, ‘wait… salacious? salacious? salacious?’ it’s always fun to hear people say your name.”
If you’ve ever named a business, you already know the pain: the blank stares, the mispronunciations, the existential dread of hearing your dream brand said incorrectly for the hundredth time. But the name stuck. And people learned it. And now they love it.
So why Salacious Drinks in the first place? This is where the story gets fun.
“There’s a Miguel song, called Use Me, and it’s one of our favorite songs,” she said. “In the lyrics, he says the word salacious, and we stopped and were like oh, we love that actually.”
That little lyrical moment turned into a business identity. And then her partner (who you could argue is the brand’s original creative director) threw out the idea: What if we named it Salacious Drinks?
At first glance, the word salacious and water don’t exactly go together, right? But that was the point.
“He said, ‘It’s water. Water in itself is not a very fun topic,’” she recalled. “But the stories behind it, the bottles, the packaging everything about it could be more. And that’s how we were born.”
It’s a philosophy that became a business model: bring energy, pleasure, curiosity, and culture to something basic. Make it beautiful. Make it mysterious. Make it indulgent. Make it a conversation.
And the name pulls that off.
But there’s another layer one most people don’t know.
“Salacia is also a Roman water goddess,” she told us. “And I am a huge mythological person, so I loved how we could tie it in.”
Salacia, in Roman mythology, was the goddess of the open sea — the queen alongside Neptune. She represents depth, movement, and the origin of water. And if you look at the Salacious Drinks logo… yep, that’s her.
“So it all flows together,” she said. Pun intended.
Between Miguel lyrics, etymology, Roman goddesses, and a creative partner with a sense of humor the brand was born.
And yes, ten years later, people still ask about the name. They still mispronounce it sometimes. They still smile when they figure it out. But that’s the beauty of it: the name creates curiosity. Curiosity becomes conversation. And conversation is how unknown waters become beloved brands.
So as we kick off this Behind-the-Scenes Anniversary Series, here’s what you need to know:
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Salacious Drinks wasn’t named in a boardroom
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It wasn’t designed to sound like a startup
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It wasn’t focus-tested, SEO-optimized, or run through a marketing funnel
It was born through music, mythology, creativity, and a need to make water feel alive.
And that’s ultimately what The Waterlady has been doing for a decade: proving that water is culture, water is identity, water is terroir, water is history, and yes — water is kind of salacious when you really get into it.
Ten years in, the name still fits. Maybe even more than it did at the beginning.
Stay tuned for Part Two of the anniversary series: How to Build a Water Company Without Losing Your Mind.
Until then cheers to the goddess, the mispronunciations, and the creative risks that actually paid off.