Prime

A single bottle of Prime was listed for £10,000 on eBay.

Three years later it was 31p in a clearance bin.

Millions of teenagers lined up for it. Most of them never came back for a second bottle.

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THE SETUP

Logan Paul and KSI launched Prime Hydration in January 2022. It sold out in four days.

Despite popular belief, Logan Paul and KSI don't run Prime. A company called Congo Brands owns 60% of it. Congo Brands, as majority shareholder, makes the big calls, including the decision that turned a bottle shortage into a three-year factory contract.

The early months weren't really a drinks launch. They were a stampede. Teenagers lined up outside Asda before it opened. Bottles resold online for hundreds of pounds, then thousands, with one listing reaching £10,000. Retailers started locking Prime in anti-theft cabinets, the same treatment they give razor blades and baby formula. At Asda, individual Prime flavours were outselling Lucozade Sport, a drink that had been on shelves for decades.

Shelves were emptying. Resale prices were climbing. Nobody could keep the drink in stock. In April 2023, demand looked the strongest and Congo Brands signed a deal to guarantee three years of production, roughly 666 million bottles.

It looked like a smart company backing a winner.

The bet: that people buying Prime because it was hard to find would keep buying it once it was easily available.

None of this was visible from outside the company at the time. The data that would eventually explain what went wrong, tracked by retail analytics firm Numerator, didn't become public until 2024, after the sales figures had already started falling.

By 2024 that bet had gone wrong. US sales fell roughly 40% in six months, driven by fewer new buyers and falling repeat purchase rates, according to Numerator. One analysis of the brand's collapse put the repeat purchase rate at around 12%, against brand awareness close to 100%: nearly everyone knew Prime, hardly anyone kept buying it.

UK revenue dropped from £112m to £33m in a year. Gordon Ramsay had already called the drink a 0 out of 10. Nobody standing outside Asda at 6am had cared what it tasted like. By 2024, plenty of people clearly did.

The rush had gone. The contract to make 666 million bottles was still running.

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THE MOMENT

March 2024. A factory in Missouri, built specially to make Prime, sits empty. Congo Brands didn't turn up for a test run. A month later Congo Brands tells the factory's owner, Refresco, that the deal is off. Refresco doesn't accept that and takes Congo Brands to court.

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The numbers (2023-2026):

→ Global sales at peak: $1.2bn in 2023

→ UK sales: £112m down to £33m in a year, a 70% drop

→ UK profit: £21.6m down to £3.1m, an 85% drop

→ US sales: down roughly 40% in the first half of 2024, driven by fewer new buyers and falling repeat purchases, according to Numerator

→ Sales at Prime's Australian distributor: A$31m down to A$14.5m, before it collapsed into administration in July 2026

→ The bill for walking away from the factory deal: a $67.71m lawsuit, filed August 2024

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THE PLAYBOOK

1. Mistaking a rush for loyalty

• Prime launched in January 2022 and sold out in four days, without a single advert.

• There's no evidence Congo Brands ever tracked repeat purchase before locking in years of extra supply and the data that would later reveal the problem wasn't public until 2024.

• By October 2022 a bottle was listed for £10,000 on eBay. By January 2023, Asda was rationing customers to three bottles each, and KSI was publicly begging fans to stop reselling.

• Neither the numbers nor the contract ever separated a launch spike from lasting demand. Market share hit 41% within a year, and nothing on record shows it was tested for durability.

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2. A three year bet

• In April 2023, Prime was at its peak. $1.2bn a year in sales. Shelves emptying across the UK and US.

• Congo Brands signed a three year deal for 666 million bottles, with no get-out if sales dropped.

• A factory in Missouri was built specifically to make them. By April 2024, Prime had ordered zero bottles from it.

• That August, the factory's owner sued for $67.71m, saying it had built a production line around a promise Congo Brands had already broken.

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3. Repeat purchases

• While the factory deal was being signed, Congo Brands pushed Prime into more than 90,000 shops.

• By the time that expansion peaked, Numerator's tracking was already showing fewer new buyers and falling repeat purchase rates, the two things retail expansion depends on. That tracking only became public in 2024, well after the shops had already been stocked.

• US sales fell roughly 40% in six months, according to Numerator. UK sales dropped 70% and profit fell 85%, a steeper fall that's consistent with heavy discounting, though the published accounts don't break out the cause.

• Stock that wasn't selling ended up in clearance bins at 31p by 2025.

• By July 2026, Prime's Australian distributor had gone into administration too, its sales down from A$31m to A$14.5m and its unsold stock worth barely a tenth of what it used to be.

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Every hyped drink slows down eventually. Novelty always fades.

The mistake was what Congo Brands did while the hype was still running: locking in three years of factory time and 90,000 shops before repeat purchase had ever been tested. That turned an ordinary slowdown into a $67.71m lawsuit, an empty factory in Missouri and a company on the other side of the world going bust.

Prime was an incredible launch. Whether it was ever a great business is a different question, and the numbers that emerged later point to an answer: fewer new buyers and fewer of them coming back for a second bottle.

A rush tells you how many people want something today. It doesn't tell you how many will still want it once anyone can walk in and buy one.

The rush was never the market.

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ONE MORE THING

In July 2026, Congo Brands Australia, the local distributor of Prime, collapsed into administration with under $85,000 in the bank and close to $8m in debt.

Its own paperwork says the business had only stayed afloat because Congo Brands, the US parent company, kept sending money, and had promised more support "for the foreseeable future."

A packaging supplier is separately trying to force the company into full liquidation through the courts. The administrator now running the business has been told to look into its relationship with the wider Congo Brands group.

Nobody outside the company knows what that will find yet. But, it suggest that this story has another chapter.

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THE PAPER TRAIL

Prime: From $1.2B to $300M in Two Years

Read time: 7 min

A compact strategic teardown of the boom-and-bust.

https://femfounded.org/case-studies/prime/

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Prime Hydration profits slump

Read time: 3 min

A report highlighting the gross-profit collapse. Down about 85% to £3.1m and Prime UK’s decision to launch a strategic review after the hypergrowth phase ended.

https://www.grocerygazette.co.uk/2025/06/23/prime-hydration-profits-slump/

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Prime Energy, PFAS and Caffeine: The Class-Action Problem

Read time: 5 min

A scandal-side read: it covers lawsuits alleging Prime Energy contained more caffeine than labelled and that a Prime Hydration flavour contained PFAS “forever chemicals.”

https://eu.usatoday.com/story/money/2024/04/23/prime-drink-lawsuit-update/73424197007/

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“Nobody Wants to Drink This” — The Fan Backlash in Prime’s Own Subreddit

Read time: 3 min

Not evidence for a financial claim, but a revealing cultural thread.

https://www.reddit.com/r/prime/comments/16f2s9v/nobody_wants_to_drink_this_shit/

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