At 5:59 a.m. in a garage, Greg LaVecchia is already filming. He flew in from Aspen the night before, hit the gym at 5:00 a.m., and now he is running through a day that includes a nine-figure distribution conversation, a TikTok shop milestone, and a lesson about rotisserie chicken as a protein source. Bloom, the energy drink brand he co-founded, is on track to close the year at over $600 million in sales and is pushing toward $1 billion next year. The reason most people would never guess it from watching the day-to-day is exactly the point he keeps coming back to.
Lev’s working title at Bloom is CEO and co-founder. He is 31 years old, and the company he built is now moving well over a million cans a day.
The week Walmart rang up nearly $3 million and it felt like nothing
Bloom’s energy drink pulled $2,890,000 in sales at Walmart in a single week. The week-over-week growth rate was 0.7%. Lev describes that figure as ‘a gigantic win’ and then immediately notes it is ‘the least exciting number you have ever seen in your life.’ His point is structural: 0.7% compounded across 52 weeks produces roughly 45% annual growth. Add a record Memorial Day weekend or a major product drop where the business jumps 10% in a single week, and the compounding becomes something else entirely.
For context he keeps close, Bloom did not clear $3 million in its entire first year of business. The energy drink alone now clears that in seven days at a single retailer. He does not track the raw revenue number day to day. ‘All I care about is growth,’ he said flatly. ‘If things are working, we’re growing. If they’re not, we’re not growing.’
The distribution backbone behind those numbers is Dr. Pepper, which Bloom signed as its partner six months after launching with an exclusive Target run. That partnership has carried the brand into 50,000 doors nationwide over the past two years. Lev met recently with Dr. Pepper’s executive team to align on what the partnership needs to look like to clear $1 billion in sales next year. He and co-founder Leo are candid about their communication style in those rooms: ‘We just say we might pull this off and make jokes every 20 minutes, even in serious meetings.’ His advice to anyone sitting across from a publicly traded corporation: do not do that.
TikTok Shop hit a million units sold and Bloom is actively blocking AI-generated content
Joelle, who runs TikTok Shop and global launches for Bloom, walked through results from the past 12 months in a session that revealed one of the sharper operational moves the brand has made. Bloom has crossed 1 million units sold on TikTok Shop, ahead of other brands on the platform by a significant margin. The mechanism is deliberate: consistent flavor launches create sales spikes, and each spike is engineered to land slightly higher than the last. The upcoming Paris Scar flavor launch is described as the biggest in the brand’s history.
Bloom has also made a firm policy decision to remove any creator content on TikTok Shop that is AI-generated. ‘We will seek that content out, remove the tag, potentially even report that video,’ Joelle explained. The reasoning is competitive fairness to real creators, a 30-year-old single mom or a college student who is taking time out of their day to build an affiliate business cannot compete with an account that can pump out 10,000 AI videos in a day.
A coaching program is now in development: 10 to 15 mid-level creators who have shown consistency but have not broken through on conversion will be put through a three-month program run by one expert creator. If the cohort works, it becomes a repeatable system.
The person who figured out he had been ignoring the back shelf
A Bloom greens end cap at Walmart, the kind of grand display that Lev says he built his early career on.
For years, those premium placements ran on 30 to 90-day contracts. He chased them hard and won them repeatedly at Target, Walmart, and Sam’s Club. What he was not building was permanent shelf space in the aisles behind the display. When a retailer eventually moved the product off the end cap, there was no foundation waiting for it. Building Bloom Energy now, he said, means spending equal time on 10-year distribution contracts with exclusivity clauses as on any short-term display win. ‘That is what is going to make Bloom Energy a household brand,’ he said. ‘That is just playing chess, not checkers.’
The jet he was browsing at 5:59 a.m., the one that is going to be painted green, is somewhere in the middle of that same logic: recover the time, own the asset, stop renting what you use every week.
