The video landed on a Thursday morning in late July, and within hours it had outrun the product it was built to sell. Kim Kardashian, standing behind a podium in a mock press conference, removes a pair of sunglasses to reveal a more studious pair underneath, fields questions from an invented press corps, and delivers the line that would ricochet across every feed by lunchtime: “No, I didn’t pass the bar. I raised it.” The satirical spot, staged partly inside a glass museum case with attorney Gloria Allred wandering in for a cameo, was the debut campaign for Update, the paraxanthine-powered energy drink Kardashian now co-founds. Days later, on July 26, the brand opened a “Focus Lab” pop-up on Melrose Avenue, translating a viral moment into something a customer could taste. It was, in every sense, a very Kim way to enter a very crowded room.
That room, the American energy drinks market, is valued at more than twenty billion dollars and growing even as it fills with new entrants promising an alternative to the old formula of high caffeine and high sugar. Sugar-free, low-calorie, function-forward beverages built around adaptogens, nootropics and gentler stimulation now crowd the shelf. Liquid Death introduced its own better-for-you energy drink last year at an unextreme hundred milligrams of caffeine. Update’s proposition is more radical still: no caffeine at all.
The brand was founded in 2022 by Daniel Solomons, alongside the Hess family, and its origin was a question rather than a flavor. “Science has always been at the heart of Update,” Solomons says. “We didn’t start with a flavor or a can design. We started by asking whether there was a better way to create energy.” The answer became paraxanthine, the compound the human body naturally produces when the liver metabolizes caffeine, and the one, Update argues, that actually delivers focus without the spike, the jitters, or the crash. Around it the team layered Alpha-GPC, L-Theanine and an active form of vitamin B12, a stack aimed at what Solomons calls “clarity, ambition, and a smarter approach to energy.” Nearly seventy percent of Americans still take caffeine daily, but a growing share want the lift with less of the aftermath.
Kardashian discovered the drink as a customer in 2023, began offering unsolicited feedback the following year, and formally joined as co-founder for the 2026 relaunch. Speaking to People about the campaign, she framed the appeal in personal terms, describing herself as intentional about what she puts into her body and her day, and calling that the reason Update resonated with her before any business conversation began. She has said she reaches for it before workouts, especially after school drop-off with a full day still ahead, the mother of four folding the product into the productivity persona she has spent a decade building.
Her influence runs through the relaunch’s surfaces. “We created a campaign that established an identity for the Update brand that feels fresh and new while also feeling unmistakably Kim,” says Leonor Castro, Senior Director of Creative Development and Social Strategy at OBB Bolded, the studio behind both the film and the Focus Lab. The pop-up, produced with Blue Revolver, recreated elements of the video for guests to move through while learning the science of paraxanthine and sampling the range. “The Focus Lab gives us a chance to have those conversations in a hands-on way while letting people experience the product for themselves,” Solomons says. The aesthetic is sleek, modern and, in Castro’s word, slightly futuristic.
The commercial ambition matches the theater. Already selling through its own site, Walmart and The Vitamin Shoppe, Update expects to reach more than fourteen thousand retail doors and a hundred thousand points of distribution by early in the fourth quarter, with twenty new SKUs arriving alongside. Skeptics will note, fairly, that this is another brand from a family fluent in launching them. Solomons frames her contribution as substantive rather than decorative, describing her as hands-on across formulation, positioning, creative direction and long-term vision, adding that she knows people will have something to say and does not much care, because she believes the product is genuinely differentiated.
@kimkardashian THR FUTURE OF ENERGY @Update ♬ original sound – Kim Kardashian
Whether that conviction holds is a market question, not a marketing one. Mintel analyst Julia Mills, writing in the firm’s US energy drinks report, argues the future of energy is not louder or stronger but smarter, and that the brands positioned to win will be those pairing functional performance with cleaner ingredients and everyday relevance across ages and occasions. It is a near-perfect description of what Update is attempting. Backed by differentiated science and Kardashian’s cultural fluency, the brand is wagering that the category’s next chapter belongs to restraint. The bar, as she might put it, has been raised.
