Munich Startup: When we first spoke in 2019, you still had to explain Air Up to everyone because no one had heard of it. Is that different now?
Lena Jüngst, Air Up: It absolutely is! We’re incredibly proud that we’ve now been able to inspire over five million customers with our scent-based drinking system! That’s probably also because we’re now available in eleven countries. But even with increased brand awareness, we still have to explain our product from time to time. It’s simply in the nature of things when you launch an innovative product and open up a completely new category. Our task is to use our communication to create understanding for this new form of daily hydration. Our new advertising campaign “This is not a water bottle” is supposed to help us with that.
Air Up: Rapid growth was challenging
Munich Startup: What obstacles have you encountered on the way from then to now?
Lena Jüngst: I’d actually prefer to speak of challenges rather than obstacles. After all, all the paths, all the decisions we’ve made so far have led us here – to our new 3,600 square meter office in the wonderful Werksviertel. For us as a company, rapid growth was certainly challenging: Just four years after founding, we now employ over 300 Air Uppies – all of them “remote-first” and distributed across Europe and the USA.
Bringing together the needs of all employees as best as possible, building a positive corporate culture, efficient processes, and the right technical setup required a lot from our team. Not least because we’ve always cared about sustainable growth and wanted to make the “right” decisions for our young company and our employees. We probably just think a bit more conservatively than other startups.
Munich Startup: How has your solution evolved?
Lena Jüngst: We constantly work on developing ourselves and our product. Starting with the use of new materials with our stainless steel bottle launched in 2022, to the development of new exciting flavors, to moving our production to Europe. We’re already producing a large portion of our products in Austria and the Netherlands – we’re incredibly proud of that. Another production facility in Germany should follow later this year.
Profitable business: revenue increased by 75 percent
Munich Startup: And how are things looking financially for you?
Lena Jüngst: After we closed 2021 with 90 million euros in revenue, we closed 2022 with 159 million euros. That’s a plus of 75 percent in just one year! We’re especially pleased about that because we’ve managed to grow sustainably at all times, despite expansion into further markets and investments in production relocation and the new office. Since the end of 2020, we’ve been profitable – at Air Up, we only spend money that we have.
Munich Startup: What learnings has your founding team taken away so far?
Lena Jüngst: If we were to start over today, we’d probably rely on our own web shop right from the start when selling our products. But during the founding phase, we were still convinced that we could only be successful if we were available everywhere possible and people could also try out the product. That led to our team initially standing in hardware stores to present our product directly at the POS (point of sale). But we quickly realized that this could lead to significant loss of control over the positioning and pricing of our own product. We didn’t want to risk that at all and quickly made a strategy change that paid off. Today we focus our communication on digital marketing and only go into offline retail once we’ve already achieved broad brand awareness in the markets.
“We’re bringing the cool kids to Munich”
Munich Startup: What role has the Munich ecosystem played in your journey so far?
Lena Jüngst: The decision to choose Munich as the new anchor point for our 300 team members was not a coincidence: Moving to Berlin or another city was never really an option for us – we were born and grew up here and want to grow old here too. Munich is our home. As we grow and expand our business, we do it where it began. By moving to the Werksviertel, we want to give something back to the city and show our deep connection and gratitude. And to be honest, the Werksviertel as a work-life quarter can definitely keep up with Berlin. We’re bringing the cool kids to Munich, after all.
Munich Startup: What milestones are you working towards next?
Where do I even start? One special passion project is the successful and complete relocation of our production to Europe – we’re working on that at full speed right now. Then there’s our “sustainability by design” approach, with which we’ve set ourselves the goal of continuously tinkering with further product improvements. This ranges from reducing our packaging to using new materials to our digital product – our web shop. We definitely have quite a bit planned here that existing and future Air Up fans can look forward to!
