Kendall Jenner Joins TRIP
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Exclusive: Business by LA Times Studios spoke with Olivia Ferdi, co-founder and CEO of TRIP, as Kendall Jenner joins the brand as global ambassador and equity shareholder.
Kendall Jenner has fronted plenty of brand campaigns. This one is different. TRIP, the calming drinks company built around magnesium and botanicals, has named Jenner its Global Ambassador and, more notably, an equity shareholder, a structure that gives her a financial stake in a business she says she was already obsessed with long before anyone offered her a deal.
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Skin In The Game
TRIP was started in 2019 by husband-and-wife team Olivia Ferdi and Daniel Khoury, after Khoury discovered the effects of magnesium and botanicals while recovering from knee surgery weeks before their wedding. The couple pooled their savings and launched what they call “canned calm,” a low-calorie sparkling drink built as an alternative to an afternoon coffee or an evening drink. Since then, TRIP has become the fastest-growing sparkling drinks brand in the U.S. this year, according to SPINS, and is on track to hit $200 million in revenue in 2026.
“I’ve been obsessed with TRIP for a while, the product is incredible, and I’ve always loved how elevated and intentional the brand feels,” Jenner said. “It’s my favorite way to stay grounded and present in my daily routine. It tastes great and makes me feel amazing. When I met Liv and Dan, I instantly connected with what they’re building. I love their vision for the brand and their mission to help more people find calm in their everyday lives. I’m so excited to be part of their journey.”
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That connection is exactly why the deal is structured as equity, not just endorsement. In an exclusive interview with Business by LA Times Studios, Olivia Ferdi, TRIP’s co-founder and CEO, said Jenner stood out long before the deal came together. “She was a genuine TRIP fan before she was ever a partner, she found us organically, the way so much of our community has, not through a pitch deck,” Ferdi said. “When someone is a shareholder alongside you, there’s a fundamentally different level of alignment. Beyond connection with the mission and vision, there’s thinking about long-term value of the brand and the business you’re building together.”
From Feed To Fridge
TRIP has generated more than a billion impressions across Instagram and TikTok in the past year and is one of the most popular beverages on TikTok Shop globally, a social-first following the brand built before it ever appeared in a national retailer. It has since expanded from cult early partners like Erewhon and Soho House into Target, Whole Foods Market, Sprouts, Walmart, Costco, Albertsons, H-E-B, Wegmans, CVS and The Vitamin Shoppe. “Building trust in the places our community already lived first meant TRIP had genuine cultural credibility before it had national distribution,” Ferdi said. “People discovered the brand, shared it and helped build it with us.”
Turning that following into a $200 million business took more than attention, according to Ferdi. “‘Calming drink’ wasn’t really a shelf tag when we started,” she said. “We weren’t simply introducing people to a new brand; we were asking them to create an entirely new reach-for-it moment in their day.” According to SPINS, calming drinks are now the fastest-growing category in functional beverages, ahead of gut health, protein and hydration, and Ferdi points to survey data from Toluna showing U.S. consumers now rank mental wellbeing as their top health concern behind only weight loss. She says 49% of TRIP drinkers report multiple use occasions for the product, more than double the rate for sparkling water, with the brand already holding the highest repeat rate of any name in the calming-drinks set. “The global household brands of our generation will be built on social media,” she said, “but a brand’s cultural relevance combined with the product quality and experience is a combination that cannot be underestimated. Social can start the conversation, but to become part of someone’s daily ritual is what builds the business.”
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The Bigger Bet
Ferdi frames TRIP’s mission in terms bigger than a single celebrity deal: helping what she describes as a billion people find calm in everyday life. “Helping a billion people find calm isn’t a campaign line to me,” she said. “It’s why I left law to build TRIP in the first place. And the bigger we become, the greater the opportunity we have to actually achieve it.”
TRIP says it is on track to double its 2026 revenue again in 2027. For Jenner, the deal adds a genuine business chapter to a pattern of culturally influential figures moving from paid spokesperson to actual stakeholder in the brands they already love. For TRIP, it is validation that the discipline that turned a newlywed couple’s homemade recovery drink into a category-defining, nine-figure business is exactly what makes it ready for its biggest spotlight yet, with one of the most culturally fluent names in the world now genuinely invested in seeing it succeed.
