alice mushrooms

Communications & Community Strategy
Agency: FuTong & Friends

alice mushrooms is a wellness brand producing functional mushroom–infused chocolates designed to support focus, sleep, stress regulation, and mood. By combining organic dark chocolate with adaptogens, nootropics, and functional mushrooms, the brand sits between supplements and confectionery, making daily wellness routines more enjoyable and accessible.

Functional wellness products rarely succeed through messaging alone. Their value is understood through experience. At a premium price point, customers needed to feel the effects of the product before believing in it. The challenge for alice was introducing the product in environments where those benefits could be felt naturally.

Rather than marketing the brand broadly, we developed a communications strategy that mapped each alice SKU to cultural environments where its effects would feel intuitive.

For Brainstorm, a cordyceps-based chocolate designed for focus and energy, we partnered with HBO’s The Last of Us, a series built around a fictional cordyceps outbreak. The cultural familiarity of the ingredient created a natural entry point for alice’s real-world formulation, allowing the brand to participate in an existing conversation rather than explain functional mushrooms from scratch. The limited-edition collaboration generated viral engagement and won Inc.’s Best in Business Award for Best Partnership (2025).

For Nightcap, a chocolate designed to support sleep, we partnered with boutique and luxury hospitality properties including W Hotels and Ash Hotels, integrating single-dose chocolates into turndown service. Placing the product within environments already associated with rest encouraged immediate trial among high-intent consumers.

For Party Trick, a sober-friendly chocolate designed to support social ease, we embedded sampling and storytelling within nightlife and cultural events across New York and Los Angeles. The launch combined a creator-led content series, My Night With Party Trick, with real-world activations that introduced the product in the environments it was designed for. Collaborators including DJ Chloé Caillet, comedian Jenny Gorelick, and tastemakers Justin Moran and Jess Graves documented their evenings with the product, sharing it with their communities and incorporating it into their routines.
Because adaptogenic mushroom products can carry confusion around their effects in party environments, introducing Party Trick within authentic social settings allowed audiences to understand the product through experience, transforming a potentially misunderstood supplement into a shared cultural moment.

By aligning each product with environments where its benefits made intuitive sense, the strategy allowed alice to build credibility and cultural relevance while accelerating commercial growth.

By 2025, alice mushrooms had reached eight-figure revenue with approximately 40% year-over-year growth, expanding into major retailers including Whole Foods, Target, and Sprouts.