"The next energy drink I promote will be my own": How Amanda Saez built Pretty Extra Energy

Amanda Saez modeled for Bang Energy for years, back when it was everywhere, until the company got sued, got sold, and her contract vanished with it. The question everyone around her asked was which energy drink she would sign with next.

Her answer was none of them. She didn't like any of the other cans on the shelf, and she'd decided the next one with her face on it would be hers.

"Unless something new comes out that I absolutely love, the next energy drink I promote will be my own."

With a following in the hundreds of thousands, she could have signed almost anything; lending her name out is the easy money. What she wanted was the slow, expensive version, with a real formula and a manufacturer behind it and her name on something she actually owned.

She could describe the drink before it existed, mostly by the way it was supposed to make you feel. She calls it your main character era.

"It's that feeling when your outfit is perfect, your hair looks amazing, your friends are waiting for you, and you're walking out the door knowing you're about to have a great day or an unforgettable night."

The drink that had to exist

There was a more personal reason underneath the branding. Every doctor and nurse Amanda ever saw told her to quit energy drinks, and she never wanted to. She just thought someone could make one that didn't feel like a guilty habit, so she set out to.

What came of it was Pretty Extra Energy: clean energy without the jitters or the crash, built on green tea caffeine, L-theanine, collagen, and functional mushrooms. Pink Lemonade to start, in a sunny yellow can that reads "pretty on the outside, powerful on the inside," with her own dog, a chihuahua, drawn dancing across the front.

None of that is cheap or fast. A custom formula can run thirty thousand dollars before anyone prints a label, and most people who look into it give up around there. Amanda had reason to think she wouldn't. She'd built a swimwear line during the pandemic that did better than anyone expected, so she knew how to take something from idea to inventory. The formula was the one piece she couldn't do herself.

She'd been after Genie about it for a while, first reaching out before Genie even worked on drinks, then checking back every few weeks.

"Sooo... are you doing beverages yet? 😂"

A few months later the answer was yes.

The part Genie made possible

Amanda is good at the parts of a brand most people find hard: the story, the look, knowing what her audience wants before they do. Turning a wish list of ingredients into something that could be produced safely at scale is a different skill, and she's the first to say it isn't hers. That part she built on Genie, the AI platform she used to develop the drink, with a chemist going over every version.

The chemistry humbled her. She'd come in with a dozen functional ingredients she loved, assuming they would all go in together.

"One of the funniest and most humbling moments was when the chemist basically told me they couldn't all work together."

They wouldn't. A few of them canceled each other out, and others either ruined the taste or wouldn't survive a few months in a can. The formula got cut to what mattered and what could coexist. She held out for an American manufacturer that met her bar on safety and quality, and Genie found one inside a week.

"I don't know how to formulate a beverage from a scientific standpoint. That's not my expertise."

She didn't need to be the chemist. She brought the drink she could already picture, Genie turned it into one a factory could actually make, and she got back to the parts only she could do.

May 17

The first people outside her circle to taste Pretty Extra Energy did it at her launch in Miami, on May 17. More than a hundred showed up. Amanda poured the samples herself and watched faces, which was the part she'd been dreading, because she genuinely wants to know when something is bad.

Half the room had never met her, and those were the reactions she trusted. They kept asking where to buy it. A couple tried to buy it off her on the spot, and she had to explain there was nothing to sell yet.

"I remember feeling both excited and guilty because I couldn't sell it yet."

A few days later she paid the manufacturer to run the first few thousand cans. That, she says, is when it stopped being a plan.

"Sending that payment felt different than anything else, because there was no turning back."

The strange part was how calm the rest of it felt.

"They took what could have easily been a 12 out of 10 stress level and turned it into a 1 out of 10."

She never put her life on hold for it. She kept modeling and making content and DJing the whole way through.

She owns all of it

Pretty Extra Energy is on Walmart.com now, with retail shelves next. Amanda owns all of it, start to finish; she didn't trade a stake for the help or sell the brand to get it made.

That ownership matters more than it sounds, because of what she plans to do with it. The dog on the can is her own, and a share of every sale goes to no-kill animal shelters. For Amanda that was never a marketing afterthought; it's close to the reason she wanted a brand in the first place. She's already planning DJ sets where shelters bring adoptable animals, the door money going straight to adoption fees and whatever a shelter needs that week.

That's the tell. The Walmart listing is the headline, but the dog on the yellow can is the point. Amanda didn't want a brand so she could say she had one. She wanted something that was hers, that she could aim at the things she actually cares about. Now she has it.

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