Put Ghia and De Soi next to each other and cover the labels. Both are non-alcoholic aperitifs. Both lean botanical and bitter-adjacent. Both talk about adaptogens and ritual. Both shoot the bottle on a sunlit table with a linen napkin and something ceramic in the background. Ghia was founded in Los Angeles in 2020 by Melanie Masarin and grew, by its own account, out of an Instagram launch during lockdown. De Soi came later, from Katy Perry and the distiller Morgan McLachlan, and sits in Target and Whole Foods.
They are competitors and they are both doing well, which tells you the customer is real. That customer is also extremely specific: a design-literate woman, hosting, who wants the evening to feel like something without the drink in it.
Nobody is making this drink for the other half of the room
There is a man at that same party who is not drinking either, and every option on the shelf is a pastel can of florals. He is not the target of a single brand in the aperitif aisle. Not because anybody decided to exclude him, but because the category was built by people making the drink they wanted, and everyone who arrived afterwards benchmarked against the brands already working.
The gap is not the drink. It is what the drink says about the person holding it. A man at a barbecue, at poker night, at a bar with friends who are drinking, wants an object that reads as a drink rather than as an abstention. Right now the honest choices are a soda, a lime and soda, or something that looks like it came from a wellness shelf.
Be careful: half of this lane is already occupied
Athletic Brewing already solved this in beer, and solved it properly. Non-alcoholic beer with a sports identity, sold in the beer aisle, sponsoring the things a beer sponsors. Anyone who says the men's non-alcoholic market is untouched has not looked at that company.
What Athletic Brewing does not cover is the rest of the bar. Beer solves one occasion. It does not solve the pour over ice, the thing that goes in a glass with a stir, the drink you make for someone at your house. That is the spirits and aperitif half of the shelf, and it is still aimed at one person.
What the counter-brand looks like
Bitter rather than floral, and closer to amaro than to a spritz. Dark glass or a matte can. Named like a drink and not like a wellness product, which rules out most of the vocabulary the category currently uses. Merchandised next to bourbon rather than next to kombucha, because shelf position is positioning whether you intended it or not.
Held at a grill, it should not look like it wandered in from a different party. That single test kills most of the design directions the category currently produces, which is the point.
How to check this before you spend money on it
Read who is posting rather than how much. Pull the public posts mentioning every brand in the category and look at the accounts behind them. If the creators tagging each brand are the same kind of account with the same audience, the category has converged on one customer no matter how many logos are on the shelf.
That is what the board of trending mentions is for: one row per post, with the creator who made it. Filter to Food and Beverage and read the handles rather than the numbers. A category where every mention comes from the same corner of Instagram is a category with one identity in it and room beside it.
The reason this might not work
The optimistic reading is that a whole customer group is unserved. The pessimistic reading is that they are served by simply not drinking, and will not pay $30 a bottle to hold something that looks right. Those are genuinely different worlds and the shelf cannot tell you which one you are in.
The cheap way to find out is to sell one before you make it. Put the can design in front of the specific man you have in mind, and if the reaction is a shrug, you have saved yourself a production run. That is a less exciting answer than a market-size chart, and considerably more reliable than one.