John Celenza collapsed on a plane somewhere over the US-Canada border.
He'd combined a business trip with a buddy's wedding in Vegas, hadn't slept, hadn't drunk anything at the wedding because he was in business mode the whole time, and somewhere between the bathroom and the cockpit he went down. Woke up with strangers on top of him. Got back up. Went down again. One of the flight attendants picked up a business card that had fallen from his pocket — Biosteel — and recognized the brand. No, no, I know this brand. This guy's legit. That's the only reason the rest of the passengers weren't more alarmed. They wheeled him off the plane. His wife was waiting at the curb. What did you do? Why are these people escorting you out?
That story is about more than grinding yourself into the ground. It's about what it takes to build a brand that a stranger on a plane recognizes well enough to vouch for you — and then doing it again from scratch after you sell the first one.
John is the CEO and founder of Sizzle Brands, which makes Quench, a no-sugar electrolyte drink in Tetra packaging that professional teams are actually paying for — which, as he pointed out, is the tell. When athletes are getting Gatorade for free and they're still buying yours, the product is working. I know Quench from my own house. My wife brought it home from the gym. My naturopath happened to be over, tried it, and said the formulation was as clean as anything he'd seen. That's the chain. That's exactly how John built Biosteel, too — validate with the best in the world first, let word spread from there.
The one idea running through the entire conversation — through Biosteel, through Quench, through every endorsement story John told — is this: authenticity is not a vibe check. It's a filter. And when you skip the filter because a distributor is pressuring you or a retailer is dangling a big display, the deal fails. Every time.
The Dez Bryant lesson
Before Quench, John was running Biosteel. And before the NHL deal, before Zeke Elliott, before any of the big names — there was Dez Bryant. Peak Dez. The shoot was supposed to be an hour. Dez was there for four, playing basketball with everyone on set, completely locked in. Great guy, great fit.
Then Roc Nation came in, Dez moved on, and John's phone rings at 6:45 in the evening. "Is this John Celenza? Please hold for Mr. Jones." Jerry Jones. Jerry tells John there are some issues with the Dez arrangement, that he supports his athletes having endorsement deals, but they need to clean it up. Then: "Here's what you're gonna do. You're gonna endorse Sean Lee. Whatever you pay Sean Lee, I'll buy in product for my team. And about a year from now, we'll have our next offensive star, and he'll be yours."
John took Jerry at his word. They flew down to Cowboys camp in Oxnard, shot Sean Lee, John walked around without his credentials on because he didn't feel like wearing them, kicked field goals in his socks. And the following year, Zeke walked on stage at the draft in that half-shirt, and the next morning John's phone rang. "So I heard we're doing a deal."
I've been in enough rooms to know that story isn't just a good story. It's a case study in how the best endorsement relationships actually form. Jerry didn't force anything. He let the product find the right athlete. Dez left, Sean Lee was a bridge, Zeke was the destination — and the whole chain held because Jerry kept his word and John trusted the process. The fit had to be right. When it was right, everything else followed.
The authenticity filter, in practice
John's word for the framework is authenticity, and he uses it precisely. Not as a marketing term. As a literal checklist item — box one, before anything else gets discussed.
Here's what the filter actually looks like in practice with Quench. Nathan MacKinnon, NHL MVP, was involved in the R&D process before there was a deal. Andy O'Brien, Quench's chief product formulator, had been training Nate since he was a teenager. So when the brand was being built, Nate was already in the room — trying products, giving feedback, testing formulations. The endorsement conversation happened after the product relationship was already real. Pat Brisson, Nate's agent and one of the most connected people in hockey, didn't need to be negotiated hard because there was nothing to argue about. The fit was obvious to everyone.
Andrew Wiggins is an investor. Cole Caufield found the product through the same agent network. I'm on the board of Quench and a partner in what they're building, so when Vida — who came into this through me — walked into a preseason game carrying a Quench without anyone telling him to, it wasn't an accident. He'd heard about it, looked into it the way athletes look into things when they trust the source, and decided he wanted it in his hand. That's not in his contract. It doesn't need to be.
PULL QUOTE: "When you create a best-in-class product, you're gonna attract best-in-class people." — John Celenza
John also told me about the deals that didn't follow this path. When a distributor pressured him to sign someone quickly because a big retailer wanted that athlete on the display — no one flew out, nobody looked the athlete in the eye, nobody asked whether the product was actually part of their life — it didn't work. It was a bit forced. That's his word for it. Forced. And forced deals don't generate the thing that makes endorsements actually valuable: the athlete going above and beyond because they want to, not because they're contractually obligated.
The equity shift nobody's ignoring anymore
The other conversation happening in every endorsement negotiation right now is equity — and John has thought harder about the structure of those deals than almost anyone I've talked to.
The David Wright story he told lands differently depending on how much you know about opportunity cost. A Canadian sparkling water company offered Steve Nash $300,000 cash. Vitaminwater offered equity. Nash took the cash. Wright took the equity, got hurt, but the shares were still there when Coca-Cola acquired Vitaminwater for $4.1 billion. Wright cashed out eight figures.
That gap — between the cash number that looks real and the equity number that looks theoretical — is where athletes have historically gotten it wrong. Including me. I sat in cash from 2010 to 2012 because I didn't trust what I didn't understand, and the opportunity cost of those two years was real. I've talked about this before. The version of me coming into the league today would be in a completely different posture about equity.
John's approach with Quench is to offer a combination — some cash with performance incentives, some options or equity that vest over time. The public company structure makes the equity feel legible to athletes in a way that private equity doesn't. They can look at the stock price. They can see how their post affects investor sentiment. They understand that their name on a news release has a measurable effect on something they own a piece of. That changes the relationship. Why wouldn't I go above and beyond? I'm only helping myself and the people I partnered with.
The athletes who take those deals and then actually engage with the business — showing up to meetings, asking questions, genuinely caring about where the company goes — are the ones who end up making real money from them. The ones who take the cash and phone in the social posts are the ones who tell a different story ten years later.
How you actually measure whether it's working
I asked John point-blank how he measures ROI on an endorsement deal, and I appreciated the first thing he said: "Anybody who tells you they have it down to an exact science is full of it."
That's honest. The social analytics on influencer posts — the click-through rates, the conversion tracking — that's relatively measurable. The macro effect of having Nathan MacKinnon associated with your brand across all of Canada is not something you can put in a spreadsheet. What John does instead is run promotions built around the athlete and watch what happens to velocity. Skate with Nate: an internal contest where the salespeople at retail locations who sold the most Quench got entered to skate with MacKinnon in Halifax. The entries got competitive. The velocity went up. That's a read. When the grocery chain executives are bringing their kids out to take a photo with your athlete, you know the asset is doing something.
The regional version of this is cleaner. Local team partnership, limited-time product with the team logo, a defined geographic radius for the deal, specific social mentions from the team account. You can track sales in that radius before and during the promotion. You know what the deal cost. You know your margins. The math is right there.
The harder thing to track — and the thing that actually matters most — is what the athlete opened that would've stayed closed. When MacKinnon walks into a buyer meeting with John, what SKUs does that unlock? That's not in a dashboard. But you know it when it happens.
What I'd tell an athlete being approached for an endorsement deal
Three things, in the order they matter:
- Ask yourself if you'd use the product without being paid to. This is the first question and it should end the conversation if the answer is no. Not because authenticity is a virtue — although it is — but because inauthentic deals produce inauthentic content, and audiences can feel the difference immediately. John has watched forced deals fail. I've seen it from the athlete side too. The math on a cash check evaporates fast when the deal damages your credibility for the next one. The brands worth partnering with are the ones already in your life, or the ones you'd genuinely want in your life once you understood what they are. Start there.
- Take the equity conversation seriously, especially early-stage companies. Steve Nash's $300,000 looks fine until you know what David Wright's equity became. I'm not saying always take equity over cash — cash matters, especially when you're earlier in your career and the bills are real. But understand what you're trading. Ask to see the cap table. Ask about the vesting schedule. Ask what a realistic exit looks like and on what timeline. The companies that offer equity aren't doing you a favor by default — some of those options will be worth nothing. But the ones that are building something real, with a track record you can verify, deserve a serious look at the upside before you take the flat fee and walk away.
- The minimum in a contract is a floor, not a target. What John said about athletes going above and beyond when the deal is authentic — Vida walking into a preseason game with Quench because he wanted to, not because it was in his agreement — that's the version of an endorsement that compounds. The brands remember who showed up. The agents talk to each other. The deals that come next are shaped by the reputation you built in the deal before. When I work with T. Rowe Price or any partner I'm in business with, I'm looking for ways to add value past what's on paper, because I'm thinking about who they talk to and what they say. The floor is a starting point. The ceiling is up to you.
John sold Biosteel in 2019 and cried the day the deal closed — not from relief, he said, but from loss. I knew it wasn't mine anymore. He spent the non-compete years thinking about what he'd do differently, and then built Sizzle Brands around the answer. The thing he kept was the filter. The part he refined was everything else.
The filter is simple: is this real, or is this forced? You can feel the difference before the contract is written. So can your audience.