Nostalgia, with Bubbles

Prebiotic soda brand, OLIPOP, turned a kitschy roadside motel into a living, breathing time machine...and then it let the internet do the rest

Author

John Kappel
July 14, 2025

Soda the way you remember it, only better for your gut and vibe. The OLIPOP brand leans heavy into nostalgia, with a modern twist.

From their vintage-inspired can designs to old-school flavor throwbacks like Cream Soda, Root Beer, and Cherry Cola, OLIPOP is tapping into a collective memory bank for its target audience, selling a time, place, and feeling.

When OLIPOP staged their motel takeover giveaway, the goal was to have every bit of it take people back to the decades that spoke most to them. OLIPOP turned a can of soda into an immersive memory. Each room let guests walk straight into the eras OLIPOP’s flavors evoke. The theme was a full on physical extension of the brand’s identity.

The Build: A Retro Remix That Felt Fresh

  • Location: The Carpenter Hotel in Austin - a boutique motel already known for its retro vibe.

  • Tactile Interactivity: Each room had hands-on props, photo ops, and design elements people wanted to explore and capture.

  • Cultural Layering: From Elvis posters to vintage cassette tapes, the experience was rooted in cultural fluency, not surface-level aesthetics.

Guests could enter to win a night’s stay, get custom content, and sip their way through the decades…literally. And they posted about it. A lot.

Flavor = Feeling

Cream Soda Suite - 1986: A dreamy blend of Y2K futurism and Miami Vice. Soft neon underlighting, layered palm silhouettes, and a wall stacked with vintage tube TVs playing endless loops of retro visuals. It’s chill, breezy, and oddly comforting — like sipping a vanilla float while watching reruns in your cousin’s basement.

OLIPOP’s Cream Soda Room

Strawberry Vanilla Suite - 1995: This suite leans full nostalgia-core with inflatable furniture, lava lamps, beaded curtains, and walls covered in smiley faces, boy band posters, and pop culture throwbacks. The strawberry-pink glow bathes everything in a warm, fuzzy memory. Even the OLIPOP cans got the “Saved by the ‘90s” treatment. It was a nod to an era, ad an immersive mixtape moment.

Cherry Cola Suite - 2002: This room was an unapologetic explosion of red and bejewels, with glowing neon ceiling cherries, cherry-printed bedding and velvet textures. It gave glam rock meets 2000s teen idol fantasy, with rhinestone “Cherry Cola” signage, disco-inspired lighting, and that iconic hanging egg chair. This is a room made for selfies, slow dances, and soda sips.

OLIPOP’s Cherry Cola Room

Why Nostalgia Sells

Nostalgia activates the medial prefrontal cortex, the brain’s emotional processing center. That’s the same place where we store memories tied to identity, comfort, and belonging. When a brand taps into that reservoir, it immediately feels more familiar to the audience, even when the brand or product are new.

As Dr. Valentina Stoycheva, a clinical psychologist specializing in trauma, put it in a New York Times feature on nostalgia and stress: “Trauma takes away our gray areas. It divides our timeline into a before and an after… Nostalgic behaviors become transitional objects.”

Transitional objects. Like a baby blanket. Or your favorite childhood movie. Or a bedroom decked out in ‘90s boyband posters and smiley faces (sound familiar?). These are the things we reach for when the world feels too heavy, because they help us regulate. They soothe. They remind us that somewhere, sometime, we felt okay.

That’s why brands like OLIPOP, who anchor their identity in nostalgia are actually meeting a customer need of reconnecting with a safer version of their selves.

Study Alert: A 2014 study published in the Journal of Consumer Research found that nostalgic feelings make consumers more willing to spend money — especially on products that feel like a continuation of a cherished memory.

📈 The ROI: From Pop-Up to Pop Off

  • UGC Overload: Social feeds were flooded with user content, not because OLIPOP asked for it—but because people wanted to share it.

  • Brand Depth: Instead of a flat “here’s a new flavor,” OLIPOP built a full-blown experience world around it.

  • Long-Term Equity: The brand positioned itself not just as a soda alternative, but as a culture-first, emotionally resonant player.