Listen up babes, Monster Energy has made a drink for women. It’s called FLRT (pronounced “flirt,” because, like, women love flirting, get it?). OMG girlie and it comes in four flavours: Strawberry Fling, Guava Lava, Berry Tempting, and Sunset Squeeze. It has a daisy on the can. It burns fat, and it supports your collagen, so we can be, like, hawt. It’s totally “your new crush in a can” like the website says.
Finally! An energy drink my tiny woman hands can hold, and I’m not going to be frightened by the scary font on the monster cans, because like, my silly female brain couldn’t take it.
I am obviously joking, but take a moment. Sit with this brand for a sec, are we not horrified? Why, in 2026, are we still doing such insanely stereotypical gendered marketing? FLRT feels like execs were sat in a room and asked to mind map what they thought women liked.
Here’s what gets me, Monster already has a huge, devoted, deeply weird female fanbase. Monster’s female demographic is the fastest-growing segment of their consumer base, with women leaning heavily into the Ultra range, many of which already come in pink or white cans, with silver accents. Monster’s CEO admitted as much at investor day, saying “one of the major segments that we don’t service on a more comprehensive basis is the female segment.” The problem is that it’s wrong. They do service her. She just wasn’t on their radar.
The “Monster” girl is a fully formed cultural archetype. She’s the goth girl, the alt girl, the hospitality worker who’s been white cans since her third double shift of the week, the scene kid, the gamer, the one who knows every limited edition flavour by heart. Monster was never marketed to her, and she adopted it despite the fact it wasn’t. The brand is dark, a bit feral, and she thought it was in on the joke. She liked that. She made it hers.
The women who drink it have built an entire universe out of it. Monster nail art. Monster makeup looks. Monster can crowns for Halloween. Full sets of armour made from empty cans. DIY butterflies, face masks, battle axes. Nail techs selling Y2K Monster sets in black and green chrome for £70 a pop. Someone assembled a gun out of Strawberry Dream cans and photographed it in a bathroom mirror.
It also makes sense from a brand perspective, historically, Monster has spawned a legitimately unhinged product universe, from branded condoms, to apparel. The internet met all of this with matching chaos energy. That’s a brand community Monster stumbled into, and mistakenly and then completely ignored, by making her a daisy.
What makes FLRT worse is that they knew. Before the launch, the original website copy read: “energy should be as vibrant, fearless, and fun as the women who drink it.” The backlash came before the product even hit shelves. So they swapped “women who drink it” to “people who drink it” and launched it anyway. With the daisy, and with the fat-burning claim. Even the art direction on the brand photography is trying to push it to a more mature, less demeaning space, although still very Y2K girliepop energy.
The comments were, predictably, furious and funny in equal measure. “I think actual Monster cans are way cuter than the FLRT ones. I’d rather be seen drinking a Monster than a Flirt.” “Monster cans are literally already girly and cute.” “I literally have a tattoo of the Strawberry Dream Monster. She’s cutesy.” Someone suggested Monster should make a drink for boys if anything, and you know what, fair point.
The comment that caught my eye was “It’s giving Bic for Her.”
We’ve been here before. In 2012, Bic launched a pink pen called Bic for Her, a pen made specifically for our tiny female hands. Ellen DeGeneres spent four minutes taking it apart on national television. Bic took ages to recover.
A more recent example was in November 2025, Sky Sports launched a TikTok channel called Halo, branded as their “lil sis”, complete with pink sparkle emojis, matcha references and hot girl walk captions. Female sports fans who had been watching football and F1 for years were invited into a smaller, less serious room and told this one was just for them. Halo lasted three days. The internet made it a meme within 48 hours.
Each time, the pattern is identical. The brand spots a female audience. Rather than asking her what she wants, or simply giving her the same product, they build her a separate, smaller, pinker room. Almost like they’re saying: ew, cooties. Gen Z clocks this playbook immediately and they will call it out every single time.
They fundamentally missed the truth of their consumer. Monster isn’t drunk because it has collagen. It’s drunk because it’s cool, because it gets you through a six-hour hospitality shift, because it keeps you up for a raid, because it goes with the outfit. This shouldn’t be a brand for the matcha-drinking-pilates-princess. This is a brand for the gothy underdog. It always has been.
Monster had a community of women who tattooed their cans, wore their colours, and defended the brand unprompted for twenty years. FLRT is a bad launch that missed the brief. It also told those women exactly what Monster thought of them.
So what should Monster have done? Either look at the community already building entire universes out of your cans and give them something real to work with. Or go back to zero and find an actual consumer truth rather than a portfolio gap. The brands that get it right earn it by starting somewhere real. By developing an actual understanding of why someone picks up a can in the first place. Not because it burns fat. Because it gets them through the shift. Because it goes with the outfit. What they shouldn't have done is assume the women who already drink Monster needed a separate, smaller, softer version of it. Brands should position around a genuine need, not a cultural assumption.
Too right. I do get that they are in theory trying to reach a specific type of girliepop with this launch but by saying they weren't reaching the female audience before a) suggests as you say they don't do much social listening b) suggests they think women are a monolith c) suggests they think their existing female fanbase are somehow something else?!