Selling the Bro Dream: Are Frat Boys Peddling Vemma Suckers?

  |   31 October, 2014   |   859   |   3980

Vemma, the wildly popular energy drink company, may or may not be a pyramid scheme, but it'll definitely be on your college campus soon

Alex Morton can still remember the day when he decided that academics weren't for him. He was a freshman at Arizona State University, sitting in biology class, when it clicked. "My professor starts talking about biomes," he says. "I'm like, ‘My major is communications, and this guy wants me to memorize all the animals in the rainforest? I gotta go.'"



Morton is recalling this catalyzing moment while in the front passenger seat of a white Mercedes sedan speeding down an Arizona highway. To his left sits his unofficial bodyguard and driver, Joe Smith, whom everyone knows by the nickname "Sloppy." Behind him sits Claudia Chiarelli, Morton's girlfriend, a 20-year-old aspiring dental hygienist from a Chicago suburb, currently in the midst of an existential crisis caused by Instagram. "OK, seriously, picking a filter is a struggle," she says.