By Taylor Bright Photo by Jordan Wald
In an office in Birmingham, in a place that would be hard to say if it were Birmingham, Homewood or Mountain Brook, Tommy Mayfield types into an old Mac computer, surrounded by books that make it hard to tell if it’s an office or the dorm room of an honors student.
There’s a poster of Flannery O’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away not yet hung on the wall, an Episcopal hymnal and multiple books by C.S. Lewis. Sitting on an end table waiting for a guest is a new “hydration” drink, NU/KE. And, Mayfield, the 45-five-year old CEO of the company has already led a career as varied as his interests. “I kind of liked not fitting into a box,” says Mayfield, a Mountain Brook native, who played basketball and guitar growing up. “I didn’t want to be just the athlete or just the musician. There’s a through line in that I’ve always had multiple interests, and it feels like maybe that’s kind of shaped some of my career trajectory.”
That career trajectory put him at first on a path to study law at the University of Virginia after graduating from Vanderbilt University with a stop in Washington, D.C., in between and then returning home and working for what is now the Birmingham law firm Maynard Nexsen. “I also knew, being from Birmingham, being close to my family, I always thought there’s going to be a time where I want to come back here,” says Mayfield, who now lives “less than a mile” from his childhood home in Mountain Brook.
Mayfield spent seven years practicing “general commercial litigation” before he came to a crossroads. “I felt like I was at a point where I needed to either decide, hey, this is really what I’m going to do professionally long term, or, if not, I probably need to look at other options,” he recalls. Those other options turned him into an entrepreneur. When he left the law firm in 2016, he worked on an idea for a few months before leaving it. And, then came his first success—an app called Wyndy that connected people looking for babysitters with students to look after their children.
Mayfield got the idea from a private Facebook group where people would post babysitter needs, and interested Samford University students would respond to the people who posted. “That gave us the confidence to say I think people are ready to use technology to try to address this issue,” Mayfield says. That eventually led to Mayfield teaming up with a developer, which led to a finished app in spring 2017.
Then came the work. They were part of a business accelerator program at the Innovation Depot, where Mayfield would be on his old computer answering customer service inquiries late at night. But they were also getting their first rounds of investment. And then COVID hit. “COVID was a very challenging year, as it was for many people, but for us as a business, that’s effectively sending strangers into people’s homes, the spring of 2020 was not an ideal time for that,” Mayfield remembers.
But, Wyndy survived, and soon after, they got another substantial round of investment. With it, came a new board member and investor. “He basically approached me and said, ‘Hey, would you be interested in bringing on someone else to run the business?’ And to be honest, I didn’t say it like this to him, but internally it was like, I was very interested because five years of running a startup is hard enough, throwing in global pandemic and all the chaos with that. I was at a point where I was pretty tired and would be happy to have someone come in with new energy.” That someone was Missy Polhemus, a former executive from Shipt. She took over the CEO duties while Mayfield sold part of his stake and joined the board. Polhemus ran the business until mid-2023, when the company was acquired.
Mayfield moved his energy on to NU/KE (Nothing Unnecessary/Keep the Energy), which is not an energy drink, he is careful to say. Those usually contain high amounts of caffeine, which NU/KE does not. It is a hydration drink, along the lines of Gatorade or Powerade but without many of the artificial ingredients those drinks have. The drink, launched in February, comes in a graduated dark blue bottle with lime green lettering to match its flavor, called Lime Time.
Mayfield connected with the founders, Marty and Lesley Frascogna, a married couple who founded the drink brand in Jackson, Mississippi, through a mutual friend. Shortly after connecting, the couple asked him to be the CEO of the startup in Spring 2025.
Being a part of a startup, Mayfield says, is less “sexy” than people think. What he likes, though, is taking an idea and making it tangible. “I think my experience has prepared me well for (this),” Mayfield says. “How do we go from an idea to something that is actually real? That’s where I really enjoy that process and that early kind of chaos.”
The team first went through the process of formulating a drink with the help of a company in California. They wanted to adhere to the philosophy of “Nothing Unnecessary” in the company’s name. “Our philosophy was we want the fewest ingredients, the cleanest ingredients,” he says. “We just want what’s necessary.”
The team purposefully chose the lime flavor drink to take to market. “We don’t need the complexity of two flavors,” Mayfield says, recounting their strategy discussions. “We need one flavor that we feel good about to test the waters. If it goes well, then we can introduce another flavor. If it goes poorly, then a second flavor wasn’t going to save us kind of mentality.”
NU/KE aims to market to youth athletes, while taking advantage of a “macro environment” that has people looking for more natural alternatives. Mayfield and the Frascognas have children at a prime age for participating in youth sports. “We as parents went out to the market and looked at what was out there,” Mayfield says. “We didn’t find something that we felt good about giving to our kids. And so, the goal was, “Can we build something that has simple ingredients, nothing unnecessary that parents will approve.”
Originally the company decided on a direct-to-consumer strategy while using Birmingham and Jackson as their test markets. They began partnering with youth sports organizations and then struck a deal with the Piggly Wiggly to put it on shelves.
Using the multi-flavor measuring stick, the rollout has been successful. The company will introduce its next flavor in the coming months and raise capital to expand its operations and fulfill its mission of delivering clean hydration to the next generation athlete. Meanwhile Tommy Mayfield does what entrepreneurs do. He wears several hats, makes plans, adjusts plans and takes it all one hydration drink at a time.
