A critical moment for many successful retail brands comes when they contemplate going public, weighing an IPO’s massive infusion of cash against the likelihood of shareholders storming into the car and becoming cacophonous backseat drivers.
For DTC brands, there’s a similar fish-or-cut-bait moment when it comes to partnering with retailers to be sold in stores. The potentially huge growth in sales from being on shelves, while tempting, risks brands losing the direct consumer connection and insight that is the hallmark of DTC brands.
Sarah Paiji Yoo, CEO and co-founder of DTC sustainable cleaning- and personal-care-products brand Blueland, said that after launching in 2019, she committed to eschewing selling wholesale to retailers for three years.
But the retailers came courting anyway.
“We had all of our dream retailers reach out to us, asking us to engage in a conversation, asking us if we’re interested in retail, and it was very hard and took a lot of discipline to say no,” Yoo told Retail Brew.
A big reason the brand did say no, Yoo explained, is that its products are atypical compared with other household and personal cleaning product brands. To avoid single-use plastics, Blueland sells empty glass or reusable plastic bottles for liquid soap and spray cleaner (dubbed Forever Bottles) paired with tablets—packaged in compostable paper packaging—that can be reconstituted in the bottles by adding water.
Since this was a “brand new behavior for consumers” and a “brand new format for the categories,” Blueland “needed to really have that direct relationship with customers and the ability to test and iterate and learn,” Yoo said. “We wanted to make sure that we were crystal clear and confident that when we did enter retail, we were going to be successful.”
But now, as the brand approaches its fifth anniversary this year, Blueland is bullish on retail, having gone from wholesale accounting for only 3% of its revenues in 2022 to about 20% at the close of 2023, according to Yoo.
And Blueland is starting the year with big retail news: Whole Foods will now carry its hand soap at all its locations.
Whole nine yards: Like Whole Foods, which famously has a vast banned ingredients list that precludes many major brands from being sold there, Blueland has done much to align itself with environmentally and socially conscious consumers.
Retail news that keeps industry pros in the know
Retail Brew delivers the latest retail industry news and insights surrounding marketing, DTC, and e-commerce to keep leaders and decision-makers up to date.
Blueland earned B Corp Certification from B Lab, which evaluates companies on what B Lab calls “a company’s entire social and environmental impact.” Blueland’s other certifications include a Leaping Bunny certification for not testing products on animals, and EPA Safer Choice certification because its products contain “ingredients with more positive human health and environmental characteristics than conventional products of the same type.”
Akin to those certifications, passing muster with Whole Foods is a boost for Blueland beyond just selling more products, Yoo said.
“Whole Foods is a great example of how retail for a brand like Blueland can be brand-elevating,” Yoo said. “Customers going through a Whole Foods know that those standards are in place and so to be accepted there, there’s a level of trust that is more automatically imparted on a brand purely by being there.”
Shelf confidence: Products in many supermarket aisles list water as a first ingredient, and one of Blueland’s arguments for its products having a smaller carbon footprint is that its tablets, along with eschewing plastic, eliminate most of the energy required to ship, say, a case of 12-ounce bottles of hand soap.
But the fact that Blueland’s just-add-water products are so compact, and don’t use brightly colored plastics, also presents a challenge on store shelves, Yoo explained.
“With the retail shelf game, packaging is absolutely the billboard in store, which is why historically that has incentivized brands to create…bigger plastic packaging filled with a lot of water because the size impression is so important,” Yoo said.
Blueland’s solution is that, along with tablets, on shelves it features starter kits in cardboard boxes that have one of its Forever Bottles as well as tablets. In other words, it stakes a claim on shelf space at retailers with empty bottles even though, in practice, consumers only buy those bottles once.
When it comes to shelf appeal, “This is an example of how we’ve had to be very thoughtful about what is our way,” Yoo said.
Cleaning house: While Blueland is starting with only hand soap at Whole Foods, it’s hoping that other lines, which include dish detergent, spray cleaners, and body wash, also get picked up by the retailer.
“We would love to expand into more categories at Whole Foods,” Yoo said.