We first heard about Founders Factory’s joint venture with Reckitt Benckiser through a mutual business contact and it struck us as the perfect opportunity for our business. We were in advanced conversations with other investors but Damian and the team made a compelling case for us to come on board, and we felt motivated and supported from the off. We were already close to launch, but the Founders Factory team ensured that we accelerated through beta testing and into launch with real momentum and clarity of execution.

Myself and my co-founder Marcus come from a b2b background. I was running a consulting business where winning clients is much more about building networks, lead generation and events marketing. That’s very different to the data-driven mechanics of direct to consumer growth marketing.

Our first few weeks…

We were just going to put up a holding page initially until the product was ready, but Emily & Tim (Growth Leads at Founders Factory) encouraged us to build a waiting list to create buzz around the brand. Together, we used a platform called KickoffLabs, and with a little social budget, we were able to generate a waiting list of around 1,500 potential customers pre-launch.

The idea was that customers would sign up to be the first to hear when we were launching, and they were encouraged to recommend us to a friend for a money-off incentive. We realised quite quickly that the money-off incentive didn’t land strongly enough as customers didn’t know what it was they were getting a discount on - so we switched the incentive to focus on product giveaways and this drastically increased the referral rate.

Building our early community

We also launched a product community group on Facebook. This is a closed group which we still run, made up of our most engaged or loyal customers. We regularly publish polls and questions to the group to gauge what we should launch, or how to improve our design. It’s a great place to quickly gather feedback amongst a bigger group, and in the early days really helped us sense check some ideas, and move forward in the right direction.

Reduction in CAC over time

While paid-for advertising was predictable and could deliver conversions quickly, we also wanted to build awareness of Bower Collective as a sustainable lifestyle brand, so we turned some of our attention to Influencer Marketing and PR.

This included influencers at every level, but we particularly focused on mid-level accounts with between 10k and 100k followers. We’ve already surpassed our target of 10k followers for the brand’s Instagram account as a result. By communicating our mission when liaising with the press, we were also able to secure coverage in places like The Independent, The Times, Country Living and Hello Magazine.

Later we turned our attention to Content Marketing and Founders Factory came up with a framework for us that made it as easy as possible to generate content.

A series called ‘my sustainable home’ asked our best customers to talk about their own personal sustainability journey. You’re building loyalty among existing customers, you’re generating rich content that your audience is interested in and it’s filled with keywords which are highly relevant.

Through keyword research, we also identified high volume, high intent and low competition keywords and mapped out further articles like “five best plastic-free bathroom products”. We now rank on the first page of Google for the ethical soap brand Beco, for example, which we didn’t six months ago.

Overcoming a few hurdles

You could not, and in fact, you still can't get these lotion pumps for love nor money. There's been a global shortage of these pumps for the best part of four or five months now, which has been a nightmare.

Through Founders Factory, we have an executive sponsor at Reckitt Benckiser who was fantastic and really supportive. When stuff started getting difficult she immediately connected us with a whole global network of very experienced professionals in a huge business. That was fantastic, giving us that “unfair advantage” to be able to access these resources when things got tough.

And we invested in a “back in stock” notification system at the height of pandemic panic buying when demand for bamboo toilet roll outstripped supply. As soon as the product’s back in stock it bulk emails everyone.

Because of the early foundations we set for our brand - being mission-driven and standing by our purpose - our customers were incredibly accommodating. If stuff went missing or was delayed, they were very very understanding - and continue, more or less, to be so if there are issues.

Final thoughts

Our mantra as a business is that sustainability is a journey, not a destination. I know it sounds quite trite, but it's really true. It's changing all the time. What’s sustainable today is not necessarily what’s sustainable in six months time. So you’ve got to be constantly innovating and iterating your business model to make sure that you're delivering the best possible outcome.

As a young business, trying to operate in these conditions has not been without its challenges, but it has also presented opportunities because of the type of business we are. It's been a really positive time. We've grown very quickly. We've amassed a great kind of cohort of consumers, a community of about 23,000 people in six months, and we consistently get brilliant feedback.