Homethings is already disrupting the homecare product market with its sustainable waterless and resuable packaging solutions – less than a year since launching
Sometimes companies come along and reimagine the way that we do things by asking the most basic of questions…and coming up with surprising answers. Homethings, one of the recent investments in Vala’s Sustainability portfolio, has done just this by re-examining home cleaning supplies.
Homethings are creating the future of Home Care Products; waterless, low toxicity and highly sustainable concentrate formulas delivered directly to consumers with zero-waste, circular packaging. By shipping only concentrates they reduce CO2 emissions – and their packaging is fully reusable, recycled, plastic.
Since launching in September 2020, Homethings are generating £850,000 in annualised revenue and have recently been featured on Dragon’s Den where they got an offer from every Dragon. Since launch, they have been growing their customers by >50% MoM.
Homethings ship to customers both via a subscription offering and via a fast-growing roster of wholesale distributors.
Their value proposition, owned-IP and differentiated brand mean Homethings are well placed to capitalise on the growing ‘insurgent’ home care space, and hope to achieve a revenue threshold that will make it an attractive acquisition target to incumbents whilst delivering commendable sustainability outcomes.
The idea immediately struck us as brilliant (as we’re conscious consumers ourselves!) but the investment decision also came down to team, timing and mission.
Team: The co-founders, Matt, Tim and Lois, have energy, creativity, experience in the sector and have delivered awesome growth since they first launched on Kickstarter less than a year ago. Matt was a partner at Tech4Good Pioneers Bethnal Green Ventures, Tim was the sector lead for Consumer Products at Barclays Capital, and Lois, who leads Homethings Brand and community is a pioneering sustainability community builder and influencer. With our investment in this round, Homethings are assembling a team of top talent around them, all aligned with the mission of making cleaning cleaner for the planet.
We believe this team’s vision, creativity and ability to execute will build an exciting brand that will be the envy of incumbents and challenger brands alike whilst delivering strong financial and sustainability impact.
Large market ripe for disruption: The £6.5bn UK homecare market, although mature, is seeing sustainability-focused, insurgent brands delivering rapid growth driven by the fact 9/10 consumers say sustainability is an important purchase consideration.
Such insurgent brands (Tails.com, Ben & Jerry’s, Oatly, Dollar Shave Club) have a precedent of driving high growth using differentiated brands and novel customer propositions to disrupt incumbent brands. We believe Homethings will be successful at similarly disrupting the Home Care market.
Impact: Although at-home sustainability isn’t the only thing we need to improve, like many things, sustainability starts and ends at home. Homethings wants to improve the environment we live (and sometimes work) in so that we’re not polluting our rivers or homes with harmful chemicals and producing excess plastic and CO2 in the process. That is an impact, and a mission, that we can certainly get behind.
We’re excited to welcome Homethings to the Vala family and look forward to supporting them through this next chapter! You can find out more about the company and its mission here, and try your first month of sustainable living risk-free with no membership fee.
Be sure to watch this space for further updates on mission-driven teams building great businesses – we’re going to be backing quite a few ?
Jake Wombwell-Povey, Investment Director
