How Public Goods Became the Unofficial Supplier of Airbnb Host
Is Brian Chesky familiar?
Recently, I went upstate with my best friends to a small A-frame on a lake and was pleasantly greeted with Public Goods amenities. It’s a pleasant reminder of the work our team had put in to get to this level of widespread distribution. But how the business pulled this off amongst a fractionalized group of customers (Airbnb hosts & other boutique owners) was no accident.
Let’s go back to Mid-2019 (sorry). COVID was unknowingly less than a year away and I had joined the team at Public Goods. My goal was simple. Ignore the DTC business and focus on B2B distribution. The goal involved getting into boutique hotels, rentals, restaurants, co-working spaces, and more. Public Goods had one B2B partner growing fast named Zeus Living which is no longer in business, and some small shops buying in bulk at full price on our DTC store.
I wanted what Aesop and Malin & Goetz had: Brand recognition and awareness across the country. For example, Aesop hand soap is at Public Records. It’s one of those brand touchpoints you don’t forget. Those brands share in each other’s “coolness” creating a cross-pollination of brand equity and exposure.
The main problem in getting partnerships was that we were operating a small business at that time. Public Goods had no brick-and-mortar stores and was not in any retailers. So people discovered the brand through Google & FB ads. The ads did very well for the company during a Kickstarter campaign and with certain viral products (Ramen). They had a certain look and feel with a strong value proposition and narrative. It was a hit and brand awareness started to pick up fast. Which admittedly, helped my cause over in the B2B department.
My strategy was cold emailing and visiting businesses in person. I remember walking to the MADE hotel with a box of products to present to the GM. Also, I made a visit to convince Sister City in Bowery to retail the products. That was an ACE hotel concept that has since shut down and been replaced with Untitled 3 Freeman Alley. Other stops were with co-working space Industrious + Bond Collective and frequent in-person visits with Zeus Living.
COVID hit which put a fork in the plan. All of a sudden my original pitch deck needed an update in strategy. We pivoted to focusing on retail accounts at this time and closed a deal with CVS that involved lots of dish soap and toilet paper. The DTC side of the business had a massive influx of customers looking for essentials to be delivered to their door, so the overall business grew. But B2B in the setting of Hospitality just needed to be a bit patient…
In late 2020 and 2021, the B2B business was back on track in a big way. Because of the influx of DTC customers, the tune changed from my original outreach in 2019. The question I often received was, “What is Public Goods?” Then we were getting responses like “I’ve heard of you! I’d like to place an order for ___”. And the inbound leads picked up, lots of them. This gave my growing team more leverage and a highly converting sales funnel. The flywheel machine was working. This made me very happy, as seen in this old photo of me in the office.
We started growing the team like crazy. I became the Head of Partnerships (director of sales). I hired partnership managers to build up their own books of business. I built a young and hungry group and we scaled up our outreach efforts massively. Hospitality businesses responded well to the below value propositions.
Consolidation (ease): We were a one-stop shop for home essentials.
Product Design: The packaging was simple, beautiful, and neutral. It was lightly scented, simple, legible, and OK for anyone and everyone to use.
Price: We offered bulk pricing that was extremely cost-effective for businesses to buy and refills for almost everything. It was an affordable luxury.
+ Sustainable packaging was a plus
We spent months building an email list of the most design-centric properties. And fortunately, the more accounts we closed, the more the community of owners and operators caught on. It was a frenzy of booking meetings and sending invoices. At this point, Shopify had launched a feature called the wholesale portal. It was a very unsexy tool used for building case packs of core SKUs and discounting them in bulk. We used this and then built a custom wholesale store once it became untenable.
We had a blend of enterprise partners, medium businesses, and hundreds of small partners. We had crossed 1500+ B2B partners and my team had reached 13 people at its peak. We had a team dinner at Little Frankies that caused me to lose my voice for the days trying to talk to everyone over the loud crowd. Fortunately, in late 2021 and 2022, the economy was ripping. Airbnbs were popping up everywhere, and we had become the turnkey solution. The business also acquired a group of enterprise accounts and we were well into the multi-millions in revenue and growing.
Coming out of the pandemic, new start-ups were created that would serve as major distribution players for the brand. Catching on to the success of the product line in a Hospitality setting, I remember fondly my first time meeting the founders of Minoan and HostGPO. These businesses have gone on to serve as a major key in awareness. They also did the on-the-ground work of short-term rental trade shows that my team did not actively participate in.
After collecting feedback from owners - I drew up and designed a stainless steel wall mount for the amenities that also ended up being a key piece in unlocking the boutique hotel and higher-end rental market. I sourced it and brought it to the PD team for approval. It got some tweaks and was set for production. The sales for this SKU alone grew rapidly. We built a system with the operators that kept them locked into the refill program with 1-gallon or 32-oz pouches.
The prices for all of the products were highly competitive - making the collection an affordable luxury for our buyers. Also, Public Goods had a very subtle and light fragrance with simple healthy ingredients that played into its neutrality and flexibility to be used by anyone and everyone.
I left the business in late 2022 to start something new (Openhouse), and do consulting. I look back on this journey as a cornerstone in my career and an eye-opening experience in how to find product market fit and scale it. We never did get the hand soap into Public Records. But we damn near got into some of the best properties in the country.
Till next time!
