Purdy & Figg Growing A Natural Cleaning Subscription
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An ongoing trend is removing harsh chemicals in the products we use. Purdy & Figg are capitalizing on this with their U.K. based natural cleaning company.
And I mean capitalizing. Look at the revenue trajectory:
2021 £1 million
2022 £3.5 million
2023 £17.5 million (holy bananas!)
2024 £54 million (forecast)
And how are they doing this? Offering 10 different products for each surface? 32 scents with limited editions? Nope.
One offer. They tested a bunch of offers and the one that maximizes their return on ad spend is a 50% off starter pack. A glass spray bottle and three 20ml concentrated natural cleaners with different scents for £15 (now includes a fourth summer cleaning concentrate). And it’s only offered as a subscription. And only in the U.K. (opportunity!).
In fact they wanted a simpler, chemical free product. They were tired of hauling around all the products and in 2018 two best friends Purdy Rubin and Charlotte Figg decided to make cleaning better.
They started tinkering in the garage and came up with a natural cleaning solution infused with essential oils. They called it Counter Clean. It’s now their hero product.
Then they made a hand sanitizer. Just in time for a global pandemic. That worked out well. But it was a temporary product that aided early growth and is no longer a focus for the company. You can’t even find it on the site.
Back to the cleaners! The fragrance is the key. They wanted people’s houses to feel like a spa after cleaning. To this day they feel that is the key differentiator of the business.
Their sons, Jack and Charlie, joined the business as co-CEO’s and have been growing it ever since.
The hero offer that they use? They looked at it from the fundamentals of a subscription offer. They could adjust the frequency, price and contents. From there you cut away everything that doesn’t work.
They found three scents in the starter pack allowed customers to find one they liked. If they delivered every three months customers didn’t get overstocked. And the 50% discount? It had the best cost per acquisition vs. contribution lost. Just a math calc.
They could charge £5 more, but new customers were sensitive to price and it actually led to a higher customer acquisition cost. I love it. Spreadsheets is my language.
Also love Jack, their co-CEO, thinking on advice: “Received wisdom should be tested.” Brilliant. Test. Test. Test.
More Interesting Tidbits:
They worked with Nick Bower at Kinship (marketing agency) for 18 months to help with influence seeding and generated a huge amount of content
They now have an in-house creative group
5-6,000 influencers have posted their product in the past year
Cost caps (Meta ad strategy) worked well for them
They rely heavily on monthly cohort analysis to evaluate effectiveness and forecast revenue (The Black Stuff focused on this as well to help them manage inventory)
They had 130,000 active subscriptions in mid-2023
As of a year ago they were adding 8-9,000 customers a month, 4-5,000 which were subscribers
They manufacture their product themselves in their Hertfordshire factory
Manufacturing and fulfillment help them control quality and add to cash flow, but limit how fast the company can grow (still on a tear!)
TikTok wasn’t as effective as Meta for them
They test 3-400 pieces of content a month on average with some months hitting 6-700
Half of influencers they give free product to make content and 80% of those they get usage rights for
They’re planning to launch two new products in 2024, a toilet cleaner and a bathtub scrub
Sources:
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Purdy and Figg for the U.S.
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