How Do You Sell a Thermos to People Who Don't Want to Carry One? | Market Inventors
Founders who set out to solve their own problems are often the source of markets that seem to come from nowhere.
Founders who set out to solve their own problems are often the source of markets that seem to come from nowhere.
Carrying a thermos around to drink from is one thing. Being eager to post photos of it on Instagram is quite another.
Five years ago, when Sarah Kauss founded the water bottle company S’well Bottle with US$30,000 in start-up money, she was confident it would succeed. She had not expected it to reach markets around the world so quickly. Nor had she imagined that S’well Bottle would do what most bottle companies never had: make customers proud of their insulated bottles, even happy to share their lives with the bottle on Instagram.
S’well Bottle (S’well, for short) makes stainless-steel bottles that look nothing like traditional thermoses and are far more stylish. They resemble old-fashioned milk bottles, sleek and slender, and come in a wide range of colors and textures. They are sweeping the United States. In 2010, when the S’well team stood in a small display booth promoting their product, they had to tell a long story to every passerby. Now people know the name.
S’well bottles in every color now sit in the department store Nordstrom and in the shops of the fashion brands J.Crew and Jack Spade, and the TED conference has put them in its gift bags for attendees. In 2013, when S’well bottles first went on sale at Starbucks stores in Atlanta and Austin, they sold out quickly without any marketing. After getting into 3,300 Starbucks stores in the U.S., S’well rode Starbucks into markets around the world. This Christmas it comes to China, with a limited-edition series made with Starbucks.
Selling through fashion shops, straight to people who had almost never left the house with a water bottle, turned out to have an explosive effect. Sarah Kauss sees it as a big reason for their success. "For a lot of customers, it's a new type of product. So selling it at Starbucks, or next to a beautiful piece of jewelry or a casual sweater, makes customers feel it's something they 'discovered' or 'found' on their own."
Customers usually buy it simply because it looks good and is easy to use, Sarah says, but coming across these new bottles in "non-traditional" places is a pleasant surprise that makes them like it even more. Then they recommend it to friends, mention it to colleagues at work and take it to yoga class, and gradually a kind of "S'well fashion network" forms.
In our conversation, Sarah Kauss used the word "fashion" again and again. It is, indeed, the key word for S'well Bottle.
The bottles work well. They are non-toxic and BPA-free, and the company says that their two layers of stainless steel keep hot drinks hot for 12 hours and cold drinks cold for 24. But what really sets them apart in the bottle market, beyond function, is their distinctive, stylish look.
In fact, S'well Bottle was founded to make a stylish, reusable bottle. Americans buy a lot of water and drinks in plastic bottles, most of which are not recycled; every year about 50 billion plastic bottles end up in landfills. Unlike the people who keep buying disposable bottled water, Sarah, an environmentalist, carries an insulated bottle every day. She has done so since college, and later even became "passionate" about water bottles.
After earning an MBA at Harvard Business School, she worked as a certified public accountant and then at a real estate investment trust. She was not the kind of student who dreams of starting a company. But in 2009, when she went back to Harvard for a seminar on the global water crisis, something moved her. She began to wonder whether promoting some product could get people to stop overusing plastic bottles and care more about the environment.
She chose the water bottle, something that had long interested her. But the ordinary metal bottle she used every day? Its biggest problem was that it wasn't pretty. "You always want to hide it rather than proudly show it off." "And I looked like I was always about to go camping or hiking!"
Sarah decided to make beautiful, carefully designed bottles to persuade more people to give up plastic ones.
Sarah Kauss positions S'well Bottle's bottles as "fashion accessories"
In 2010 Sarah, who had an interest in the industry but no background in it, founded S'well Bottle. She asked friends and people in the field for help: how to build a website, how to design the product, how to find a manufacturer. To make a "stylish" insulated bottle she talked to many design firms, and finally hit it off with an industrial design company in New York. Together they worked out how the bottle should look, then took the beautiful drawings to a factory to discuss which ideas could actually be made. It was a long road to the first S'well bottle.
What happened next moved so fast that it caught her a little off guard. S'well's first bottle made the recommended-products list of Oprah Winfrey's O, The Oprah Magazine, and the company quickly became known. The magazine asked whether it came in other colors, but at the time S'well's bottle came in one size and one color (ocean blue). Sarah started frantically flipping through the Pantone color guide for new color families, and from then on S'well began developing more colors and more styles.
For a company just five years old, S'well naturally has plenty of "elders" and rivals in the bottle business: Stanley and Contigo in the U.S., Zojirushi and Tiger in Japan. Not to mention Thermos, Starbucks' regular partner, whose limited editions with Starbucks are snapped up for their looks every time they launch.
Thermos, which sells on both looks and crossovers, may be the benchmark most worth chasing. Its crossovers range from coffee chains such as Starbucks and Costa, to cartoon brands such as Angry Birds and Hello Kitty, all the way to women's clothing and kitchen appliance brands.
Even so, Sarah is confident that "no one in this industry is doing what we're doing." She calls her product a "fashion accessory" and an "affordable luxury." Similar companies, she says, are not in fashion at all, and sell to an entirely different set of customers.
As design, S'well bottles do qualify as fashion accessories. They are slim, with flowing lines, simple and refined shapes, and no needless extra features. Distinctive patterns (such as animal prints) add texture. They look more like stylish plastic bottles than the bulky, fussy or overly sporty thermoses we picture.
S'well did not start out this way. When the company was new, Sarah did a lot of research and wrongly concluded that her bottle needed a water filter, hooks, buttons, leather and the many other small add-ons found on other bottles, because she assumed people bought such bottles for those things.
"But if you really think about why people buy water bottles, it's just because it's hot outside and they're thirsty. Even hikers usually only walk from the car to the summit. The bottle they carry doesn't need lots of complicated features."
So she changed her mind and stripped out the unnecessary design elements one by one. The bottles soon became refined.
S'well bottles now come in three sizes: 9 oz, 17 oz and 25 oz (about 260 ml, 500 ml and 760 ml). Sarah showed them to us one by one. The smallest holds coffee or tea; the middle one is the most practical and good for taking to work; the 25 oz holds a whole bottle of wine and is made for picnics. "This one is really popular in New York. People fill it with wine and take it to the park for a picnic. But nobody would want to put wine in a sports bottle, right?" she joked.
So far S'well has released more than 90 bottles in different colors and patterns. Nearly 70 of them are regular styles (not limited-edition collaborations) sold on its website: classic glossy and matte solid colors, a metallic series, a color-block series, a "Stone" series that imitates the surface of rock, an "Exotic" series with crocodile, snake and other animal prints...
The one fashion sites recommend most is probably the "Wood" series. The grain is only printed on stainless steel, but it looks like real wood, soft and richly textured.
A bottle from the "Wood" series that looks very much like real wood
Many styles; left, the S'well Bottle Brunch next to Albert Babycat, the internet-famous cat
This variety lets S'well bottles suit different people and different outfits. A writer at Stripe Design explained after counting the colors released each season: I use a glittery gold one, my boyfriend has a black men's style, my best friend bought a pink one, and my mom's is green. Everyone can find one they like.
All this is the work of S'well's design team, the company's core department. The designers draw ideas from the Pantone color guide and fashion runways. They pore over color cards, go to fashion week shows and work with fashion designers. But the job is more than releasing new colors and patterns. They have to keep watching what is in fashion and do their trend research, so that before the market warms to certain colors and patterns, they are already ready to put them into their product lines.
At first, when S'well tried to get into fashion stores, convincing buyers that "S'well Bottle is a very stylish product" was not easy; these people had almost never sold a water bottle. But S'well had a good product, and it launches a whole new collection every spring and fall, on the fashion brands' calendar.
"We also have a lot of customers who collect bottles, gathering the styles they like. So every time we announce a new product, they get really excited: 'Is there something new?' 'What's coming next season?'" The phrase Sarah Kauss uses most in interviews is "Stay tuned." Teasing each season and constantly launching new collections has won them a large base of loyal fans. Next to other bottle companies, with their narrow ranges and rare updates, S'well seems full of ideas and energy.
Want to know what's new for fall/winter 2015? "Rose Gold," "Monaco Blue," "Smoky Eye," "Python," "Zebra"...
In five years, S'well has grown fast. In 2015 its sales will likely rise 400% for the second year running, and by May it had sold more than 4 million bottles in total.
Its fans are multiplying too, and they are unusually enthusiastic. On Instagram, the photo-sharing site, many photos carry the #Swellbottle tag. In the "Adventures of S'well" section of the company website, users can send in photos through the site or by email and tell the story of themselves and their bottles. Sarah looks through the new photos every morning. Many people send pictures to tell them they are on vacation, or with their kids, or what they do every day.
"After buying this bottle, they really feel it goes on adventures with them. It has become part of their lives." Sarah had not expected this when she founded the company, but now she can truly feel the emotional bond between customers and the product.
The company now has 40 people, more than twice its original size. It has moved into a new office, and more and more men are joining this female-led team, making it more diverse.
As for changing the world (in the environmental sense), Sarah knows the road may be long. Since its founding S'well Bottle has often worked with environmental nonprofits, but consumers may not think that far. Some people do buy S'well bottles for environmental reasons, but S'well has found that people love the product mostly because it is useful and beautiful, and then, as a bonus, it is also good for the environment.
"I originally thought everyone would be thinking about protecting the planet. Not that many people are. But if you can give customers something beautiful, and that thing happens to do some good too, they gradually change their mindset for the better and are willing to follow your story." The environment is not the only area where reality has differed from what Sarah Kauss, as the founder of a young company, expected. But she has stayed fairly optimistic.
Image sources: Starbucks, S'well Bottle Pinterest, S'well Bottle Official, doinggoodtrading, gentsamongmen, thetrendyphotographer, buildingforhealth
Translated from the original QDaily article. Original publication date retained.