BusinessGreen: Can you give us a bit of background on
Method?
Adam Lowry: We are a home care and personal care company,
providing household cleaning and laundry products, as well as personal care
products such as soap and handwash.
How did you come to found the company?
My background is as an environmental scientist and chemical engineer. I worked
for the Carnegie Institution and was involved in work on the Kyoto Accord and
the second IPCC report. My role was to do the science that was meant to lead to
policy change, but while I loved the work, I often felt it was only reaching
other scientists and wasn't really reaching the mainstream – so I started
looking for business ideas that could better help drive sustainable ideas.
So where did the idea for green cleaning products come from?
At the time, I was living in a bachelor pad in San Francisco with five
friends from university, one of whom was Method's co-founder, Eric Ryan. Eric
had a background in branding and marketing and he recognised that one of the
sectors in greatest need for a complete branding overhaul was the cleaning
products space. At the same time, I knew from my work that from an environmental
perspective these were some of the most pernicious products available. We
started the business from that flat in San Francisco in early 2000, originally
going door-to-door to local retailers with the products.
And how large is the company now?
We now have 100 staff and our annual turnover is $100m. We also made our first
move outside the US last year, launching in the UK. We've got a fully staffed
office in Richmond, west London, and are repeating the start-up model that
worked in the US. Our products are already available in John Lewis, Waitrose,
Tesco and Sainsbury's.
Why did you target the UK as your first overseas market?
The UK consumer is so far ahead of their US counterpart when it comes to green
issues that this was the obvious choice for our first international market.
We're seeing healthy growth, albeit from a low base, but the interest in green
issues is definitely driving demand.
Cleaning products have a long history of using hazardous and
environmentally damaging chemicals. How did you go about developing clean
alternatives?
The simplest way to explain how we develop the products is through an
equation: risk = hazard x exposure. The conventional approach to developing
cleaning products is to focus on the risk part of the equation and argue that
you can use hazardous materials as long as you only use a little bit of them.
Our approach, right from the first design phase, is to focus on the hazard part
of the equation and try to remove the hazardous elements. So if a child drinks
it, nothing bad happens, or if a whole bottle goes down the drain, nothing bad
happens.
How feasible is that?
It can be very challenging. The problem is not necessarily finding replacement
chemicals and materials but finding high-performance replacement materials and
chemicals. The solution is to either develop new chemicals, which we've done in
some cases, or develop new formulations of chemicals, which we've also done.
This approach can prove expensive and also takes a lot of time. For example,
we've just launched new products for scrubbing tiles and cleaning toilet bowls
that took eight years to develop.
You say that this green approach is expensive, but isn't keeping the
price as low as possible critical if you want to compete with conventional
alternatives?
Absolutely, and we try to keep the price premium as low as possible right from
the start of the design brief. Most of our range costs £3, while typical rival
products cost £1.80 to £2.20. That is a price premium of 30 to 40 per cent,
which we think is good for the improvement in performance, design and fragrance
you are getting – not to mention the environmental credentials.
How do you go about marketing new green products such as
these?
I think this is where a lot of green companies get it wrong. Our aim is to
appeal to customers beyond the typical green consumer, because if you can do
that then you have really made the breakthrough and can make a difference with
green products. There is this common problem where green companies just target
the green consumer.
What tactics should you employ to reach beyond the traditional green
or ethical consumer base?
You need to focus on other components of the products besides the environmental
elements. For example, we have a full-time design team and we invest really
heavily in product design. A lot of green product companies forget about other
aspects of the product beyond its environmental credentials. They think the
green consumer market is growing so all they have to do is target that and stick
a green leaf on the label. We are trying to go for a different approach. The
green credentials are still critical – after all, I've invested my entire career
in green issues – but it is just one attribute of product quality. You have to
appreciate that green credentials are not the only reason a customer buys a
product and you have to focus just as much on price, quality and design. The
goal for green companies has to be to make sure that all products in a market
are green. When that is achieved, where does it leave the product with the green
leaf on the label?
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