PlantPaper

0:00Lee Reitelman:Welcome to the Emerging Brands podcast. Sharing the stories behind brands you'll want to shop next. I'm your host, Kelly Bennett. I am a New York City-based brand strategist for CPG Food and Beverage Brands. In each episode, I'll take you behind the scenes of founders that are building better-for-you products and bringing them to market. Also, I talk to brand builders, retailers, industry experts, and tastemakers who help bring those cool products to your shopping cart. You will hear stories of real life founders, their launch strategies and practical advice you could use to grow your own brand or simply discover what's next on shelf.

0:42Lee Reitelman:And the best part is you could shop all the brands featured on the show. This podcast is brought to you by Glimpse. Glimpse is an AI powered deduction management tool that disputes and recovers invalid deductions. winning brands thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours back to founders so that they can focus on what really matters most. If you're a brand selling in retail, go to tryglimpse.com backslash trial for 30 days free and let them know I sent you. Now let's dive into the new episode. Hi everyone. Welcome back to a new episode of Emerging Brands Podcast with Kelly Bennett. As you know, I focus a lot on food and beverage, CPG, but I also love bringing on brands that you can easily add into your home.

1:37Lee Reitelman:I love brands with intention, with purpose, really well crafted, with great stories behind them. And this is a product that I've had stocked in my home that I've gotten great reviews from everyone in the family. So today I have Diva and Lee. They are the co-founders of Plant Paper. And Diva and Lee, I'm so happy to have you on the show. Thank you for having us, Kelly. You're so welcome. I have been really impressed with the quality of your toilet paper, your tissues. I got a sneak peek of a new product also before we hit record. And I really love the, like I said, the quality because in the paper alternative options of Better For You toilet papers and tissues, we know that sometimes they don't act the way we need them to.

2:30Lee Reitelman:And your product has been really a standout to me. And so I would love to kick the conversation off with you, Lee, of how did this brand idea first start? I know that it originally started in 2019 and really kicked off in 22. But I would love to hear how did this initial concept come together? What was that light bulb that you had?

2:57Deeva Green:Well, I'm glad that you started off by talking about quality because I think like for us, the idea for this business, you know, it started off as an idea just for a product, a toilet paper, and a toilet paper that was made with a level of intentionality and sort of rigor and obsessiveness and, you know, passion that like aren't, you know, none of which things you typically associate with like toilet paper you know it's a basic product a product that's really easy to forget about um you know and just sort of have it be a rote thing you go into the grocery aisle you grab something and you know it is what it is um the the the business really started the the i wouldn't say it was a light bulb moment it was more a sort of um uh a dawning awareness that like this was a really interesting category you know at first um we diva and i had actually both worked in food before um oh interesting a couple of uh uh early stage businesses in the food and beverage space so had our partner scott our partner scott as well in california and um so you know obviously that's a world where like a certain passion for the product is like a key part of what you do.

4:30Deeva Green:Like, you know, you want to, you want to make this product, you want to share this product because you think it's great. Um, and so we had that piece, um, uh, but we wanted to do something that we could scale. You know, we wanted to do something that would like really make an impact, um, beyond just, you know, um, our community, uh, you know, we, we, we want to do something that was like really universal and really accessible. And a toilet paper kind of came to us. And we thought, wow, like here's a really unexpected product where we could bring to bear our obsessiveness, our passion. And also we're interested in, there was, you know, an environmental component.

5:14Deeva Green:Like one of the early light bulb moments was like hey this is a product that we use you know tremendous amounts of every day everybody uses it every day and will for you know their entire lives um and it's a product that has a really big environmental footprint um and like is there a way to to do something better um environmentally and then the other uh the other part of that dawning awareness was it's not just an environmental thing. Toilet paper, household paper in general is a very chemically intensive industry with a big sort of chemical footprint that has both environmental implications and also implications for human health.

6:00Deeva Green:And it was kind of those two realizations together that kind of made us feel like maybe there's something here. And that, you know then grew into this feeling that this is a product that nobody has really a product in a category that nobody has really put love into like if you look at the at a product level toilet paper has basically been made the same way for many many decades from the same substrate you know virgin trees in Canada in South America for decades and decades and you know while they talk about the size of the value, mega roles, ultra roles. There's really been no innovation in the space.

6:45And at a brand level, also no innovation, nothing interesting.

6:51Deeva Green:We were like, so what if we make a product that A, is a product that we feel really excited about from a health standpoint, from a quality of ingredients standpoint, B, feel good about from an environmental standpoint, C, actually want to use, like, as opposed to something that felt like a kind of trade-off, like a sort of a lesser than product, but, you know, you use it because at least it's not, you know, as bad as some of the other ones. And finally, like, a chance to build a brand and tell a story that people could connect with and get excited about in a way that they never had with, you know, the the Charmans and the Cottonells of the world.

7:35Deeva Green:That's really where it where it started.

7:37Lee Reitelman:Very cool. So, Diva, what made you want to make the shift from food to then toilet paper? Like, I would love to hear from your side of street what was really appealing about leveraging also your background into the brand. Totally. So, I mean, since before high school, I was like, I'm going to do something good for this planet. I grew up in Canada, spent my summers in Algonquin Park, which is this provincial park north of Toronto and just, you know, completely off grid. And growing up, I was just, that was my, that was my goal in life. I didn't know what that looked like, but I was like head of a Gaia club in high school and then, you know, sustainability prefect, you know, all these things.

8:25Lee Reitelman:So I went to school for environmental policy and economics at LSE. And then when I was there, I loved my studies, but like government and public sector seemed quite gray and slow. So I'm from there, moved to New York and was working at TerraCycle, a waste solutions company, and decided to go back to school to focus on sustainability from more of a private sector perspective. So I studied sustainability consulting and really in my sort of core was, okay, something environmental where I'm doing good and entrepreneurship. My parents are entrepreneurs and they always work together actually um in Canada for 45 years um so that's incredible too yeah in that environment I'm obsessed yeah yeah I mean we we've worked together now for almost 15 years so you know it's a very cool the norm to be able to work with your partner but also um to start a business um and so that part didn't feel scary but what what was different we went into food um became quite obsessed with the our ingredient sourcing um what we were doing there and then like lee said the shift was really like what can we do where we can really make an impact and with we had this small food business we were like sourcing everything from like a town away basically and that that was just not scalable or accessible.

10:10Lee Reitelman:And so I mean, toilet paper was, felt like this was the right way to really make an impact. Very cool. I love your, both of your backgrounds and how it all merged into a commodity that we can often overlook and how you both have channeled all of your passion and interest and and knowledge into bettering something that we're all using, which I love when I could see that through line when I hear people's stories. So that's really cool. So Lee, let me kick it back to you. Okay, now you're both are bought in. You're like, yes. And you have another co-founder as well. We're going to go into the toilet paper business.

10:55Lee Reitelman:We're totally shifting things up, but we see the connection. We're feeling that we're really can make an impact here for multiple different reasons as you listed out. What did that first look like of building a brand, to your point, around a commodity that people can just add to cart, not really think about? What was some of your maybe inspiration, train of thought, brainstorming of, okay, how do we make this feel like something people would want to stop and go out of their way to purchase? I know you've been really focused on D2C as well. What, what was the, what were those conversations like of really building a strategy that would make this brand stand out?

11:40Well, I think I can tell you,

11:45Deeva Green:you know, about the choices that we made to help the brand stand out, but I would, I would say that none of them in the early days and even now like it was never really strategic as far as like what does the market want or what's the thing that's going to make this work it really was just channeling what was interesting to us you know like our backgrounds both of them despite divas like business schooling like we come at things that we do from like a place of just like wanting to, you know, loving those things, like wanting to work. And that was really, we began like completely innocent to like the way a lot of people, I think, think about starting a business.

12:35Like for us, it was just like, you know, we want to make this product.

12:39Deeva Green:We want to make it great. We want to love it. And we want to build a brand around it that is appealing and attractive and interesting to us. And we'll see if other people care about it. What that translated into was, you know, like toilet paper is typically marketed, you know, historically been marketed in a pretty sort of, I don't know, it's a pretty lame way. There's no other way to put it. Like, you know, cuddly bears and, you know, that's just how it is and clouds and things. And you, You know, you can see why they chose to do that on some level. But but at a like deeper historical level, the reason that they chose to do that was like when they started to market toilet paper heavily in the 1920s, the 1930s, you know, Scott Corporation emerging like it was kind of a taboo thing to talk about, like, what do you wipe your butt with?

13:38Deeva Green:and so they they worked very hard to give to sort of like provide a world of euphemisms like it wasn't even called toilet paper it was called like bath tissue um and there were some really funny early ads for scott that were like something like don't you don't even have to ask for toilet paper just ask for the scott and it was like you know somebody about would go behind the counter and grab it and give it to you. It was like, you know, sort of like buying condoms or something like that same like taboo. But actually like worse in a way. And they knew that the main buyers were women and they didn't want to like, you know, push women to have to say or do or think about anything indelicate.

14:24Deeva Green:So like that's kind of that's the deeper reason why we have the brands that we have and why they look the way they do. and so we thought like wow you know if we want to get people thinking about toilet paper like we need to be much more adult you know to be much less reliant upon euphemism in fact like push really hard back against the use of euphemisms the use of puns you know which come really easily in the world of toilet paper just like any of these things that kind of allow you to like avoid you know confronting the fact that you're literally talking about wiping your butt or your vagina like we wanted to sort of embrace that stuff we did feel that there was some like a way in there to get people's attention and then once we kind of started doing that we realized like this is actually like a whole world you know like this is actually a really intimate daily process daily routine.

15:22Deeva Green:And if we can like own that more, I don't mean own the act, but I mean just like take, you know, like kind of step up to the thing of like, this is what our product is and does, and we're okay with it. And we speak about it in an unvarnished way and in an adult way. And the imagery that we create is, you know, like we showed a lot of more or less naked bodies in the early days, people sitting on toilets, like just getting people to think about like, wow, this is something we all do. And it's and it's a sort of an easier step from there to start thinking about like, hey, well, should my toilet paper be made with bleach?

16:03Deeva Green:You know, should my toilet paper contain dyes, scents, formaldehyde? Should it should I wonder what goes into the making of my toilet paper a bit more? So that was kind of how, again, I don't want to call it strategy, it kind of just emerged as a thing that was like felt interesting to us. And over time, it did prove like interesting to other people too.

16:25Lee Reitelman:So it was more so essentially having people pause to even think about toilet paper and then help guide them to even question what was in it of being like, oh, wait, hold on. I would never have even thought about that. This is not even on my list of things that I'm pondering today or thinking about today. So that totally makes sense. Diva, for you, knowing your background, and I know that you are really in more of the depths of creating the product and the claims and the environmental impact and all of that, what was that process like as far as creating a actual toilet paper that works, that is easy to flush because that's also an issue.

17:10Lee Reitelman:I live in New York City. The old pipes don't really love the new stuff, right? Which I didn't have an issue with yours. But what did that look like from your side of the street to actually then deliver on what you're having people pause and think about? Yeah, I mean, it took years and a lot of patients of R &D to just be like with our, you know, several manufacturers and then we honed in on one. just like what what doesn't need to be here what doesn't need to be in the ingredient list um why is that necessary why are we you know what does that and and so we over and over different iterations until we sort of you know stripped the initial product of everything it it didn't need and then it was making sure that the performance was you know beyond what we were getting, I think we were buying like Trader Joe's maybe at the time, like recycled TP or something.

18:11Lee Reitelman:And something that would be a trade-off. What I understood from a lot of schooling in sustainability and understanding people's psychology around it is that something has to be a trade-off. We assume that an environmentally friendly product is going to be a trade-off. And we assume it's going to be more expensive and a trade-off and it doesn't need to be but um that but that is our assumption and we we right it couldn't be we were not going to offer a product that was you know just better than one thing but not the other and certainly performance was like was key so it had to be three ply um it had to be um grippy so you know not just like i can i'll be graphic here like we like moving shit around literally yeah job yeah and do it like cleanly both like metaphorically not it just so so that was like those um we didn't we we wouldn't um settle for anything less the sheet size factor sheet size yeah um our actual sheet size is um larger than the average which means that you end up using less sheets and we often oh cool one of the things that we

19:27Deeva Green:was that like the toilet paper industry had been steadily shrinking this sheet size for decades. Like back in the 70s, 80s, most sheets were 4.5 inches wide by 4.5 inches long. Now, if you go to the store, there's very few that are over four by four. Mostly they're like 3.92 by four, which doesn't like sound like a big difference, but it's actually like, you know more than a 20 percent difference in surface area and what happens is like you have these very narrow sheets so you end up needing to use a lot of sheets and it's actually like it's you you end up using less surface area by making a wider a wider sheet so it's not like a jumbo

20:10Lee Reitelman:roll that looks huge but the right area so you are naturally then using more well that's also

20:18Deeva Green:true is like if you make it look huge then people use more because it feels like they have a ton of it like everything about the way the toilet paper industry toilet paper marketing is designed and this is true of paper towel too is basically designed to completely like disorient you to like the the value or the cost you know it's like they're constantly changing the roll sizes they're constantly changing the packs per roll they're constantly changing the language around mega, ultra, triple, quadruple. Right. None of the math makes any sense. And then the point is like, the point for them is that when they do that, they're able to basically like make pricing changes when the price of pulp goes up to preserve their margin.

21:03Deeva Green:And we don't even really know it because we don't know what we paid last time or the time before.

21:07Lee Reitelman:Right. You're not thinking about it.

21:09Deeva Green:Yeah.

21:10Lee Reitelman:This is so interesting. I never knew so much about toilet paper. I'm like going to be checking toilet paper now in my next grocery haul. So, but Kelly, sorry, just to finish off on, on sort of product beyond that, which is the physical product. It became clear to us too, that like the, the experience of buying your toilet paper online needed to be like basically just as important as the physical product. so pretty quickly in covid we launched a subscription model okay and there were subscription models going on at the time we felt like okay toilet paper there's no better product because you know you're going to use it you're going to go through it there's no shelf life or i mean infinite shelf life right um it doesn't need to be refrigerated all that but um But the interface, the portal, the ease of changing your date and your address and your credit card and all these things had to be perfect and extremely thought through.

22:17So honestly, we see it as like part of the product and part of the experience is our portal and is our email flows and our reminders and the whole subscription experience.

22:29Lee Reitelman:because we, you know, we're not in a little store selling our brown rice bowls or whatever we were doing before plant paper. And, you know, being able to talk to the customer about what we did in the kitchen a few hours earlier, where we source the ingredients, the, you know, the overall experience of buying the toilet paper has just been super, super important to us. Lee, I would love to ask you, what were some of the pieces of advice you've learned or just in the trenches of building out a predominantly D2C business and again a commodity product and having people want to get a subscription right they've tried the product they're like yes we will make the swap any lessons that you've learned building a D2C business that you would want to pass down or put on the radar of someone who's contemplating going down that path?

23:27Deeva Green:Well, two things. One is I think a lot of people seem to be interested in starting, you know, in building a business that has a subscription component, you know, and for obvious reasons it has its, you know, great appeal. I think that clearly certain products lend themselves better to it than others. I think that a lot of what I see out there is companies that, you know, they'll create a subscription platform, but it seems clear that their model is based on just getting one more incremental order or two incremental orders.

24:14Lee Reitelman:Right.

24:14Deeva Green:It's like, we're going to give you a great opening order discount. And, you know, you might like it you might not either way there's a decent chance you forget that the second order is coming and by the time that second order processes we've recouped our customer acquisition cost and then some and that and then a certain percentage of the people will stay on and remain loyal customers and and that's obviously a valuable part of the business but like there's this sort of reliance upon like this short-term kind of thinking like how do we just get recoup that initial thing we um have never thought that way about it um like we've always felt that we were playing a longer game um because toilet paper is just one of those things where like if you like the brand that you have um and it and it comes when you need it um and you don't have to worry about it there's literally no reason that you should ever turn it off it's not like shampoo you know shampoo people like yeah they'll fall in love with the shampoo for a little while but most people end up wanting to change their shampoo at some point they're like you know six months and they're like oh well you know maybe it's good if i change my shampoo or a year or whatever it is that doesn't happen with toilet paper you're not like right wait to use a new toilet paper if you've got a good one you're sticking to it yeah and knowing that we were we just built everything around like let's make it so easy for somebody to control how much they have, make sure that they never get taken by surprise with an order.

25:47Deeva Green:And this is kind of what Diva was alluding to with the portal and the UX. And I think, you know, we get the average new customer, you know, purchases, the average new customer purchases 3.2 times or something like that in the first 12 months, including, you know the meaningful percentage of people that order only once so you've got tons of people that are actually ordering four times five times six times in a year and many people who will order 20 30 40 50 times in the first four or five years of their of their life cycle and so i think you know i think it's it's the advice would be to somebody who's serious about you know a subscription description component of directing.

26:33Deeva Green:Like, what are your true goals? You know, like, are you actually trying to build like a true recurring revenue model? Or are you just trying to make the acquisition economics work in the short term? And that's okay. Like if you are, but I think it just changes how you think about this, you know, this sort of like the initial transaction, and then all of the follow up.