Direct-to-consumer shower brands are killing it right now. Let’s break it down.
Jolie is a three employee company that sells shower heads with filtration systems but markets them as beauty and wellness products (water is the first step in a beauty routine, after all). The brand, founded in January 2022, ended the year with $4 million in revenue. Its products were sold DTC in its first four months but have since moved into retailers including Goop and Anthropologie.
Outlines is another example. A sustainable DTC bathroom product company that is perhaps best known for its shower curtains, its revenue increased 20% to 30% each month since roll out in January 2022, accelerating to nearly 40% monthly growth by the end of the year, said Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer Megan Murphy.
According to Ryan Babenzien, co-founder and CEO of Jolie, the pandemic has shifted our purchasing habits more towards home products. “Pre-pandemic, people used a lot of their discretionary income on in-person activities such as travel. But when pandemic lockdowns forced us inside people started focusing that discretionary income on their home environments.”
Jolie started seeding its shower heads to what its founders called “influential people” before it even officially hit the market in order to drive FOMO (fear of missing out). Pre-launch, Jolie sent out about 100 shower heads and continues to seed slightly more than that amount per month to people in the art, culture, and fashion worlds, whether they’re social media content creators or not.
“The more we get organic content—content from seeding, content from customers—the more we can spend on Instagram, efficiently,” Arjan Singh, co-founder and head of brand marketing at Jolie, said, adding that Jolie is able to make money from Instagram, in part, because of all the content the community produces. Currently, about 90% of Jolie’s influencers aren’t paid, but it plans to do more paid partnerships in the future.
Before the brand even rolled out, Outlines had a list of 5,000 email subscribers. Those arrived from two main, separate sources: those obtained from its first product, and a creative referral program.
