900.care sells waterless personal care products and lets you add tap water at home

Right here’s the tough fact behind private care merchandise: you’re largely shopping for water and plastics. The principle ingredient in a bottle of shampoo or bathe gel is water, and by far. It’s combined with a bunch of lively substances. And since it’s a “pre-mixed” product, firms spend some huge cash on plastic bottles to move these merchandise to your lavatory.

French startup 900.care desires to strive one thing new. As an alternative of shopping for a brand new bottle of bathe gel each time you want some bathe gel, the startup focuses on the lively substances.

In your first order, you obtain an empty, reusable plastic bottle with a pump. You set a tiny stick of compacted powder within the bottle, add some water and wait just a few hours. It’s then prepared to make use of. The subsequent time you want extra bathe gel or shampoo, you solely want a brand new stick (and a few faucet water).

“You retain all the advantages of utilizing bathe gel, for instance. Our bathe gel lathers, it has the identical texture, it smells good, and so on. However you didn’t purchase any plastic and also you didn’t carry any water,” co-founder and CEO Aymeric Grange informed me.

And 900.care raised a €21 million funding spherical a few months in the past ($23 million at right now’s change charge) as its merchandise have been working fairly properly in its dwelling nation. Lombard Odier Funding Managers is main the funding spherical with present buyers White Star Capital, Swen Blue Ocean and Founders Future additionally taking part.

900.care adopted the direct-to-consumer playbook as prospects can solely purchase merchandise on its web site. As you at all times want new private care merchandise, the corporate additionally determined to promote its merchandise as subscriptions completely.

In 2023 alone, 900.care generated €10 million in income ($10.8 million). The startup has 90,000 shoppers with 235,000 lively subscriptions — every shopper can have a number of subscriptions.

Along with shampoo and bathe gel, 900.care additionally sells foaming hand cleaning soap, dish cleaning soap, laundry and dishwasher tablets, in addition to just a few different merchandise. The corporate estimates that it prevented the equal of three.5 million plastic bottles of waste.

The small prints

900.care’s merchandise additionally signify enterprise alternative. Each few weeks, prospects obtain an envelope with new sticks for his or her hygiene and residential merchandise. As a result of these compacted powder sticks are fairly small, they slot in a traditional envelope and will be despatched as regular mail. 900.care saves cash on delivery charges.

Equally, factories and manufacturing strains are fairly small as they don’t want large basins to combine water with lively substances. They solely want to combine up completely different powders and compact the combination to show it into tiny sticks.

“For the compacting and industrialization stage, the large problem was that there was nobody who knew how to do this. Initially, we began working with individuals who had been concerned in cosmetics,” Grange mentioned. “However we quickly realized that this wasn’t going to work. They couldn’t sustain with the tempo, and the factories weren’t designed for it. So through the second quarter of 2023, we opened a manufacturing unit in Saint-Etienne, devoted to compacted powder.”

This new manufacturing unit will work completely for 900.care however continues to be operated by a companion. However the truth that all the things has been particularly designed for 900.care’s has tremendously improved the corporate’s margins.

The startup thinks it might attain €100 million in income inside three years as it’s about to develop to different European nations past France, Belgium and Switzerland. However the firm nonetheless expects to show a revenue this yr.