This New Site Sells Food And Household Essentials–All For $3 Or Less
Brandless wants to do away with corporate markups on everyday products, from corkscrews to organic maple syrup.
A few years ago, Ido Leffler, a Bay Area-based entrepreneur and founder, woke up in the middle of the night, suddenly bothered by a system he’d been participating in his whole life: the inflated cost of consumer packaged goods. “It just hit me: Why were we spending $15 or $20 on things that cost maybe $2 or $3 to make?” Leffler tells Fast Company.
Take granola, for instance. The farmers’ market and health store staple can be plucked off shelves for as much as $7 for eight ounces, despite the fact that all it is is an interesting arrangement of readily available grains and nuts. The steep price–which is a function of some of the ingredients, like nuts, falling on the expensive side, but also a response to consumer demand–has rendered the product aspirational (we tend to think expensive things are better for us), but also out of reach for many Americans.
“We’re in a whole new phase of modern consumption,” Sharkey tells Fast Company. “There’s a generation of consumers now who don’t want their parents’ establishments, they don’t want their parents’ governments, they don’t want their parents’ industries, and they don’t want their parents’ brands.” It’s a sentiment that’s fueled the creation of direct-to-consumer brands like Everlane, whose mission it is to democratize access to good-quality clothing by eliminating markups (often in the region of 50% to 75% of manufacturing costs) associated with traditional brick-and-mortar retail, which necessitates that companies bring in extra revenue to pay for both staffing and property.
“It’s very hard to fix a broken system,” Sharkey says. When she and Leffler surveyed the consumer packaged goods landscape, they saw a network of retail competition, layered with markups and inefficiencies and obscured by opaque business practices and pricing rationales. “So we decided: Let’s just start with a clean slate and build a new one,” she says.
And the direct-to-consumer model rids customers of what Sharkey and Leffler have termed BrandTax–the additional costs baked into purchases from other retailers. Through their market research, Sharkey and Leffler estimated that the average person pays at least 40% more for products of comparable quality; that can reach as much as 370% more for beauty items like moisturizer. Of course, the savings are not evenly distributed across all Brandless products–a $3 pack of 100-count organic cotton swabs is pretty comparable to what you might find in a drugstore, but a $3 bottle of organic maple syrup, when it’s not uncommon to see such items going for $12, is staggering. Anyone who makes an account with Brandless and begins purchasing through the site will receive a quarterly savings report, calculated against what they would have spent had they purchased the same items at major retailers.
“We wanted to create a platform where people could find items that reflect their values–whether it’s organic, non GMO, or gluten-free–across a wide swath of products at a price that’s accessible to almost everyone,” Sharkey says. “Obviously, we have costs for all of this, but we bear those costs.”
Sharkey and Leffler are aware that a $3 price point is still not accessible for everyone: A McDonalds hamburger costs less, and when the average Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program recipient is allocated around $4.23 per day for food, those dollars start to look a lot weightier. Brandless will do a lot to boost access to healthy, good-quality products for a wider range of the U.S. population, but the efforts of one company are not enough to dismantle or reach across decades of entrenched poverty. Sharkey and Leffler recognize this, though, and each purchase made on Brandless will automatically donate a meal through the nonprofit Feeding America.
Ultimately, Sharkey and Leffler are aiming, by doing away with excess costs and supporting an ethos of transparency, to eliminate the background noise of financial stress and choice overload. “It’s not just about creating a community of people that are looking for everyday things that are affordable and match their values,” Sharkey says. “It’s about taking action, putting people first, and ushering in an entirely new way of modern consumption.”
