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Adam Lowry's Key Move: Taking a Fresh Look at an Old Product Category

 

Adam's Story:

There's nothing new about making lemonade out of lemons. But giving true brand panache to mundane products like soaps and household cleaners? Now that's an accomplishment. And Adam Lowry and his partner, Eric Ryan, have done it. Method Products, their household-cleaning products company, is generating sales at a $40-million annual run rate after less than five years in business.

Adam graduated in chemical engineering from Stanford, which is impressive enough. But after stints as 1) a researcher at a "green" plastics company in Michigan , 2) a climate-change researcher with a think tank, and 3) a member of the U.S. sailing training team for the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, Adam was ready to tap his inner entrepreneur.

He and Eric had been high-school buddies in suburban Detroit and were roomies in San Francisco . And on a long drive one day they began talking about hum-drum product categories that could be transformed through fresh thinking about product design and formulation - presumably, theirs.

"I knew as a chemical engineer that there was no reason we couldn't design products that were non-toxic and used natural ingredients," Adam says. "It would be more expensive to do it that way. But that was okay as long as we created a brand that had a 'premiumness' about it, where our margins would support our extra investments in product development and high quality ingredients."

Adam and Eric came up with a complete line of cleaners and soaps, each one for a different room in the house. Now they have more than 100 products under the Method Home brand umbrella. "We've crafted a master brand in home care," Adam says.

Taking a Fresh Look at a Product Category

Adam and Eric's success story demonstrates that "the next big thing" can really be as simple as slight but sly improvements in the same old thing.

As they chatted on their fateful trip, Adam and Eric conjured up the environments that are most emotionally charged for consumers-ones that offered the most potential to come up with a transformative idea. They settled on the home.

"You have all your domestic experiences in that house or wherever you live," Adam explains. "And so from the furniture you buy to your kitchenware, you put a lot of thought and emotion into what you put in that space. Yet the commodity products that you use to maintain this very important space tend to be uninteresting, ugly, and toxic - and you hide them away. Why did that have to be?"

The two determined that the big chemical companies that produced the best known of these products, from Procter & Gamble to Unilever, were "so price-limited" that they had to use only single active ingredients. "They weren't able to invest in fragrance or interesting packaging or design," Adam explains.

"Our idea was to turn that reality on its head and come up with products that absolutely could connect with the emotion of the home. We wanted to make these products more like 'home accessories.' We believed there was an opportunity to really reinvent, and in the end, change the competitive landscape."

But to complete their transformation of this hoariest of consumer-product categories, the guys went beyond the chemicals themselves to other things that would enhance the brand. They created ergonomic dispensers for their hand soaps, for example.

And once they were able to create buzz at trade shows and the like with their products, Adam and Eric honed in on doing their own effective public relations. They sent press releases out to trendy home and lifestyle magazines and even got their products placed on Friends.

Today, Method Home products are gaining different kinds of "placements": on thousands of shelves of retailers nationwide, including Target and Costco stores.

Adam's Bonus Insight: A big part of realizing that you want to start your own business is understanding why you're chafing at doing something else. Adam had always been creative and was a problem solver who needed outlets for those abilities. "But I didn't understand until after I'd gone through several career phases," he says, "that working for other people who didn't understand where I was coming from was something I couldn't really do very well. I didn't fit into a box."