A smol announcement
I’m so very excited to share the news of Balderton’s investment in smol today. As an investor, there are times when you meet a team and, within minutes, know you just have to work with them. This was the case with Paula and Nick, the founders of smol and, in the months that have passed since, I’m glad to say this enthusiasm (at least on my end!) has not dimmed one iota.
Why am I so excited about smol? There’s the obvious stuff … they’re going after the $45B market in household cleaning products (and that’s just the US, UK, Germany, France). They’ve gone from zero to 250,000 households in the UK in less than two years. They’ve launched three products and have a stream more planned. And then there’s the fact they save 4 tonnes of plastic and 5 tonnes of chemicals from the world’s dumps and sewers every week thanks to the customers who have switched to them.
But, actually, what I have really loved about Paula, Nick and the rest of their team is the way they go at absolutely everything in their way: an irrepressible, infectious combination of passion, determination and wit that makes you realise that when they talk about a sparking a ‘smol revolution’ they aren’t joking at all.
At the heart of the mission is Paula and Nick’s determination to deliver the product and service they believe their customers deserve. They’ve taken on a product category where the legacy brands (Tide, Persil, Ariel and others) have enjoyed dominant market share for decades upon decades. That sort of market dynamic leads to stagnation in innovation. After years working in FMCG companies themselves, they picked this market as one that had let down its customers for years and, if it were fixed, could touch the lives of literally every household in every country they launch. As they memorably said on the first page of their pitch deck, ‘Our market is everyone who has clothes.’
They started by innovating on the core product itself. Paula’s chemistry background came into play as they built a laundry capsule that’s smaller than all of its rivals — so small it can be packed into a package that comes through your letter box. Yet the smol capsule is actually more effective than its competitors, achieves this less chemicals and is vegan and cruelty-free. Since launching laundry, they’ve applied the same innovation to dishwash (again smaller, more effective, yet with fewer chemicals) and then to fabric conditioner (which, unlike most legacy products, does not rely on animal fat).
But their product focus didn’t stop with the capsules. Already eco-friendly with recycled plastic cases that could be returned and that used substantially less material than legacy products (even so-called ‘eco’ brands come in huge virgin plastic packing), Nick spent evenings and dog walks obsessing on new packaging design. Months later, he’s a bona fide packaging design ninja and the company has launched a patent-pending cardboard pack that is made with recycled material that is 100% recyclable.
And the wit and passion come in the way they’ve built an entire company that cares about customers from start to finish. As Paula once pointed out to me, ‘your clothes touch your skin, we clean your clothes — it doesn’t get much more intimate!’ And she means it. After 12-hour days running the company, it’s still pretty normal for her to log in and work through countless customer comments and questions. It would be easy to dismiss laundry detergent or dishwasher tabs as a mundane afterthought. In reality, pour the thought smol have into the product and mix it with the warmth they have for their customers and it turns out people get passionate about laundry. Every Insta and FB post has hundreds of comments within an hour of appearing. Over a third of smol’s new customers come from word of mouth referrals. And the company has customers in every single top level postcode in the country, from Scottish isles to the Cornish coast. As I have seen customers say time and time again in social media comments, “I can’t believe I’m this excited about laundry!”
At the heart, I think the enduring thing Paula and Nick have built is a very special team. From Catherine in customer support to Diane in tech, Matt in design and Ashley on ops to Gemma in partnerships, the team is smol but mighty. Resolutely distributed from day one, supportive of work-from-homers, part-timers, a resolutely non-tech-bro culture that mixes warmth for the customer with humour around every setback, there’s a very special foundation there. A foundation that has already built a business that’s changed life every day in a quarter a million homes around the UK and yet the revolution has only just started.
