Please welcome Otherland, a home fragrance brand aiming to elevate everyday moments
Meet Otherland, the latest addition to Lerer Hippeau’s portfolio.
HQ: New York
Cofounders: Abigail Cook Stone and Sayyid Markar
The problem: From cookware and toothbrushes to shampoo and wardrobe staples, consumers have come to expect elevated and improved options for their day-to-day essentials. Next generation consumer brands are shaking the dust off these product categories and others by retooling the brand and customer experience with millennial buyers in mind. At the same time, this increasingly stressed-out generation is demanding more avenues to practice self-care and new ways to enhance their daily routine. The convergence of these market trends has created the right timing and opportunity to rethink a humble, everyday home good: candles.
Otherland’s solution: While competitors offer low-cost, sticky-sweet scents or options that sell at prohibitively expensive price points, Otherland meets consumers with a thoughtfully designed, luxury candle that easily elevates otherwise ordinary everyday moments. Anchored by its core collection, Otherland releases limited-edition collections with scents like cardamom milk and crisp cornflower for purchase by candle ($36) or in a set of three ($89), for gifting or for yourself.
Origin story: As a student at Columbia Business School, Abigail Stone often studied with candles close by, but she couldn’t find a brand she loved. Drawing from her background in art, e-commerce, and venture capital, she set out to solve her own problem. She spent a year testing hundreds of scents, mixing waxes, and tinkering with wicks before introducing her creation, Otherland, to the world in December 2017.
Why we’re betting on it: The market dynamics of U.S. home fragrance look like many of the categories that have been disrupted by digitally native brands: dominated by a long-standing incumbent, little transparency, fragmented distribution, and the lack of true adoption of e-commerce and social media. The biggest player, Yankee Candle, is a massive business built on glass jars filled with saccharine scents and mall foot traffic. On the long tail, there are a number of high-quality candle brands, but at a luxury price point — so high, you even think twice before lighting one. It’s a playbook we’ve seen before and one where we see an opportunity to build an aspirational home fragrance brand for the mass-market consumer in a modern way.
It’s rare to meet an entrepreneur like Abigail, who can balance a profound creative vision with the operational focus to turn that vision into products people love. Abigail’s unique sense of brand design combined with unrelenting attention to detail makes her the perfect entrepreneur to build an aspirational home fragrance brand for the modern consumer.
Our take: Across every industry, consumers are investing in ways to reduce stress and anxiety through self-care. And, increasingly, millennials are spending on experiential consumables in home beauty. In 2016, one in four millennial women purchased more than 10 candles in a year and of millennial candle consumers, 50% use them daily or several times per week. Otherland is well-positioned to capture this demand by appearing where the modern millennial shops and incorporating many digitally-native brand distribution best practices. With Otherland, Abigail has already built a brand that customers absolutely love through captivating brand visuals, high-quality and elevated scent formulations, all at an affordable price point. Otherland customers come back again and again to replenish, gift and, of course, share online.
Further reading: “Exclusive: A Luxury Candle Startup Raises $2.7 Million in Seed Round Backed by Co-Founders of Casper and Venmo” via Fortune.
Learn about careers at Otherland.
