I graduated Dartmouth and co-founded a men’s detergent company
Laundry detergent for men? Absolutely
Out of all the times I have told someone what I do, not once has their reaction suggested that they think what I do is anything close to normal.
Most of the time there is a delay between me telling them what I do and their response as they try to process what I just said. Other times, people ask me “You’re doing what?” as if they thought they had misheard me the first time. This normally prompts me to begin my little spiel about what I do, and I love to see the very predictable progression of their facial expressions from confusion, to doubt, to judgement, to wonder, to curiosity, and to impressed or excited. And when they ask how I got here, I don’t sugarcoat the fact that it was a messy process. And when I tell you how I spent my last summer, you will see why.
If you ask me what I do, I will tell you: I make a premium laundry detergent designed for a man’s lifestyle. This is the part where I am sure you ask me something along the lines of “huh?” No, I didn’t misspeak, and no, you didn’t hear me wrong. My brother Leif and I founded a company that produces a premium laundry detergent, which boasts a scent inspired by the top men’s colognes and utilizes over a dozen fragrances found in the top high-end brands. Additionally, it is designer-label and athletic wear safe, meaning our laundry detergent is specifically formulated to protect your clothing, and lengthen their lifespans, compared to other mainstream brands, which contain harsh chemicals. It also is eco-friendly, and we strongly believe in philanthropy. We donate 10 percent of all our profits to charities such as Movember, Americares, and the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, and we believe that in providing men with a laundry detergent of their own, we are encouraging men to increase their participation in household chores and encourage gender equality.
So now is the part where you understand what we are doing, but you think it is weird and you are questioning what I am doing with my life. This is when I mention some of our success stories so far. Within the last year, after completing a Kickstarter campaign, we have appeared on Good Morning America, in the Wall Street Journal, the London Times, BBC News, and many others. We have had several partnerships with Touch of Modern, a prominent ecommerce site with over eight million subscribers, and Paramount Pictures actually reached out to us about a possible co-promotion partnership for their new Ben Hur movie, though we are still working out the details.
This is when I look at the face of the person I am talking to and see that they are now very intrigued by the idea. How did we get here? What did we have to do? Let me tell you, it was definitely a journey.
The idea began as a joke, which progressed to a realization that this was actually something people needed, which progressed to us pursuing a Kickstarter, which we completed in the winter of 2014. Even after completing it, we had many of our friends joking with and teasing us, and we laughed with them. We had no idea where it would go. That winter, my fraternity did a “Secret Santa” type of gifting thing. My Santa ironically bought me a bottle of Tide laundry detergent and a bottle of Downy fabric softener. I thought it was hilarious. But then all of a sudden Good Morning America reached out to us. Apparently they saw our Kickstarter, and they asked us to go on their “Shark Tank Your Life” segment. My brother and I stood up there on national television in front of several million viewers, with our hearts racing and adrenaline pumping. I remember folding towels (which they suggested using as props) while my brother was speaking. My hands were sweating and I was trying to hide up any sort of panicked facial expression as I hoped more than anything else that I wouldn’t somehow screw up folding those towels. But it all went well, I folded those towels like a champ.
And then summer came around, and let me tell you, our setup for producing all the bottles people were ordering was one of the most janky things you have ever witnessed. Working 12 hours a day trying to continuously improve our scent, working on our website, taking and Photoshopping pictures and trying to find relevant social media posts was not the hard part. It was handling the nightmare of dealing with the fact about a quarter of the plastic bottles we had ordered from China were leaking. After filling the bottles, we would cap them and put them upside down to test for leakage. So in the pandemonium that once was our parent’s basement, we had dozens of bottles sitting upside down throughout the room and several big tubs of laundry detergent, which we occasionally stirred the scent we had created into. We joke that to an outsider’s eye it probably looked like a meth lab because we had chemistry sets and vials set up around our basement, were blasting music as we filled bottles and tinkered with perfecting our fragrance, and were wearing facemasks to protect ourselves from the scent. Believe it or not, getting high off scent was not one of the reasons we started a laundry detergent company.
What made our summer exponentially busier was the fact we decided to rebrand. Our original Kickstarter brand, which we used as a test of the market, was called “REAL”, but unfortunately people were reading into that name too much, thinking we were trying to tell them what a “real man” should smell or be like. That was not our goal. We chose the name REAL because we thought that in the real world, men do laundry too. But partly because of that, and partly because we desperately wanted new bottles which didn’t leak (we ordered bottles from Canada this time), we rebranded to form the brand FREY. I know, this is my last name.
A friend once joked to someone who was just learning about our product that I was “Modest like that” after they heard it was called my last name. My brother and I did not think about this implication when choosing the name, but we rolled with it. I thought it was funny, and to people who don’t know us it doesn’t matter. Rebranding, however, took a ton of time. Again, we had to find a bottle manufacture and a company to mass-produce our scent and detergent to our specifications with our specific proprietary enzyme blend that ensures it has a great clean. Again we had to take pictures and Photoshop them and re-do our website and change our social media. And again, we re-opened our “meth lab” and brought out our chemistry sets and face masks and gloves to perfect the fragrance.
One of my favorite quotes is that entrepreneurship is “living several years of your life like no one else will, so you can spend the rest of your life like no one else can”. I graduated Dartmouth in 2015, and believe me, the last thing I wanted to do was go live back at my parent’s house. But I wasn’t making enough money to live anywhere else yet, and I wanted to see where we could take this company.
By the end of the summer, we had moved to a warehouse in Baltimore, Maryland, and for the six months since the launch of the FREY brand we have been averaging over 60 percent growth in revenue month-over-month. We are moving to a fulfiller to ship out our orders and getting a filler to fill bottles, so the messy days are almost over. The summer was chaotic and unpleasant at times, but the excitement I get with each new news source we appear in is such a rush, I love it.
Even though starting a company is a lot like gambling, unlike the Powerball you can influence your odds with hard work. We have seen success so far, and are going to expand to other men’s household products soon. To anyone interested in pursuing an entrepreneurial venture, I strongly encourage it, even though it can be scary at times and unpleasant at others and definitely stressful.
Last summer was a pain, but only a year later and I know this summer will be very different, and who knows where we will be in the future.