Cleanery co-founders Ellie Brade and Mark Sorensen. Photo / Supplied
Cleanery co-founders Ellie Brade and Mark Sorensen. Photo / Supplied
On the face of things, environmentally friendly cleaning products seems a tough category to enter.
It's a crowded market, and one where Consumer has warned about ineffective or incorrectly certified products (although green cleaning results have improved with recent testing).
Nevertheless, Cleanery has jumped in with its range of sachets.Punters add water to create the cleaner.
And the Auckland-based startup is enjoying early success. It launched a pilot with Farro in October last year and this week it has two container loads of its product going into Woolworths supermarkets across the Tasman.
How did it get on to Australian shelves, and before New Zealand supermarkets at that?
Co-founder Mark Sorensen says credit partly goes to its distributor, Chris Wong's Pavé, and partly to the door-opening skills of the investors who backed Cleanery's recent $2.3 million seed round.
The startup's backers include Peter Cullinane, Nicola O'Rourke (Comvita's CDO) and Michael Stiassny (all via Founders Advisory), Shane Bradley, and Lance Wiggs, Rohan MacMahon and Dr Jez Weston via the Climate Venture Capital Fund.
Sorensen says he wants Cleanery to disrupt its niche in the same way that Cullinane's Lewis Road Creamery shook up dairy (Lewis Road also made it to Woolworths in Australia, as well as the likes of Whole Foods in the US, before its 2020 sale to Southern Pastures).
Cullinane (a former chairman of NZ Herald publisher NZME), says: "The cleaning and personal care products industry is very large and very much ready for a disruption. Cleanery is such a simple proposition: it's the cleaner we want, not the bottle. And it works. It really does."
A four-pack of spray bottles for $30 and a four-pack of sachets for $12.
By not shipping water, Cleanery can fit the equivalent of over 200,000 bottles in one shipping container – up to 20 times more than traditional products and at a fraction of the weight, co-founder Ellie Brade says. There's no plastic, only recyclable sachets.
"Real science" is another selling point. Five of Cleanery's core team of six come from a science or engineering background (Brade comes from PR). Head of engineering Dave Hassell formerly designed production plants for clean energy company LanzaTech.
And some of the investors are pushing that angle too, as well as Cleanery's green credentials.
Climate Venture Capital Fund's Weston - who has had science and commercialisation advisory roles at MPI, MBIE and (currently), Auckland University's Uniservices, says: "Our mission is to fund high growth companies that deliver significant emissions reductions. Cleanery means you're not making more single-use plastic bottles and spray heads and it means you're not hauling that weight of water around the world. Every household uses cleaning products, so the emissions savings are going to be substantial."
Cleanery sent two container loads of products to Australia for its launch into Woolworths supermarkets this week. Photo / Supplied
While it's notable that Cleanery made it onto shelves in the more competitive Australian market before being stocked at home, where the two major supermarket players' wholesale operations have been put under Government heat, Sorensen says it's simply a matter of range reviews happening a few months earlier across the Tasman than in NZ.
The co-founder says the seed funding will be used for further expansion in Australia and NZ and a push into the US, which will initially be through online sales.
"Cleanery's products are better at cleaning than other products on the shelf, but have intrinsically lower emissions and better margins and pricing," Climate VC Fund's Wiggs says.
While Sorensen and Cullinane push the startup's connections with Lewis Road in terms of shaking up the market, the comparision doesn't extend to pricing. Where Lewis Road pushed the boundaries of what people were willing to pay for dairy, Sorensen says Cleanery is a bit cheaper than most of its competition.
Wiggs, adds: "There is a job to do to help people understand the new way of buying liquid products, but the advantages of the product will deliver long-term company success and substantial emissions reductions."
