How Can Sustainable Products Make An Impression On Store Shelves?

SAN RAFAEL, CA JUNE 15: A Home Depot customer pushes a shopping cart with a Weber barbecue grill ... [+] at a Home Depot store on June 15, 2006 in San Rafael, California. Retail outlets are promoting Father's day gift buying in hopes that the holiday will become more profitable for businesses.

(Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images) If you walk into any store or shop and the chances are you will be bombarded by various displays and promotions, all designed to make you choose one brand over another. And the retail world can be a pretty brutal place, with major brands able to dominate the marketplace with multi million dollar marketing budgets.

With all the competition out there, both online and in physical stores, how can small eco brands and sustainable products find and grow their audience? Sarah Paiji Yoo, co founder and CEO of Blueland, which specializes in eco friendly cleaning products, said in an interview the work to market a new sustainable product starts “far before you actually enter retail establishments”.

Blueland traded mainly online for the first three years of operation, but now has over 10,000 points of distribution on retail with Target, Kroger, Costco, Erewhon and more. This winter, the brand will also be launching its foaming hand soap at Whole Foods nationally, the brand will be the only shelf offering a glass bottle on shelf, offering sustainability with stylish options that will actually help entire customers.

“ You do not want to use retail as the testing ground to figure out what's the messaging that you need to be putting on your packaging,” Paiji Yoo told me. “One of the things we learned in our first three years of mainly trading online was to approach our product with an open mind,” she added.

“We needed to listen to our customers and figure out what the right assortment, pricing and messaging was going to be.” She said good luck and timing can also play a part in helping sustainable products out into the wider market place. “I think there are more people than ever, who are looking to make more sustainable choices,” said Paiji Yoo.

“Additionally, there are moments in people's lives when they are more open to changing how they do things. We find people convert to more sustainable products when they are expecting a new child and they become more conscious about the ingredients being used in the house.” Richard Tegoni, the chief executive and executive director of Australian compostable packaging specialist producer MyEcoBag and MyEcoWorld said in an interview getting sustainable products on shelves has gotten easier over the last few years, because of increased demand.

Although Tegoni admitted there is still a “David and Goliath” scenario in terms of competing with larger suppliers who have existing relationship with retailers. “We started off in just a handful of stores in Melbourne and slowly through the sale of our products, we expanded the number of stores and our shelf positioning, but it has been a long haul,” he told me.

Over the past six years, the company has sold 500 million compostable bags globally, which equates to around 3.3 million kilograms of conventional plastic replaced with a more environmentally friendly alternative. Tegoni said his advice to any aspiring eco entrepreneurs would be to “know your product”.

“You cannot assume a retailer will understand your product either,” he added. “You have to educate the market and the category managers on what your product is, and what the benefits are and make sure what you’re proposing fits in with their larger corporate strategies.” Hanna and Johan Olzon Åkerström started their Swiss eco skincare company, Soeder in their kitchen, based on a 5,000 year old soap recipe.

The business has now expanded with goods stocked in more than 500 stores across Europe, the United States, and Asia. The couple control and source every ingredient that goes into their products and produce entirely in house to ensure quality control of their processes. In an interview, Johan Olzon Åkerström said they wanted to make products people need and use on a regular basis.

He said they also wanted to focus on transparency and educating customers, because there is a lot of misinformation, particularly around the ingredients used in many skincare products. “We have worked hard to make something different to the standard commercial product,” he told me. “The niche is the best place to be.

It allows you to innovate and take risks. “We may have more expensive raw materials, but we can do things a lot of our competitors cannot do, because we are our own producer and we control the process.”.