Grove Collaborative, an e-commerce startup specializing in delivering natural home and personal care products to customers, just passed the $1 billion valuation. The company announced it has raised a $150 million Series D round, elevating it to a Silicon Valley unicorn status in just a few short years.
Since its launch in 2016, Grove’s mission has been to offer products from clean brands like Mrs. Meyers and Seventh Generation, as well as its in-house brand, at a discounted rate through a subscription service. Now, Grove is planning to use its fresh funding to invest more into sustainable packaging and supply chain, as well as to expand into the red-hot clean beauty category, among other initiatives, said co-founder and CEO Stuart Landesberg.
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“About half of our revenue today is from one of the five brands Grove owns, and we plan to invest even more behind technology to create the most sustainable, healthiest products for your home and family, like our Seedling tree-free paper line that is made from bamboo and up-cycled sugar cane,” Landesberg told Observer.
To keep with its environmentally-friendly mission, Grove will use proceeds from Seedling to plant over 100,000 trees in the U.S. this year. The company will also use funding to hire at least 100 more “Grove Guides,” the concierges who help educate consumers and “answer any questions from recommending laundry detergents to helping pick scented candles.”
As previously mentioned, Grove also plans to expand its offerings by venturing into “clean beauty,” which Landesberg says is one category where many consumers want to make great choices about what they put on their skin, but “there is still confusion over what works and what is healthy.”
Grove Collaborative’s beauty venture will be built out by Nicole Farb, who joined the company when it acquired how-to site Darby Smart this year.
“Farb is leading the effort for us, and her team is working to define the future of beauty and set a standard for clean beauty,” Landesberg said. “What we’re hearing from women of all ages is that the beauty category needs to move beyond the focus on looking good to understanding that what women want is to feel good about the products they buy.”
This notion falls in line with the current wave of consumers paying closer attention to ingredients, as the meteoric rise of “clean makeup” has proved.
Grove’s future plans also echo today’s increasing consumer needs, including choosing to support brands with the same values the company holds, such as sustainability, at affordable prices. “We want to make natural approachable for everyone, not just the ‘health-food-store’ set,” Landesberg noted. “Those trends: consumers moving to natural, and consumers choosing online, are huge multi-decade trends that we are playing a small role in.”
