A Greater Cincinnati startup on an exponential growth track is placing products on Walmart shelves after winning big at the company’s pitch competition.
Fewer than three years after its founding, Clean Age, with three full-time employees in Terrace Park, is now in more than 5,000 stores across the country.
Founder and CEO Rachel Peters pitched her company’s deodorants at Walmart’s (NYSE: WMT) Open Call in June 2022. Competing against more than 4,500 applicants and more than 13,000 products, Peters and Clean Age took home the Open Call Golden Ticket – an actual award and the highest distinction offered at the event. Clean Age products will be in stock at nearly 2,000 Walmart stores, including 86 in Ohio, beginning in September 2023.
“It’s a huge deal,” Peters said. “It’s the biggest retailer in the world.”
Clean Age offers a growing line of personal care products including deodorant as well as toothpaste. It doesn’t take long to grasp the target demographic: Clean Age’s website confronts the reader, “These products were made for you,” before narrowing down “you” precisely to “teens.”
The products boast a Generation-Z checklist of conscientious attributes: vegan, cruelty-free, PETA-certified natural ingredients in sustainable paper packaging certified by the Forest Stewardship Council. The company uses epsom salts and coconut oil – what you might use if you were making it at home, according to Peters.
Clean Age’s colorful packaging was designed by a University of Cincinnati College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning (DAAP) student, giving it a standout, “of the moment” feel, Peters said.
Groups of teenage consultants helped determine the gender-neutral scents.
“We found in our research that’s super important to Gen Z,” Peters said. “They don’t want to be told that lavender is only for women or cedar is only for men. The way to be able to smell and think about it for themselves.”
The deodorants are also free of aluminum or baking soda, another item on the Gen Z wish list. Peters noted national brands are trying to retrofit their product lines to do the same. “Customers don’t trust that,” she said. “A brand becomes for something.”
Or, as Clean Age’s young customers might say: “Vibes.”
Peters created Clean Age drawing on her 15 years in products consulting for Procter & Gamble, KAO, Unilever, Nike and more. Speaking to parents in consumer research panels, Peters said she kept hearing about the delicate transition from youth to adulthood.
“You know, you’re not parenting a little kid anymore, but an older kid,” Peters said. “It’s an emotional time in the household, a big time, and consumer products brands have mostly ignored this space. They’re not really going after these consumers, which is crazy, because that’s the next generation of consumers. It’s super important.”
In 2018, Peters joined former Nike executives at Verify, a Portland, Ore.-based venture lab focused on product innovation. At Verify, she continued to help large companies get their products to market – and she began to test a few ideas of her own, one of which turned into Clean Age.
Peters soon raised nearly a million dollars from angel investors in Portland and Cincinnati. She met with Kroger in August 2021. A few months beforehand, Peters had secured a manufacturer in New Jersey by convincing the firm’s owner – a friend of hers – that Clean Age wasn’t too small for them. Soon she and the firm’s in-house lab were honing the deodorant formula and packaging processes.
“We finished the product and had something we could be super proud of and hold in our hands only a day before it needed to get to the Kroger buyer. So I ended up flying out to New Jersey, getting the test samples, and flying them back home so that we could drop them off at our Kroger buyer’s doorstep,” Peters said.
Clean Age products hit the shelves at Fred Meyer, a Kroger-owned chain in the Pacific Northwest, in March 2022. Peters’ initial strategy was to get into one large grocery store, one large pharmacy and one large big box store. That playbook – from nowhere and nothing to everywhere and all at once – Peters learned from Procter & Gamble.
“They don’t go directly to the consumer or online when they launch a product. It goes national, and then they dump advertising on you,” she said. “We’ve always operated with the creativity and speed of a startup, but we took the playbook from the big brands.”
Peters’ nagging question was how to get the attention of one of the big boxes. Hence Walmart’s Open Call.
“I don’t know if I expected the decision to be made so quickly,” Peters said, “but at the end of a four-minute call, they said, ‘We’re gonna put you in 200 stores.’”
The deal wouldn’t last, however. Peters learned as much in Bentonville, Ark., where Walmart is headquartered and where six months after Open Call she traveled to hammer out the launch details.
“That’s when they told us they would rather launch us in 2,000 stores,” Peters said. “They asked if we had the capacity, and it was one of those meetings where you look at the person in the face saying, ‘Absolutely,’ knowing full well that on the backside that we would have to dramatically change the way we were operating.”
Clean Age had to quadruple its production – more packaging materials, more raw ingredients, more social media influencers. It wouldn’t have been possible had Peters not secured such a large manufacturer to begin with.
“That was one of those beautiful things, depending on a super great personal relationship. They were way too big for us in the beginning, and we just built a relationship over time because we knew they were going to be what we needed going forward,” Peters said. “Thank goodness we did that.”
Peters closed a deal to go in 2,200 Rite Aid stores in early 2023. Clean Age is also in more than 70 independent retailers as well as the initial 200 Fred Meyer stores. (Peters recently met with Kroger buyers about expanding to stores throughout the West Coast.)
The company is now 12 times larger than it was in August 2022. Peters said she forecasts Clean Age will grow fourfold in 2024. She credits the company’s agility in being able to capitalize on emerging trends.
“We could move fast on things like Gen Z aging up to a place where they are influencing what their parents buy them, and they’re super connected, so they can discover their own products,” Peters said. “It’s something you don’t see in bigger corporations, where it take so long for things to hit the selves that they’re not really relevant anymore.”
