Two D.C. neighbors have turned a casual summer conversation into a full-fledged subscription box business — and about six months after first exchanging ideas, they’re selling their product to companies across the country.
Cooler Supply Co. co-founders June Blanks and Laurent Besancon in December launched their District startup, a service for employers to improve morale, foster team building and keep employees engaged as they work from home in the age of coronavirus. Now in their second month, the partners are expanding their customer base, planning new products and conceiving more customized offerings after an initial wave of positive feedback from big corporations and smaller firms, they said.
“The model in culture building has always been something that’s practiced while people are together as a team,” Blanks said, but now “they can provide something that shows appreciation and there is a way for them to help staff reconnect with each other — there are tools and we’re providing them.”
Here’s how. Named for the organic “water cooler” exchanges between coworkers inherently absent from the home office, Cooler sends boxes to remote employees. Those packages — with themes such as “focus,” “new habits,” “recharge” and “wellness” — include drinks and snacks, and “fun and functional” office objects,” Besancon said. Those products come from small businesses throughout the U.S. focused on high-quality items that are sustainably sourced, the partners said. The co-founders also target businesses that are innovative, local to their markets and have diverse ownership such as women, people of color and those from the LGBTQ+ community.
The boxes also include Cooler conversation cards, discussion prompts and self-coaching activities for personal development and colleague interaction. That component was born from the co-founders’ first conversation in summer 2020, according to Blanks. “Laurent planted this seed that positive habit building and coaching would make a positive impact, and that became a primary part of what I envisioned Cooler could be,” she said.
For a one-time fee of $66 per box or a through a recurring subscription model, Cooler — which works with a fulfillment center — ships the boxes to team members after an employer provides a staff mailing list.
“What the companies are buying is a shared experience that they can send to their staff on their doorstep,” Besancon said.
The goal? Provide human resources departments a benefit for staff that’s not rooted in the virtual world and, yes, still keeps them connected in the new — and increasingly ubiquitous for many companies — work-from-home culture. The startup is now preparing to launch a new product in the coming weeks and expects to continue expanding its self-coaching offerings, the co-founders said. Cooler is also developing new product lines that target specific needs such as employee onboarding and different industries, such as real estate.
Blanks, Cooler’s head of product, is also the mind behind D.C. cold brew company Junius Coffee, which provides coffee as an office perk. Besancon, Cooler's head of coaching, is a professional executive coach and HR specialist with a background in staff and leadership development at the World Bank. They self-funded Cooler with a combined $60,000 and though they’re not actively fundraising, they’re not ruling out the prospect of future investment, they said.
Their startup is already starting to generate revenue from its existing customer pool, which includes 15 companies including Allied Title & Escrow LLC, Prime Policy Group and Berkey Williams LLP locally. It’s also pursuing referrals from those companies, many of which expect a work-from-home model to exist in some form beyond the pandemic. Though, Cooler is also devising plans to serve companies once they move beyond strictly remote work, Besancon said.
The business has big ambitions for 2021, targeting $6 million in revenue “and to grow from there exponentially,” Besancon said, adding that he expects to have shipped 100,000 boxes by year’s end. To do it, he said, Cooler is working to bring on large-scale organizations as longtime customers “with the notion that we can customize some of the experience for them.”
