28 PW JAN2022
FIRST PERSON
Catching Up with Grove Collaborative as it Goes Public
Jon Silverman
Back in in March of 2019, Packaging World used this First Person space to hear from John DeVierno, then Head of Community Happiness at Grove Collaborative (visit pwgo.to/7434 to read). In the intervening three years, the brand and platform has been busy with a series of innovative product launches at the intersection between D2C and sustainability. Jon Silverman, Grove’s Senior Vice President, Physical Products, catches us up on the once emerging, now fully emerged brand owner, including the most recent big news that it plans to go public.
Packaging World:
How have things changed since we last spoke with Grove Collaborative?
Jon Silverman: In the past few years, Grove has evolved from origins as a subscriptionbased model mostly for third-party, sustainable home cleaning and personal care brands, really leaning into the home cleaning side. Three years ago, we began exploring a new space. At that point, we were just beginning to create products under our flagship Grove Co. brand, and we were at least thinking about building those from the ground up. But we were still largely a platform where [consumers] came and either discovered, or furthered their relationship with, third-party brands. Those brands really pioneered a lot of sustainable formats in the home cleaning space. But since then, we’ve recognized a few things. First is, we’ve just gotten bigger and attracted and acquired more customers. We’ve been able to do that in a few different ways. One is through more sustainability messaging. On that front, we started an experiment when we launched Seedling, our line of tree-free home tissue (A), toilet paper, paper towels, tissue, etc. That was the first time we really started to talk to customers about ourselves as a sustainability player and consumer products company. We asked consumers to come to us for sustainable products, as opposed to asking them to come to us for exciting products from other brands they may know. Seedling was really an unlocking point for us. Customers came to us A because they thought, “Hey, I should do better by the world when it comes to purchasing home tissue.” And that has evolved into much stronger sustainability messaging and positioning.
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So, we have really come into our own when it comes to Grove’s own brand product development, and we’ve realized the value that that can have. That’s not only in building products that we want—so the products are exactly what we want them to be—but also in customer acquisition and retention of customers through those products. That led us to leaning into sustainability, and always evolving our site, and the app we launched in the past three years. Then, it was really about discovering ourselves and exposing customers to our platform through the strength in our owned brands and products. That led to this recently announced partnership with the Virgin Group, and I think we felt like it was time. We were ready to take the next big step in the long, what we hope is the multi-decade future of Grove.
That catches us up to now, and to the big news that Grove Collaborative just a few weeks ago, announced its plans to become a public company through a transaction with Virgin Group Acquisition Corp. II, a publicly traded special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) sponsored by Virgin Group. Tell us more. Since we are going public through a SPAC, the mechanics are a little bit different than, say, an IPO. But the end result is the same—we are expected to become a public company with current timing slated for late Q1 or early Q2 of 2022. We’ve always thought that a public offering was the most likely outcome for the company, or most likely a major step in our evolution, because we have obviously seen a number of our brand partners, like Seventh Generation, be acquired by large CPGs. And that’s how large CPGs are finding their way into the natural and sustainable space, largely through acquisition. But Grove was not interested in being acquired. We have pioneered the space in ways
12/24/21 9:53 AM
