The Ebels made a point of choosing color names designed to appeal to a clued-in millennial audience (the names of various hues reference a hipster neighborhood in Los Angeles, Radiohead’s first album and Mexican architect Luis Barragán). In broad strokes, Backdrop is a classic direct-to-consumer play. “What we saw was there was no brand affinity, especially among a younger cohort, and so we saw a real opportunity that if you took this down to first principles, and you were starting from scratch serving a consumer in a new way, you’d do things very differently.” They’ve been doing the same things for a very long time, and a lot of the choices that they’ve made over many decades have accumulated to become the baggage around the customer’s neck,” Caleb Ebel tells host Dennis Scully on the latest episode of The Business of Home Podcast. “What we started seeing is the paint industry is a handful of very large, very old manufacturing companies. When setting out to paint their newborn’s nursery a simple shade of white, the couple was struck by the complex purchasing process: multiple trips to a hardware store and a clunky, elaborate interaction with a category that hadn’t seen serious challenges to its business model in decades.
For husband-and-wife duo Caleb and Natalie Ebel, the product was paint. Whatever the product, there’s an entrepreneur looking to cut out middlemen and disrupt it. The direct-to-consumer phenomenon has seen a wave of startups reimagine virtually every category of consumer goods, from eyeglasses to toothbrushes to suitcases.
0 kommentar(er)
