The Honey Pot Company is betting big on body care.
Following a majority stake acquisition by Compass Diversified for an enterprise value of $380 million, the feminine care brand is focusing on the third key pillar of its business: body care, which it recently launched online and at 500 Target doors. The lineup includes three pH-balancing body washes, $11 each, in scents of coconut shea, lavender chamomile and grapefruit ylang-ylang.
“It was a natural extension from what we do,” said The Honey Pot Co. founder Bea Dixon, who is staying in her role as chief executive officer and chief innovation officer post-deal. “For years, it has been something that has been requested… We’ve been working on this body wash for two-and-a-half years.”
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Body care has become a hot category for players across the beauty and wellness industry, as brands like Youth to the People, Love Wellness and The Inkey List also invest heavily in the segment.
With this launch, Dixon said body care has become the third core segment of the business, following menstrual care and intimate wellness.
“We built intimate wellness out beautifully and we’ll continue to see innovation there, but we won’t need as much innovation there as what we’ll need in menstrual or body,” Dixon said of the brand’s product pipeline.
In addition, body care is an opportunity for The Honey Pot Co. to attract new customers.
“Our mission is to be the number one better-for-you global, personal care brand,” Dixon said. “[Body care] gives us the ability to do that with humans that have vaginas, with humans that don’t, with young people, with children.…It gives us the ability to connect and to be able to serve the whole family.”
Following the launch of the cleansers, more body care is on the horizon, including lotion, though Dixon said it won’t be launching this year.
“We wouldn’t have gone from the personal care that we make in vaginal wellness, and then just go into making a lotion. We’re gonna actually make you the thing that you need before you put on a lotion, which is to clean your skin,” she said. “The way that we like to think about everything that we do is really systematically.”
Since body care is new for the brand, the team has incorporated unique strategies to raise consumer awareness.
“We’re doing things like geo-targeted direct mail to humans in those 500 door locations with a scratch-and-sniff so they can have this senatorial experience with the product,” said Giovanna Alfieri, The Honey Pot Co.’s vice president of marketing and e-commerce. “We’re treating this as a new go-to market and trying to ingest a lot of those learnings to start pushing the boundaries on the awareness, the trial and moreover the distribution.”
While the brand declined to share sales figures for this particular launch, adding that the team couldn’t yet predict how body care might do, they did share its products can be found in 4.6 million homes and in 30,000 retail doors. Retailers include Target, Walmart, Whole Foods, CVS and Walgreens. In addition, The Honey Pot Co. can now be found in Walmart Canada, marking its first international retail footprint.
In terms of the recent deal, the team shared that it is allowing them to better build out their resources, including the company’s board.
“We’ve been sprinting for so long and have had to look at things in short and medium term because that’s what the business needed,” Alfieri said. “Now, the business needs us to look thoughtfully at medium and long term and a transaction of this nature invites that in and that becomes the charge.”
