Cleaning, washing, disinfecting: David Löwe and Christian Becker wondered how to make everyday products more sustainable. With refillable cleaning products, for example. The founders of everdrop, which won the German Brand Award 2024 for “Best Purpose of the Year”, talk about their vision and reveal how they plan to make the future greener.
Interview: Katharina Hempel
Everdrop’s first product line was detergent tabs that could be dissolved in water in a spray bottle at home. How did you come up with this idea?
David Löwe: In autumn 2019, my co-founder and I were looking for an idea to make everyday life in our society a little more sustainable. So we took a look around our own four walls… And the problem that caught our eye is probably familiar to everyone: the cleaning products cupboard full of disposable plastic bottles. Not only do they create unnecessary waste, but in most cases they are also an aesthetic nuisance. So we came up with the idea of offering high quality cleaning products in stylish bottles that can be refilled at home, saving a lot of single-use plastic. The principle is simple: water plus tab – and the cleaner is ready!
You were not the first to come up with this idea, but you are now one of the most successful. How did you succeed in making your brand stand out?
Christian Becker: That’s right, a manufacturer developed the tabs back in the 1980s, but unfortunately nobody wanted them at the time. Our approach is to build a bridge between more sustainable concepts and a lifestyle that appeals to a wider target group. The company’s unique selling proposition of reusable, stylish and minimalist bottles for tabs and powders has set new sustainable standards in the industry, which are being adopted by more and more competitors. With our product solutions, we completely eliminate single-use plastics and unnecessary chemicals – and reduce CO2 emissions from transport by up to 97%.
This approach makes our products significantly more sustainable in the long term than comparable conventional products. In addition, one of our principles is ‘We treat our products like software’. We continually improve our products based on feedback from our customers and with the help of our own research and development department. While traditional companies have been increasing the cleaning performance of their products for decades, we are committed to becoming more efficient and environmentally friendly with every development. The best proof that we are succeeding is the victory of our dishwasher tabs without plastic wrapping in Stiftung Warentest.a
What role did product design play for your brand?
David Löwe: A very big one! It is important for us to make sustainability accessible to a broad audience without making it feel too ‘eco’. By doing so, we lower the barrier for people to get involved with sustainable concepts. In a broader sense, we want to make it possible for as many people as possible to live a more sustainable lifestyle. On the one hand, through our environmentally friendly yet powerful products, and on the other, through the appealing minimalist aesthetics of our packaging.
How do you integrate the principles of circular design into the development and production of your products?
Christian Becker: Circular design plays an important role for us, especially when it comes to the refill principle. We don’t want people to use the cleaner bottles just once, but rather make it easy for them to refill them at home.
We also supply spare parts for spray heads or dispensers so that the bottle does not have to be discarded when it shows signs of wear and tear. When designing the bottles, we make sure that we use recycled materials wherever possible and develop them to be durable so that the product can be used for many years.
What challenges and opportunities do you see in implementing circular design in your company and in the industry as a whole?
Christian Becker: The biggest challenge for us at the moment is over-regulation by the EU and individual countries, because many recycled materials cannot be used in cosmetics, for example, because their composition is not 100% standardised.
What is your marketing strategy and which marketing channels do you use?
David Lion: Household cleaning products is probably one of the most competitive segments in the industry. If you look at how many brands are investing nine figures in marketing every year, you don’t really stand a chance in traditional media. So we try to use digital media to target the generation that is most vocal about sustainability. And that is where we have grown almost virally. Because we have a product that requires some explanation, video formats and influencers in particular can do a lot of educational work.
How do you manage to combine sustainability and profitability?
David Löwe: We have ambitious goals because we know that sustainability will only prevail if it is attractive and profitable in the long term. We are optimistic about the future because, as a company, we are focused on two macro trends: Sustainability is inevitably becoming more important and more present in society, as the effects of climate change become more noticeable, even in Europe. In addition, people are increasingly ordering goods online and getting used to the convenience of e-commerce.
Your corporate culture also embraces environmental and social sustainability. What are the values that are particularly important to you and how do you put them into practice?
Christian Becker: Sustainability and transparency are ever-present issues for us and part of our DNA. We want to be as transparent as possible about our environmental impact, which is anything but a given in our industry.
Our environmental performance is constantly published and updated on our website – from the environmental benefits of our products, to our CO2 and plastic emissions, to the ingredients we use. We also use our website to transparently show where we have made improvements and where we have more to do.
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