One of the things Alex Yale loves about being an entrepreneur is that whatever work he invests into the business, he gets back. Every action he takes is one meant to directly benefit the brand. He’s not pulled into other people’s projects, and his calendar is not filled with other people’s meetings.
At the same time, the challenges are all his own. If a problem arises in the middle of the night, it’s up to him to solve it right then. And of course, it can be difficult to unplug. Indeed, there are no traditional office hours when you are a brand-owner.
But it’s in Yale’s blood to be an entrepreneur. After all, each of his parents is a small business owner, and after a career in the corporate world that spanned a consulting firm, teach company and an e-commerce business, he felt the need – or calling, if you will – to launch household cleaning and chemicals brand Uncle Todd’s, and with a small investment of time on a RangeMe submission, ended up on the shelves of 2,000 Walmart stores to date.
Who is Uncle Todd?
We all have one of those people in our lives. The person we call when a pipe is clogged, when a light fixture needs to be repaired, that person who is handy with building, fixing or cleaning anything around the house. That’s Uncle Todd, whose essence is captured on the brand’s packaging in the form of a strong, spectacled fellow with a playful smirk under a thick handlebar mustache that seems to say, “yeah, I can take care of that for you.”
Uncle Todd’s makes products for the home cleaning category that are not too expensive, not too harsh, but do the job and are safe. Yale zeroed in on the category after extensive research to find white space niches on the shelf. “I was looking to develop products that I thought would do well and I could launch relatively quickly in e-commerce on Amazon,” says Yale. “I explored gaps in the market where there were stale brands that were consistent sellers.”
He settled on the home cleaning space, where he noticed that a lot of brands on the shelf have been there for decades with very little changes to their branding, the way they are merchandised or their ingredients. He felt there was an opportunity to squeeze into that space.
“You have typical household cleaning products, and then you have the expensive, premium, all-natural products which sometimes don’t have the efficacy because they are made with less harsh ingredients,” Yale points out. “We’re trying to be right in the middle of that. We don’t want to be the most expensive products that make every sort of eco-friendly claim in the world, but also not one that isn’t going to be safe for your kids or pets. Uncle Todd’s develops products with hgh efficacy that solve everyday problems, but are also safe. They may not be the most eco-friendly, but they are also not the harshest. We’re somewhere in between.”
The brand’s first product – the one that was selected by Walmart from Yale’s Open Call submission via RangeMe – is Uncle Todd’s Septic Pods, which contain 2 billion CFU bacteria in a small 2-ounce pod. Users simply flush one pod each month and the special strains of bacteria go to work providing preventative maintenance. Initially launched at 600 locations, its distribution has now expanded to 2,000 stores nationwide.
Uncle Todd’s also has two cleaners in the form of eco-friendly sheets – a floor cleaner and a toilet bowl cleaner. To use the floor cleaner, you just drop one sheet in a bucket and add a gallon of water. For the toilet cleaner, just drop one in the toilet bowl, it dissolves in seconds, then you brush it and flush it. Each requires no plastic bottles, and because they are not liquid, less carbon is used in transporting them.
Maximum ROI from RangeMe
You just can’t get a better return on investment than what Uncle Todd’s received. When Yale submitted his product to Walmart Open Call, he was a free RangeMe subscriber, so the only investment was his time.
“Shortly after launching my first SKU I signed up for a free RangeMe account,” says Alex. “In one of the regular RangeMe communications there was a notice that Walmart was seeking Open Call submissions. I filled out the application, which took about 30 minutes, and then moved on to other stuff. Then one day I received an email letting me know that I was accepted to have a meeting with Walmart.”
He met with the buyer for his category, who liked Uncle Todd’s unique packaging and approach to the category. The meeting resulted in a Golden Ticket and a launch at 600 stores, which eventually expanded to 2,000. In addition, Walmart added Uncle Todd’s toilet cleaner to the lineup last month and is adding an additional SKU in June.
Not surprisingly, Yale has since upgraded to a RangeMe Premium subscription so he could participate in Immediate Opportunities, submit products directly to retailers and leverage the RangeMe buyer insights and NIQ data.
“Every week now I’m logging into RangeMe to see which retailers are having reviews that might be relevant to my products,” says Yale. “Where there is a fit, I apply; it’s not a time-consuming exercise. You just make sure that you have the right talking points and are positioning your products in the right way relative to that retailer. To get an opportunity in front of these retailers can truly change the trajectory of your business.”
Handling the new growth
This recent success for Uncle Todd’s brings with it a challenge brand owners face when they start getting momentum – managing growth. As the company adds more doors and more SKUs to the lineup, more resources are required, and for Yale, he accomplishes this by hiring ahead of this growth.
“For some roles, it’s not that I could use them 100 percent today,” he says. “But I don’t want to get to the point where I’m burned out and the rest of my team is burned out because we didn’t hire in time.”
His first hire was a Director of Supply Chain, someone to handle all of the coordination needed to get his products where they need to be, something that is not a particularly strong point for him.
“My background is really strategy, sales and marketing,” he says. “These things are really different from data sets, analytics and forecasting. When you have one or two SKUs and your supply chain is fairly compact and your sales aren’t that large, it’s manageable. You can under order and be okay. You can over order and be okay, and it’s not going to cost you a lot of money. But when your business grows and over- or under-ordering can pose real financial challenges, that’s a problem. So my first hire was a Director of Supply chain and her skill set, background and excitement are in those areas where mine isn’t. She’s excellent at forecasting, building out spreadsheets, looking at componentry, factoring in ship times and lead times, looking back at historical data and trying to figure out what it means for seasonality.”
What’s next for Uncle Todd’s
It’s certainly a good thing Yale has her on board, as he is planning much more growth in the coming years. Among these plans are launching one to two new products each quarter on Amazon, then taking the hero products and pitching them to the mass retail chains, including future plans to meet with buyers in-person at ECRM’s Household Cleaning & Essentials Sessions.
It’s going to be a lot of work, but Yale looks forward to the challenge. And the best part is, as an entrepreneur, he knows that his destiny is completely in his own hands (and those of Uncle Todd).