CONVERSATIONS WITH FOUNDERS: MATT FROM HOMETHINGS

Words by Rebecca Magee

What kickstarted your passion for making refillable cleaning products?

There are almost two stories behind Homethings, so I’ll give you a combination of both. My co-founder, Tim, was in the shower at a flat-share, surrounded by plastic bottles of shower gel, shampoo, conditioner, and all sorts of other products. That’s when he had his eureka moment. At the time, he didn’t come up with the idea for Homethings, but it sparked a deeper look into the issue. As he researched the plastic waste associated with everyday household items, he came across a report by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. The Foundation focuses on building a circular economy, and in their report, they highlighted that cleaning products are up to 95% water. This made them an obvious candidate to make circular, ie. by removing the water from the product, we could provide a concentrate that customers could mix with water at home, refilling their packaging and therefore supporting a circular economy. Tim realised two things: 1) The fact that the water could be added at home was a real game-changer – it meant the product could be done so much better. 2) There was an easy opportunity to make the product more circular while also providing a much better product for customers.

I’m a big fan of the scents. Talk me through this decision-making process.

You can’t just make these sort of products and sell them on sustainability alone. They have to work really well, they have to be appropriately priced, and we also found more and more that fragrance is so important. We work with a great fragrance house that produces highly concentrated scents, which makes them more sustainable since we use less fragrance per product compared to other fragrance houses we’ve previously spoken to. They send us loads of samples, and then we all sit around a table to test them out. We’ve learned that fragrance is really subjective – people on our team often have very different opinions about what smells good. Because of this, we can’t rely on them alone. We aim to come to a conclusion, where some people will love the fragrance that we want to go ahead with, while those who don’t necessarily love it at least don’t hate it – some of these fragrances can be a bit like Marmite! Once we’ve narrowed it down, we need to get it under the nose of our actual customers – so we’ll take the fragrance, do a batch run, make it into an actual cleaning product, and then send them out to customers to try.

What’s the best part of being a founder?

Good question. It really depends on the day you ask me! We’re a small team, and even when we’ve been a bit larger – up to 11 or 12 people – the thing I’ve really enjoyed across all team sizes is you have to get involved in loads of different stuff, and you have to learn and solve problems in lots of different areas of the business. Personally, I love that. I enjoy being a bit of a a jack of all trades and master of none – someone who’s hands-on, diving into challenges like, “Okay, we need to figure out how to solve this.” I find that really fun. I think if I was just doing the same thing every day, I’d probably get better at it, but I personally enjoy being involved in a wide range of areas across the business.

Can you give me a highlight from your time at Sandbox so far?

I’ve been lucky to work in different offices run by Charlie for years, and I’ve always known that he and the Sandbox team can put together an awesome community in co-working spaces. We have got to know lots of other people and companies really well, so that’s my biggest highlight – getting to know founders and teams doing similar-ish stuff, so you can celebrate the highs, get help in the lows, and actually get some real good community spirit from it as well. That’s definitely the biggest thing for me. You guys are really really good at creating that environment through both the stuff that you do and your team energy, and as a result the teams that you attract into these spaces.