Stuart — or “Stu” — Landesberg grew up in New York thinking that everyone used brown, recycled paper towels and had a compost bin in their yard. Then he found out the truth, which developed the young would-be entrepreneur’s ambition for changing the world through challenging consumer habits.
“My early childhood experiences left a huge imprint on me in terms of what I accept as normal,” Stu says on this episode of The Empowered Challenger. “I grew up with a lens that I still see the world from today, which is that the world should be more sustainable than it is. That’s at the core of Grove.”
Stuart gained private equity skills during his time at TPG Capital while still holding onto his passion for the planet. By combining his business skills (and a little bit of self-admitted hubris) with his environmentalism, he eventually came up with the Grove Collaborative, a company that produces and sells natural, eco-friendly home goods.
The road to success wasn’t always easy — Stuart says that if he had known how hard it was going to be to start a company, he “probably wouldn’t have done it.” But now Grove Collaborative’s products are found nationwide at Target, with more successes on the way.
More than anything, Stuart thinks about how important it is to disrupt consumer habits and make sure that doing the sustainable thing is the convenient thing, instead of the other way around. With easy access to sustainable, natural products, the path to permanently eliminating plastic waste is in the consumer’s hands.
Disrupter-at-a-Glance
👱♂️ Name: Stuart “Stu” Landesberg
⚙️ How he challenges: As the founder of Grove Collaborative, a sustainable home goods company, Stuart challenges consumers to think about the kinds of products they’re buying. He also challenges other companies to think about their long-term impact on the planet rather than focusing only on their short-term profits.
♻️ Company: Grove Collaborative
💎 Noteworthy: Grove Collaborative is currently plastic-neutral, meaning anytime you receive plastic from a Grove order, the company collects and recycles the same amount of plastic. And it’s striving for more: by 2025, they aim to be 100% plastic free, saving tons of plastic from filling up landfills and the ocean a year.
🔍 Where to find Stuart: Twitter | LinkedIn
Challenger Wisdom
Highlights from the conversation appear below.
💡 Mixing ideology and business
“I think of myself as having a very healthy mix of a diehard environmentalist hippie and someone who really believes in capitalism and knows that the gears of business, when turning well, can drive huge change.”
💡 Using less promising ideas as a jumping-off point
“One of the things I noticed early on in college was the proliferation of a certain red piece of plastic, the red Solo cup. It used to drive me insane, because those things never get recycled at the end of the night, and there’s a compostable alternative made from plant-based plastic that just wasn't convenient at the places you bought beer. I actually thought that I was going to go into a business at some point selling sustainable Solo cups to college kids. Thankfully, that business never got off the ground, but it was the first time where the insight of convenience and consumer behavior being linked took root.”
💡 Building on preexisting social awareness
“Grove exists at a time where access to information because of the internet is widespread. We’re at this incredible moment where education and information is more available. Efficacy has caught up to conventional brands and awareness around the impact of packaging waste. It’s higher than ever. And so we exist in this moment that's really ripe for consumer transition.”
💡Taking advantage of shifting tides
“More than 80% of people in the U.S. want to take action on plastic pollution. That means Red Sox and Yankees fans agree on this. There’s very few things that 80% of the U.S. agrees on. Some issues, like climate change, have become contentious, but there’s very few people who are in favor of the great Pacific garbage patch, right? It doesn’t matter if you’re a Republican or a Democrat or don’t even care about politics. You understand that at some point we’re going to run out of space to put our garbage.”
💡 Grinding through the hard times
“For the first four years, we were unable to raise institutional capital. If you work at that startup for four years — more than half of my professional career at that time — and it doesn't work, that's not a startup experiment. That's bad judgment. So it was a high-pressure, depressing time. I definitely cut checks from my personal account to cover payroll. If I slipped past you on the street, I might pitch you. I'd take money from anyone in any amount. It was a challenging time.”
💡Relying on early customers for help with growth
“We got to 200-300 customers through our PowerPoint version of the website when we launched in 2012. We got to lay out $10,000, $20,000 a year of annual revenue by running the business in PowerPoint and Excel with no technology. And that allowed us to go at a pace that's way faster than if you're using finished technology. That’s one of the secret things about this company that's led to our strong consumer understanding to this day. I spent a ton of time directly with our consumers. I probably gave away $10,000 in Starbucks gift cards of $5 increments asking consumers to look at prototype versions of growth over the years.”
💡 Getting consumers to move past guilt and anxiety and take action
“There’s just no version of the world where we don’t have to talk about environmental crises, like the microplastics in our water. If you’re somebody who eats fish, it’s already in our bodies. It’s going to be in our bodies in 20 years in a way we can’t even fathom and this stuff is going to change consumer behavior. What I focus on is getting the data from the consumer to build brands that the consumer will embrace on the way to this transition. At some point, people will be like, ‘Oh, plastic waste is something that is dangerous and I know better now.’”
💡 Thinking bigger about your impact than other bigger companies
“Corporations have no incentive to account for the end of the life of their product in their operations. They account for the financial cost, but they don’t account for the environmental cost. So we announced that we want it to be zero plastic a year ago. And in the first year, we saved almost 10 million pounds of plastic. And we're a tiny little company, just a grain of sand on the beach compared to the big guys. But even we saved 10 million pounds [of plastic] last year, and we’ll save even more than that this coming year. I’m a believer that change is possible.”
Top quotes from the episode:
Stuart Landesberg
Quote #1
“One of the foundational reasons I started Grove was my belief that, gosh, I've seen business have so much impact on society. Wouldn't it be better if business leaders gave a shit about the impact that their companies had on the world around them?”
Quote #2
“I’m someone who believes there is always a way through. It never occurred to me that I would die in the tunnel — even if it was really hard, I knew I would find a way through and that I could not stop until I got through.”
Quote #3
“Guilt can induce a one-time change, but it's much more powerful if you buy with your heart. If you love the product that we're buying, you're not buying it because we made you feel guilty. So we try to create products that are at the intersection of efficacy, consumer love and sustainability. We don't just make sustainable products. We make products that are genuinely better than everything else on the market.”