Public Goods

Here is a fact about the consumer economy that is both obvious and slightly annoying to think about: the bottle of shampoo you buy is priced not for what is inside it but for what surrounds it - the brand, the shelf placement, the retailer's cut, the ad you half-remember. Public Goods was founded in 2016 on the theory that you could strip all of that out, sell people the shampoo more or less at cost, and make your money somewhere else entirely.

The somewhere else is a membership. Public Goods charges an annual fee - historically about $79, more recently closer to $65 - and in exchange sells hundreds of its own-brand products at near-wholesale prices. If this sounds familiar, it should. It is the Costco trick, the Sam's Club trick, the thing where the store makes its margin on the privilege of shopping there rather than on any single item. Co-founder Morgan Hirsh described the ambition more memorably: "Amazon with a soul."

The soul part is not marketing filler, or at least it is load-bearing marketing filler. Public Goods makes a single house brand across dozens of categories - personal care, cleaning, grocery, paper goods, vitamins - and applies a house standard to all of it. The company says it has eliminated more than 400 ingredients it considers harmful, uses plant-based and biodegradable formulations where it can, and dresses everything in near-identical minimalist labels. The labels are the tell. When your packaging refuses to shout, the implication is that the product doesn't need to.

The origin story is better than most. Hirsh and his co-founder, electrical-engineer-by-training Michael Ferchak, met at a bar in Shanghai in 2003. Hirsh was then nursing an idea called Green Cab - a fleet of electric taxis that would carry rooftop ads only from environmentally friendly companies. Green Cab did not happen. The underlying conviction - that "many of the toughest problems we face are the result of the products we choose to consume" - did, thirteen years later, in New York.

What is genuinely interesting about Public Goods is not that it sells eco-friendly soap. Lots of companies sell eco-friendly soap. It is that the company made the boring, disciplined choice at almost every fork: one brand instead of a marketplace, membership instead of markup, fewer SKUs instead of infinite ones, plain labels instead of loud ones. In a category littered with well-funded flameouts, boring turned out to be a competitive advantage.

The funding history makes the point vividly. Traditional pitching went nowhere: warm intros, decks, the usual choreography, no cheque. So in 2017 Hirsh made a two-minute Kickstarter video and let the market vote directly. It raised roughly $690,000 from 10,260 backers in under 40 days, landing in the top 0.2% of campaigns on the platform. The crowd funded what the professionals had passed on, and it did so by pre-selling the one thing Public Goods most needed to validate: memberships.

Institutional money followed the demand rather than leading it. In 2018 the company raised a $3 million seed round from Day One Ventures, Listen Ventures and Yes VC. It later closed a Series A, with consumer-focused investor L Catterton becoming its largest outside backer, and has raised north of $30 million in total. More unusual for a direct-to-consumer brand of this vintage: it has reportedly reached profitability, which in the 2020s D2C graveyard counts as an achievement all by itself.

That graveyard is worth naming. Brandless, the most direct comparison - own-brand essentials, minimalist ethos, "everything $3" - raised roughly $290 million and shut down in 2020. Public Goods, on a fraction of the capital, is still here. The difference was not the products; it was the model. A customer who pays $79 to belong behaves differently from a customer who clicked once because the ad was good. Membership is a promise in both directions, and promises reduce churn.

What can you actually do with Public Goods? Replace the boring recurring purchases in your life - the dish soap, the shampoo, the paper towels, the vitamins - with cleaner-formula versions at prices that aren't a punishment for caring. Members get discounted pricing, annual credits and free shipping; the catalog spans bath and body, home and cleaning, grocery and snacks. It is not a treasure hunt. It is the opposite: a deliberately short, curated list of things you were going to buy anyway.

And there is a ledger of consequences the company likes to keep public. It says it has funded nearly 500,000 trees through reforestation partners such as veritree, donated more than 100,000 meals to food banks, and continues to push plastic reduction and tree-free paper across its lineup. These are claims worth reading with a raised eyebrow, as all corporate sustainability claims are - but they are specific, numbered, and attached to a business that has to keep selling soap to keep planting trees. That alignment, more than any slogan, is the interesting part.