When Jordan Nathan launched his DTC nontoxic cookware company, Caraway, in 2019, he knew he wasn’t the only founder trying to sell a new brand of pots and pans to millennials scrolling through Instagram. But he found that launching after his peers proved to be a boon in all areas, except one.
When Caraway launched, it joined companies like Our Place, Great Jones, and Made In Cookware in an increasingly crowded category of online cookware startups. But arriving a little late to the party gave Caraway a chance to see what other brands’ products and target audiences were, Nathan said in a recent episode of TechCrunch’s Found PodcastThis allowed Caraway to change its approach and fill the gap left by these brands.
Caraway initially planned for its pans to be bought off the factory shelf, Nathan said, and targeted millennials who wanted something better than the pans they could find at IKEA, but weren’t yet at the wedding registry stage. It seemed like every other DTC cookware brand had this same idea, so Caraway shifted gears and instead focused on the wedding registry and beyond, spending a little more time and effort on its product design.
“That helped us change our color palette, it helped us change our price point, it helped us decide what items we put in the set,” Nathan said. “And while a lot of those other brands did a lot of things right, we were able to carve out our own space within the kitchen DTC world that others weren’t playing in.”
Seeing the launch of other brands also made the company change the way it sold its first set of products. Nathan said Caraway was initially going to sell its cookware in both sets and individual pieces, but when they realized no competitors were selling sets, the company launched solely as sets — without the option to buy one piece at a time.
Caraway’s competitors also helped Caraway decide to start talking to retailers early in the process. Nathan said they had always planned to launch in stores, but after noticing that no other DTC brands were ready to enter retail, Caraway began talking to retailers even before launching online. You can now find Caraway sets at Target and Costco, among others.
Entering retailers early helped Caraway solidify its share of the wedding registry because it started in retailers with existing registry businesses, such as Target and Bed Bath & Beyond, before they went bankrupt. This made Caraway a more natural choice for couples building their own registry than its startup cookware competitors.
Nathan said the late entry helped Caraway in many ways, but it also hurt them in one area. “We were actually last in the market, but also last in raising funds,” Nathan said. “And so when we went to raise funds, the investors we spoke to had already picked out our kitchen brand and wanted to invest in it.”
Because of this, the first fundraising round was very slow, and Nathan said that after a 10-month period of talking to five to eight investors a day, they were able to close a seed round involving over 100 investors, and no major funding from VCs.
But now, five years later, it looks like getting in late to the game may be paying off. The company has raised more than $40 million in venture capital and has expanded its product line to include bakeware and food storage, among other things, with more on the way.
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