How Two Friends Built A $100 Million Company
Childhood friends Adam Lowry (left) and Eric Ryan didn’t set out to reinvent an industry.
But the combination of modern design and eco-friendly ingredients has made Method Home, the company they founded in 2000, into a $100 million behemoth.
The story behind Method’s now ubiquitous bowling pin-shaped containers of soap and dishwashing liquid is more than your typical bootstrapping saga.
Think soapy concoctions mixed in bathtubs, drained checking accounts, and a business that barely squeaked through the dot-com bubble.
While living in San Francisco in the late 1990s, Ryan and Lowry, who grew up together in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, spent hours brainstorming about products that they could reinvent. They decided to reimagine the most prosaic of household items–cleaning supplies.
The founders mixed the first few batches of their all-purpose cleaning solution in a bathtub and delivered orders in a beat-up truck.
By the Spring of 2001, Method had hired Dorward as CEO, but the founders would soon max out their credit cards. At one point, they had just $16 left in the bank and payments to vendors were three or four months past due.
“We had to appeal to the inner entrepreneur of each of our vendors,” Lowry told Inc. last year “We had to sell them on the fact that Eric and I could do something that had never been done before.”
Photo by Inc..
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