Ian Blair - CEO of Laundry Sauce - Scented Laundry Detergent

Ian Blair is the founder and CEO of Laundry Sauce, one of the fastest growing Ecommerce brands on the internet. Laundry Sauce produces fragrance infused laundry detergent pods that make your clothes smell great. They are building a brand around fragrance and it's exciting to see the growth trajectory when a fresh idea, manufacturing execution, and marketing skills intersect.

Ian spent his childhood refining his entrepreneurial skills. And they came naturally to him. From selling lemonade, selling CDs in school, and to finding and selling used golf balls….Ian leveraged his entrepreneurial skills so he could afford the best hockey equipment while growing up.

When Ian was in college, he launched The University Exchange, an online marketplace that allowed students to buy and sell textbooks, cutting out the bookstore. However, Ian’s creative approach to building an email list by scraping the college intranet, quickly led the school to shut him down.

After college, Ian spent time building apps in the Apple app store. He realized that most of the apps he was building were highly templatized, and in 2012, decided to build a platform enabling others to white-label new businesses by using his templates.?He named this new company Buildfire. In the first few months, Ian and his co-founder sold several hundred app templates.?

It was exciting to help small entrepreneurs to fortune 500 companies create apps - from elevator companies to vending machines businesses and everything in between. In the last decade, thousands of companies have built their apps using BuildFire.?

You might be thinking, how did Ian go from building white label apps to manufacturing laundry detergent? I wondered the same thing…

Ian is passionate about brand building and wanted to build a D2C brand. After watching a meme about laundry detergent being called “a sauce”, Ian’s curiosity was peaked - was there an opportunity to build a brand in the CPG space?

When he was able to buy the name www.laundrysauce.com, Ian and his brother started to take the opportunity more seriously. They felt as though few people were loyal to their detergent and if they could differentiate, they could capture the market. In identifying opportunities, they started iterating on scent. Since people bought perfumes and sprayed them on their clothes, what if there was a detergent that made your clothes smell good? In doing research, they didn't find a single player in the space who had tried fragrant detergents. They immediately went to work creating the product.?

However, it turned out that injecting fragrance into a laundry pod was quite challenging. Fortunately, Ian connected with Kimball, who previously worked at the laundry division at Unilever and had a PhD in analytical chemistry. Kimball became an advisor to the business and together, the team worked closely with contract manufacturers who had significant experience within fragrance and cleaning products. It took nearly two years, but the team was able to build laundry detergent pods that made clothes smell great. Next, they would need to leverage their marketing skills to get the products in the hands of consumers.?

Thankfully, Ian had developed a relationship with a branding agency who were the creative partners for some of the fastest growing Ecommerce brands in the world. After honing in on the initial branding and optimizing the creative that would be used for social media ads, the brand began to come into focus.?

And in late 2021, Laundry Sauce opened its doors and immediately began shipping its products nationwide. Through leveraging paid media ads to get in front of target customers, the brand began to scale rapidly. Additionally, it was apparent that customers love the products, as reorders have been a large part of the company's growth story. Now, the company is busy increasing its SKU count to include other fragrant goods like candles and perfumes.?

In its first year of business in 2021, Laundry Sauce generated $50,000 in sales. And in less than one year, Laundry Sauce is now quickly approaching their first $500,000 sales month! That is 10x their entire annual sales for 2021 in just one month! All within one year!?

And with a very large addressable market with plenty of whitespace ahead, along with a loyal customer base with extremely high reorder numbers, Laundry Sauce is poised to continue its rapid rise far into the future.?