Method : Stinky apartment experiments → $100M eco-friendly empire

Scan time: 2-3 minutes / Read time: 4-5 minutes

Hey rebel solopreneurs 🦸‍♂️🦸‍♀️

You're staring at your laptop screen, paralyzed by the thought: "Who am I to compete against industry giants who've been doing this for decades?"

That voice in your head keeps whispering: "They have all the connections, all the experience, all the resources - what chance do I have?"

Meet Adam Lowry and Eric Ryan - two complete outsiders who felt the exact same imposter syndrome before building Method into a $100+ million empire by proving that having zero industry connections can actually be your secret weapon.

But their journey started in the most unlikely place...

🧘‍♂️ Just two regular guys from Detroit

Picture this: Adam Lowry and Eric Ryan were high school buddies from suburban Detroit.

Nothing fancy about their backgrounds whatsoever.

Eric was working as a strategic planner, doing branding for companies like Gap and Old Navy.

Adam?

He was a Stanford-trained climatologist writing research papers that... well, only other scientists bothered reading.

They ended up sharing a dirty little apartment in San Francisco with five other roommates.

Both were frustrated as hell.

Adam felt like his environmental research was just preaching to the choir - the people reading his work were already environmentally conscious.

Eric had always dreamed of being an entrepreneur who could create a brand that actually mattered.

Two ordinary guys with big dreams and absolutely zero experience in household cleaning.

Can you imagine walking into that niche as complete outsiders?

But they were about to discover something even bigger...

🧩 The daily frustration that changed everything

Here's what was eating at Adam every single day.

He was trying to be an environmentally conscious consumer, but every "green" product on the market was absolutely terrible.

"This was the late '90s, and every brand that I patronized asked me to make a sacrifice for the good of the environment," he says.

The products were inferior, cost way more, looked brown and ugly, smelled awful, and were completely uninspiring.

Sound familiar?

That moment when you're using something and thinking "There HAS to be a better way to do this"?

Meanwhile, Eric was looking at the $5.2 billion household cleaning niche and spotted something that should've been obvious to everyone.

Everything looked exactly the same.

Boring.

Corporate.

Uninspired.

But wait, it gets better...

That's when they spotted two massive opportunities everyone else was missing...

🎪 Two massive trends hiding in plain sight

While researching the cleaning niche, Adam and Eric discovered something incredible.

Billion-dollar companies were completely missing two huge cultural shifts happening right under their noses.

First trend: The "lifestyling of the home."

People weren't just living in their homes anymore - they were designing them to reflect their personal taste and wanted everything to look beautiful and artistic.

Second trend: Health and wellness.

People were eating organic, obsessing over what went into their bodies... but somehow using cleaning products filled with pesticides and actual poisons in their homes.

The opportunity was literally staring everyone in the face.

What if you could create cleaning products that were both effective AND gorgeous?

Aveda for the home - an "eco-chic" approach that nobody was doing.

But recognizing opportunity and actually executing it? Two completely different things...

🕵️‍♀️ Beer pitchers and bathtub chemistry

Their messy, dirty San Francisco apartment became their makeshift laboratory.

They scraped together $90,000 from savings and help from friends and family.

No fancy equipment whatsoever.

They mixed cleaning formulas in their bathtub and kitchen sink.

Sometimes they'd use beer pitchers (with big "Do Not Drink" labels so their roommates wouldn't accidentally poison themselves - pretty funny when you think about it, right?).

Their first products?

Four simple cleaning sprays.

Once they'd perfected their formulas, they started giving out samples at parties and going door to door to sell them.

They'd walk into independent stores, befriend the managers, and do live demos to see how people actually reacted.

"We were surprised how quickly it resonated," says Eric.

Consumers loved the bright, candy-like colors and the unusual cucumber, lavender, and mandarin orange scents.

Made in bathtubs, delivered in a beat-up truck.

Can you imagine?

90 local grocery stores started carrying products made in someone's bathroom.

But here's the thing about success - it costs money to grow, and they were burning through cash faster than they could make it.

Success was building momentum, but disaster was lurking around the corner...

⛳️ When you've got $16 left and $300,000 in debt

They'd gotten into 90 local grocery stores, but growth came with a terrifying price.

Money was disappearing faster than they could make it.

$16.

That's all they had left in their bank account.

$300,000 debt stacked up on their credit cards.

Vendor payments were three, sometimes four months past due.

Can you imagine lying awake at night with that kind of pressure crushing down on you?

Eric says, "We had to appeal to the inner entrepreneur of each of our vendors. We had to sell them on the fact that Eric and I could do something that had never been done before."

They were constantly pitching private investors, hearing "no" over and over again.

Finally - FINALLY - they secured $1 million from private investors.

They didn't even have enough money left to buy a celebratory dinner after signing the deal.

But that funding?

It changed absolutely everything.

Now they could actually invest in proper design and manufacturing.

And with that new money came their boldest design decision yet...

🌈 The bowling pin that changed everything

With their new funding, they made a crazy decision.

They cold-emailed famed industrial designer Karim Rashid and asked for help to completely "reinvent" the dish soap bottle.

Karim created these incredible unique bottles, including one that looked like a bowling pin.

For the first time ever, people actually wanted to leave their dish soap out on the counter instead of hiding it under the sink.

The design was so eye-catching that it opened doors to major retailers.

Target agreed to test their products in Chicago and Northern California.

Plot twist: They initially failed Target's metrics.

But here's what's amazing - Target realized that Method was driving growth to the entire household cleaning niche.

So Target decided to roll them out nationally anyway!

"There were three people working out of our one-room office and getting Target to nationally authorize your product is like winning the Super Bowl of capitalism," Ryan says.

But then... disaster struck again.

The beautiful bowling pin bottles started leaking all over store shelves when customers pulled off the seal to smell the product.

Adam and Eric literally drove from Target to Target with paper towels, cleaning up their own messes.

"I have nightmares still," says Eric.

They had to completely redesign the bottles to fix the leaking problem, but the design concept had already proven itself.

🎁 From apartment bathroom to $100+ million empire

They fixed those leaking bottles and kept pushing forward.

Adam was working 100-hour weeks, often sleeping in the office just to save time.

They revolutionized laundry detergent by creating a triple concentrate, then later an 8x concentrate using patented technology that nobody else could replicate.

Today?

Method employs more than 100 people and generates over $100 million in revenue.

They're selling in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, France, Japan, and Canada.

They literally brought eco-friendly cleaning out of tiny natural food stores and onto mainstream shelves everywhere.

Adam says, "The winners in the new economy are going to be those that are the very best at designing deep sustainability and high design into wonderful product experiences."

Two guys who started mixing formulas in beer pitchers now compete head-to-head with billion-dollar corporations... and win.

🥂 Your turn to break the rules!

That voice telling you "Who am I to compete against industry experts?" is the same one Adam and Eric heard before they proved complete outsiders could outmaneuver billion-dollar corporations.

Their total lack of cleaning niche experience became their superpower - fresh eyes that saw opportunities the "experts" missed for decades.

Your hunger is your edge - just like two friends mixing formulas in beer pitchers built a $100+ million business by refusing to let imposter syndrome stop them.

Something tells me you're gonna build something amazing.

Keep zoooming 🚀🍧

Yours 'helping you build a biz with almost zero-risk' vijay peduru 🦸‍♂️