Australian lifestyle brand Frank Green has just launched a shiny new range of reusable cups and bottles in rainbow, gold, silver and blue chrome in an effort to attract a different type of customer: style-conscious shoppers who care more about what a product looks like than its carbon footprint. “The conscious consumer has played a huge role in our growth as a brand to date and comprises the majority of our existing customer base, however, we’re now increasing our relevance to customers who
ho choose products based on how they align to trends and personal style as the main priority,” Ben Young, Frank Green’s founder and CEO, told Inside Retail.
It’s not that Frank Green is abandoning its values, Young clarified, but rather using style as a vehicle to reach more customers and inspire them to live more sustainably.
“Our mission is to stop single-use plastic consumption. To do that, we need to remove the perceived barriers that prevent customers from choosing a sustainable product. One of these barriers is style, so by designing an on-trend product, like the chrome collection, we are showing customers that living sustainably can still be stylish,” he said.
With chrome and liquid metal trends popping up on the runways of some of the biggest names in fashion, Young hopes that customers will view the new range as “wearable fashion accessories” – not just reusable lifestyle products.
Expanding the product range
Style and functionality have always been an important part of Young’s design process. He launched Frank Green in 2014 after spending three years trying to create a reusable coffee cup that people would actually want to use.
“I was always trying to understand why people didn’t use them, and it was quite simply that they didn’t look very good and didn’t make consumers’ lives easier,” he recalled in a recent interview for Klarna’s new video series, Bold Moves.
His solution – the Frank Green SmartCup, a sleek cup with an innovative push-button lid – won the Good Design Australia award for product design in 2015.
Over the years, the brand has expanded into reusable water bottles, reusable bags, insulated food storage containers and coffee and tea accessories. Further product launches are in the pipeline for 2022.
“We’ll continue to target the single-use products that are most devastating to the planet. Any items that have single-use plastic in them, watch out,” Young said. “We’re going to create a beautifully designed consumer product that you’ll love to use forever instead.”
Last year, Frank Green brought its manufacturing in-house with the opening of a 6000-square-metre warehouse in Melbourne’s inner west.
Getting suppliers on board
As part of Frank Green’s fashion pivot, Young has also appointed a new PR agency, MCMPR, whose clients include Zimmermann, Tory Burch, Net-A-Porter and Oroton.
“As a carbon-neutral agency, MCMPR is focused on a sustainable future. We believe that the communications industry has a responsibility to influence and drive positive change, so we jumped at the opportunity to work with Frank Green,” Marie-Claude Mallat, the agency’s founder, said in a statement.
“The products are incredibly well designed and complement the latest fashion and beauty collections from our other global clients. The team and I are thrilled to support Frank Green’s stylistic vision and deliver results that move the dial.”
The move is in keeping with Frank Green’s growing focus on the environmental impact of its supply chain.
“At Frank Green, we’ve spent a lot of time putting together a supplier code of conduct that is so many things, but importantly, it’s about sustainable practices in business,” Young said in the Bold Moves video.
“The energy that our suppliers use, where they get their materials from and their carbon footprint has been mapped out…because we need to be able to show our customers that we’ve done that due diligence.”