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To trace the origins of Frank Green, you have to go back to the outskirts of Sydney in the 1980s. It’s there that the business’s founder, Benjamin Young, grew up – and first saw the devastating impact of single-use plastic.
“I always came home from school, took my shoes off, put my footy shorts on, went down to the bush and spent my time catching fish,” he says. “It was a Huckleberry Finn kind of thing. [But] when it rained, all the plastic got washed from many kilometres away into this river that I played in on a daily basis. I really didn’t like it. Why is this ruining such a surreal, beautiful, natural experience?”
Those early years playing by the river gave Young a deep-rooted dislike of single-use plastics, which he describes as “nature’s cancer”. About 30 years later, he decided to do something about it.
After an early career in finance and business strategy, Young set out to create a different kind of hydration brand – one that made stainless steel bottles you’d want to keep forever. It’s been a phenomenal success.
Frank Green now ships out about 25,000 orders a week in peak periods, employs more than 150 staff, and speaks to an audience of almost 300,000 followers on Instagram.
But reaching cult status took a lot of work. Young spent four years doing research and development on how to craft the perfect water bottle, a “very expensive” period of learning. He says he got it wrong twice, with each attempt chewing up a year and a half. The first product he tried to create was a finicky squeezable water bottle with a carbon filter that was “a nightmare” to try and make work. But eventually Young figured out how to create coffee cups that didn’t leak and stylish bottles that kept water chilled for hours – products he was happy to take to market.
With so much expensive trial and error along the way, having a dependable banking partner has been essential for Young. He chose to work with NAB.
“They’ve been our bank from the start,” Young says. “I’ve worked with other banks in my time, and just the responsiveness and the professionalism of NAB has been really fantastic.”
Frank Green wasn’t the only company selling reusable bottles when it launched in 2013, but it had some key points of difference. Firstly, Young says, while a focus on fixing the environment has always been a core part of its ethos, the company framed its mission a little differently to some of its competitors.
“We had some [competitors] that were doing phenomenally well, but their products were marketed like: ‘Hey, use a reusable product because you’re killing the Earth.’ We go: ‘Hey, use our product because you’re going to look and feel great by doing the right thing for the environment.’ That’s what Frank Green is about.”
Young also understood that looks matter. He poured a lot of time into creating designs that people would want to carry with them, from the pleasing colour palette Frank Green is known for down to the exact kind of curve humans find appealing in a bottle. Then he added touches such as monogramming, so customers could personalise their bottles with their names. It’s those little things that helped him craft a product that’s not just a functional object but “an emotional support water bottle” – one that customers can’t be without.
That commitment to creating bottles that look great comes back to the company’s belief that sustainability is the brand’s problem to solve, not the consumer’s.
“We have this constant pursuit of making sustainable living irresistible. If you don’t use our product, that’s not on you, that’s on us, because we haven’t made it irresistible. And I think it’s that desperation for solving a consumer problem that keeps the business successful today.”
The Frank Green line has come a long way from those early days of research and development. The brand now does everything from lunch boxes to pet products and even an apparel line. The idea is to create a replacement for any form of single-use plastic we might use in our daily lives.
“I think it’s been an evolution, but also a revolution,” Young says.
And the business is continually looking for ways to improve its products. Frank Green has made, for instance, at least 19 modifications to its reusable cup lid since launch.
“People don’t believe this statistic, but we invest over 40,000 hours a year in new product and development to be better and better,” Young says. “There’s a lot of innovation that we do, and we just don’t stop.”
NAB has remained an essential partner through it all.
Paul Waring, Frank Green’s chief financial officer, says: “In the last six months, the things we’ve asked them to do and get done, they’ve been extremely great, extremely flexible.”
And while Australia currently provides 99% of its consumer base, Frank Green is looking abroad – including to Indonesia, where it has just opened retail spaces, and the UK, US and Europe. Its plans, Young says, can be summed up as: “Taking Frank Green and our mission to the world … world domination.”
NAB supports Australian businesses doing things differently. For more business stories, insights and the latest economic data, visit NAB Business Research and Insights.
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