How our family’s passion for eco-friendly cleaning turned into a multimillion-pound business
Ambition A.M. meets Charlie and Jack Rubin, co-chief executives of natural cleaning brand Purdy & Figg, to see how they’ve managed to achieve rapid growth in just under three years.
Have you ever wondered what the counter cleaning spray that you find on your local supermarket shelf is made of?
The answer is probably no, because it usually only costs a few pounds and you buy it out of necessity and convenience.
Charlie and Jack Rubin, co-chief executives of natural cleaning product start-up Purdy & Figg, however, are the two entrepreneurs making me personally question what I’ve been cleaning my home with.
Purdy & Figg was founded in 2020 by Charlotte Figg and Purdy Rubin, with the help of Purdy’s sons, Charlie and Jack, after the former found themselves fed up with toxic cleaning chemicals in plastic packaging.
Within its first year of operation, the sustainable cleaning brand hit the ground running. It generated a total of £800,000 in sales, all direct-to-consumer, a number that has since soared to £18.3m just this year.
The growth has not gone unnoticed, with the start-up recently securing a top 10 place on both the FEBE Growth 100 list and The Sunday Times Fast Track 100.
The secret recipe, the two brothers tell me, is not only found within the product itself, but also the brand’s efforts to directly connect and resonate with each and every customer from day one.
Scaling a good product
The idea for Purdy & Figg can be traced back to 2018 when Charlotte, a costumer researcher, and Purdy, an NHS nurse, started to host workshops in their garage to experiment with their own recipes for natural cleaning solutions.
The opportunity to turn the efforts into a business was nearly impossible to ignore, especially for Purdy’s sons Charlie and Jack, two serial entrepreneurs in their own right.
“Charlie and I noticed that people were driving an hour and a half each way to pick up these natural cleaning products that mum was making in the garage,” Jack says.
“We could just see a huge amount of energy and passion in these workshops for what Purdy and Charlotte were doing,” he adds.
The mission from the start, the two say, has always been to create a different view of cleaning products, and in order to do that, they needed to focus on connecting with the consumer.
Branding
Purdy & Figg operates a strict direct-to-consumer model and its glass-packaged products — which range from its £13 hand and body wash to its £30 Counter Clean hero product — can only be purchased online.
It seems to be an approach that has worked out in their favour, given that an early investment in social media marketing and influencer partnerships helped the brand appeal to a mass audience right off the bat.
“When you’ve got a great product, it’s just about how you leverage that,” Jack says.
“We saw really early on that the virality aspect on social media was going to be very powerful.”
Indeed, the brand’s witty personality can still be seen resonating with a growing number of people today, with its Tiktok and Instagram accounts combined ticking closer to a half a million followers.
Keep moving forward
I cannot help but notice the smile on Charlie’s face as his brother runs through his long list of start-up attempts, some of which they both admit “failed pretty dramatically”.
“I started my first business when I was 13 [which] was selling tea online,” Jack says, with a laugh.
“That was shot down by Google actually for bad advertising practice,” he adds, still laughing.
As Charlie chimes in to say they’ve both managed to have “some of the worst business ideas in history,” it becomes clear that the brothers have always known that they’d end up running a successful one together.
“We only needed one to work, right?,” Charlie adds, still smiling.
Indeed, with a few successful ventures of their own to follow and the most recent success story of Purdy & Figg, the two seem quite confident that their resilience will bring the brand to the top of a market, which is projected to be worth $15.4m (£12m) by 2032.
That is as long as they continue to put innovation at the forefront, which they hope will be an easy path to follow now that Purdy and Charlotte have dedicated much of their day-to-day efforts to the product development side of the business.
“Constantly working to optimise and stay further ahead of the competition is something that’s really important,” Charlie says.
He adds: “They [Purdy and Charlotte] really put a lifetime of expertise and experience into the principles of what Purdy & Figg has become, which is a different way to view cleaning products, not as a kind of lowest common denominator job-to-be-done product, but actually something that you use every day in your home, around your pets and loved ones.”
For now, the firm’s 50-person team seems to be focusing on the UK market, but Jack hints a global expansion could be on the horizon.
“Germany, Netherlands, France, they all have the same online adoption as the UK, they all have very high needs in terms of sustainability and non-toxic products, so we see no reason why we can’t expand into those countries when the time is right.”
CV
Name: Charlie Rubin
Company: Purdy & Figg
Founded: 2020
Staff: 50
Title: Co-CEO
Age: 33
Born: London
Lives: London
Studied: Law & Philosophy
Talents: Scrabble
Motto: Principles guide, instincts decide
Most known for: Terrible dress sense
First ambition: To be Bob Dylan
Favourite book: The True Believer: Thoughts on the nature of mass movements by Eric Hoffer
Best piece of advice: There is no dress rehearsal
CV
Name: Jack Rubin
Company: Purdy & Figg
Founded: 2020
Staff: 50
Title: Co-CEO
Age: 28
Born: London
Lives: London
Studied: Politics
Talents: Marketing
Motto: Rising tides lift all boats
Most known for: My Twitter
First ambition: Billionaire
Favourite book: All Quiet On The Western Front
Best piece of advice: The first rule of compounding: Never interrupt it unnecessarily