Courteney Cox wants to take her home care brand to the next level after scoring financial backing.
Homecourt, the brand launched in 2022 with dish soap, surface sprays and hand soap before expanding into body, has raised $8 million series A investment. The round was led by consumer-facing investment firm Cult Capital, which contributed $5 million, with the remaining $3 million participation from existing investors and friends.
A rep for Homecourt declined to comment on sales, but industry sources estimated them to be around the $30 million mark.
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On seeking outside investment from institutional investors for the first time, the “Friends” star, who was speaking to WWD in New York City where she is filming a new project, said: “At first I was a little afraid, because Homecourt just means everything to me and I was afraid to have partners that might come in and do or want to do something that didn’t feel congruent to the way I like to do things visually, creatively, whatever they turned out to be.”
Quickly after meeting Cult Capital, though, her worries were immediately quelled: “They were great. They just want to enhance our growth, but not in any way get in the middle of creative. They really are happy with the way it is, which is why they wanted to invest in the company. And they see my particularness and my obsession with detail and the creative part. They’re the perfect partners. They really are nice people. Their track record is incredible. I just couldn’t be happier.”
As for what the funds will be used for, Cox detailed it was all about expansion, after the brand has doubled sales every year since inception with a small but mighty team of five.
“We have a very small team, which I love, but I know that as we grow, we need a lot more people. That’s just the way business is,” she said.
Sarah Woelfel, cofounder of Cult Capital, whose other investments include Subtl, Act+Acre and Lawless, said in an interview that she was attracted to the brand by Cox’s vision and mission.
“Homecourt is creating products for the home that are truly differentiated and don’t exist on the marketplace today in such a modernized and wonderful way,” she said. “The brand is very authentic to Courteney as a person, and the way she thinks about her home and what she enjoys visualizing in her home. The products really came out of a personal need for Courteney to have products in her home that really resonated with her from both fragrance perspective and also quality of product and efficacy perspective, and then the visual aesthetic perspective.”
On white space for Homecourt, she pinpointed retail partnerships as a big area of opportunity, in addition to the possibility of limited Homecourt stores in key cities.
Earlier this year, Homecourt launched in select Nordstrom and Bluemercury stores. At the latest count, it is in five Nordstrom, 40 Bluemercury, and 290 independent doors.
For now, Woelfel is content with the number of categories Homecourt plays in, after it debuted a range of laundry products in March.
“It is a very wide product lineup,” she said. “There’s an opportunity before we go deeper with categories to grow our brand awareness and make those categories bigger, but we are all still always thinking about category expansion as well.”
Providing a breakdown of category performance, Sarah Jahnke, cofounder and chief executive officer of Homecourt, said hand wash is now its number-one stock keeping unit in dollar sales, surpassing surface spray once Homecourt came out with refills. For units sold, surface spray is still at the top, followed by candles and room deodorant.
On retail, she said: “What’s really key is, in these stores, we don’t just have one sku. We actually have four shelves, and the full storytelling of the products. A big reason to fundraise is to scale up the team and just continue to grow and bring Homecourt to more people and places.”
While international expansion is also on the horizon, she stressed that building out the team as well as strengthening brand awareness are its big plays with these funds.
When the time does come to take the plunge internationally, it will most likely begin in London where Cox spends some time and has already had her eye on potential locations.
In the meantime, Cox, who describes herself as obsessive over Homecourt’s fragrances, has been entrenched in finding the perfect ingredients as they have to recreate the CeCe scent, Cox’s favorite so named for her family nickname and its top-selling fragrance franchise, for international use. Products in the CeCe scent currently account for 40 percent of sales.
“We have to change one ingredient, and it’s such a small ingredient, but it’s a domino effect. One ingredient can affect the whole thing. It’s taking longer, because I can’t just go, ‘OK, well, it’s 99 percent there. It really needs to be 100 percent.’ That’s why this brand really works.”