EXCLUSIVE: Period-panties Brand Thinx Enters Walmart
Just in time for International Women’s Day, the period-panty brand is entering 558 Walmart stores, as well as walmart.com.
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“It’s the next step,” Maria Molland, chief executive officer of Thinx, told WWD in an exclusive interview. “We still have quite a few people who don’t know about the category, don’t know about our brand. Therefore, getting on the shelves and being in front of these folks is going to be key to us really disrupting the space and being in more underwear drawers.”
The Walmart partnership follows Thinx expansion into the mass channel a year ago, when the brand entered Target stores and its e-commerce business, as well as CVS, Urban Outfitters and London Drugs in Canada, at lower price points than Thinx’s own direct-to-consumer business.
Molland said the expansion into the mass channel was so successful — which she said early last year was worth about $10 million and grew more than 200 percent in 2021, year-over-year — that the brand is now turning down third-party offers.
“We just don’t have the operational capabilities to do a ton of retailers all at the same time and to do them all well, which we know is important,” she explained. “So we’ve been very thoughtful about which ones we roll out. We’re looking to launch in [third-party retailers] that have large sets of customers that we think are really complementary to our current customer base.
“We’re already in Kohl’s and we have been talking to Costco,” Molland added. “They have an interesting model. We might actually go into a premium line there just because of the nature of the customer and the price points. And then we have a lot of international [partners] that we’re looking at and we’re also looking into grocery.”
Thinx, which was born online in 2014, is now also available at Boots in the U.K., Amazon, the FSA store, Nordstrom and Selfridges. In addition, the brand launched a co-branded product by way of Kotex and Kimberly-Clark last year in Australia. Molland added that Thinx will likely launch more co-branded products in a handful of Asian countries this year.
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The newly available products at Walmart follow a similar pricing strategy as Target: underwear starting at $16.98 a pair, versus roughly $35 on Thinx website, and come in sizes XS through 3XL (and 4XL online).
“We have a broader assortment on [our direct-to-consumer website], which obviously we’re doing strategically, because we want people to move [consumers] to d-to-c as well,” Molland said. “There’s still a lot of people who are still interested in replacing disposables with this new product. But they still need to be convinced of that first and have just a great experience before they kind of expand into other areas.”
Berch Schultz, vice president merchandising intimates at Walmart, added: “As we continue to expand our assortment of national brands, Thinx fills a gap in our product offering that we know our customers are looking for at such an incredible value.”
In addition to investing in marketing to expand brand awareness, Molland said Thinx is working with product engineers to offer the same innovation (such as absorbency levels in underwear) at lower price points — all of which is buoyed by the recent investments from personal hygiene company Kimberly-Clark, which purchased a majority stake in Thinx in February.
Molland declined to mention the exact figures — (Kimberly-Clark, which includes the Huggies, Kleenex, Kotex, Cottonelle, Depend and Pull-Ups brands in the greater portfolio, among others, previously made a previous minority investment of $25 million in Thinx in 2019) — but said Thinx will continue to be run as an independent firm, with its current leadership team remaining in place.
“The reason behind that is that [Kimberly-Clark] really values our entrepreneurial high-growth culture,” she said. “And they realize that if they came in and were reorganizing, or moving parts of the business over to [Kimberly-Clark] that would most likely slow down our growth.”
Instead, she said the acquisition allows Thinx to tap into both Kimberly-Clark’s resources, including capital, as well as retail partners. One example will be in Thinx’s ability to better mitigate rising freight costs.
“It’s really hard now with inflation,” Molland said. “Supply chain costs have literally doubled. Marketing costs have doubled. If we can tap into [Kimberly-Clark’s upfront marketing costs, which we bought a year before and we can save basically 20 percent on our marketing costs, [then] we can get our supply chain costs down by 50 percent. That’s the kind of stuff that enables us to grow a lot faster.”
Meanwhile, the entire period industry continues to grow, with more and more new competitors entering the market. In addition to Thinx, there’s also Knix, Ruby Love and Karla Welch’s The Period Company, all of which sell reusable period underwear or reusable pads. Direct-to-consumer period brand Saalt launched at Neiman Marcus last year. Thinx and Adidas both launched period activewear the same year. Australian period-panty brand Modibodi recently revealed a period-panty and period activewear collaboration with Puma, coming in May. But Molland said she’s not fazed by the added competition — in fact, she welcomes it.
“These players coming in validates the opportunity,” Molland explained. “And over the last few years, as we’ve seen competition come in, our market share has actually increased, not decreased. I think that’s just because, as more companies come in, more people say, ‘oh, this company is validated. I know Thinx more.’” (Molland told WWD in early 2021 that Thinx was anticipating approximately $100 million in revenues for the year. The brand has also gone from a staff of about 26 people to roughly 110.)
“But we obviously can’t depend on that [model] well into the future,” she continued. “That’s why we’re taking a lot of time in market research, understanding consumer needs and we’re focusing our product innovation and product development around those consumer needs: wicking, absorption, better materials, more sustainable materials.”
One of those categories is for teens — a category that’s been getting more attention as of late, with Victoria’s Secret’s recent reveal that it’s launching a Tween line called Happy Nation this spring and Cosabella’s new teen line Girls With Big Dreams. Thinx launched its own tween line, Thinx (Btwn), in 2018.
“Mothers buy things for their daughters that are healthy; that are good for the environment,” Molland said. “And girls are much more focused on the environment in ways that the other generations aren’t. And then we found that mothers actually buy for themselves while they’re buying for their teen daughters. So we get both the mom and the daughter and it’s obviously very good from a lifetime value perspective as well. We get two customers instead of just one, by marketing to just one. So we have so much upside there.
“And clearly if you capture a girl early in her period life, typically what we’ve seen is — and why it’s so hard to change the category… — is that girls and women tend to stick with the same brand that they have from the very beginning,” she added. “If we can capture more of the girls in their early teens, that really helps for a lifetime value for the business as well.”
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