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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Equal Parts

Home Goods Holding Company Pattern Brands Announces $60M in Funding, Buys GIR

Patterns Brands, the DTC holding company that evolved out of brand agency Gin Lane, has announced that it has taken on $60 million in new debt and capital equity financing and that it has acquired silicone utensil specialist GIR. As part of the announcement, Pattern announced that it was planning on using some of that new funding to hunt for other interesting DTC brands to scoop up.

From the announcement:

By definition, what we’re doing is a roll-up. But our interest lies where it always has, since before this trend started. We care about building brands that matter to our generation. And what some roll-ups risk missing is that lasting value doesn’t come from forcing big, short-term profits. You have to strengthen the brands. You have to give them a community where they can thrive.

Up to this point, Pattern has consisted of two brands: The Equal Parts cookware and Open Spaces storage products brand. Spoon readers may remember we’ve written about Equal Parts early experiment of bundling text-based guidance from chefs with their cookware. The company looks like they’ve since dropped those early efforts at bundling cooking guidance and have become a more traditional DTC cookware brand.

For its part, GIR got its start when founder Samantha Rose had a successful Kickstarter campaign for a silicone spatula, has since become pretty successful kitchen utensil and accessory business.

One thing that’s not clear is whether the deal includes the Voltaire coffee grinder business. Back in 2015-16, GIR founder Rose had launched a Kickstarter campaign for an IoT connected burr coffee grinder. It took a while for GIR to ship the grinder and eventually it did. The grinder got its own website and looks like it might be a separate business at this point.

Pattern is one of a number of home goods startups looking to become the preferred brand of millennials as they settle down, buy homes and just generally begin acting more like their parents. Pattern, Caraway and Misen have all taken fresh looks at housewares categories and have focused on building robust direct-to-consumer channels through online storefronts and social media.

Last year, Storebound, which combined a similarly adventurous approach around categories with an heavy focus on online channels was acquired by Groupe SEB. With Pattern’s new debt and equity-funded warchest, I have to wonder if we’ll see a flurry of new DTC home goods acquisitions as bigger brands look to scoop up those brands with fast-growing businesses.

Equal Parts Bundles Coaching With Cookware In Effort To Lure Millennials Into the Kitchen

For those new to cooking, it’s easy to feel lost the first few (or few dozen) times in the kitchen.

But what if you had a personal cooking coach to text with questions about techniques, meal suggestions or even dinner party tips? That’s the idea behind Equal Parts, a cookware brand from Millennial-focused direct-to-consumer startup Pattern Brands.

Here’s how Equal Parts coaching+cookware works:

When you buy a new cookware set from Equal Parts, you get an accompanying bundle of cooking guidance as part of the package. Guidance comes in the form of eight weeks of seven-days-a-week text messaging access to cooking coaches that provide advice on pretty much anything related to the meal journey, from teaching new cooking skills like sautéing to walking through a meal plan to grocery shopping guidance. Coaches are available each day from 4 PM ET to Midnight ET.

The cookware + coaching kits range in price from $65 for a utensil bundle all the way up to $499 for a 20 piece “Complete Kitchen” bundle that includes pans, knives, mixing bowls and more.

Once your eight weeks of text-based coaching is up, you’re ready to spread your wings and fly solo or, as the company puts it on their website, it’s time to “build your intuition in the kitchen” because, after a couple months, “you won’t need us anymore”.

Guided Cooking For The Millennial Generation?

In a way, Equal Parts offers guided cooking, only instead of using connected pans and software, the Millennial-focused brand offers up personalized guidance in a delivery format that is second nature to pretty much anyone in the under-35 crowd: texting.

Another difference with connected products is the temporal nature of the guidance. While products like the Hestan Cue offer the prospect of continuous guidance over the lifetime of product, the reality is most folks usually have a few go-to meals they cook, so the idea of weaning people off of their coaching makes sense. I also suspect giving a limited time window to use the coaching probably is enough to incentivize many to actually use it and not shove their pans in the drawer.

The company behind Equal Parts is a venture funded startup from Pattern Brands, a company founded by some of the marketing agency whizzes who helped launch direct-to-consumer brands like Warby Parker, Everlane and Bonobos.  While many of the early D2C success stories have been largely focused on fashion and lifestyle categories, the kitchen and other more “domesticated” brand concepts have come into focus the last few years as Millennials move both into parenthood and up the career ladder.

And while Equal Parts is a new take on cookware, it isn’t the first new take targeted at the under-35 set.  Great Jones is another buzzy cookware brand that launched in the last few years, and let’s not forget Buzzfeed Tasty’s cookware brand partnership with Walmart. Tasty has also tried its hand at guided cooking with the Tasty One Top, a product it seemed to lose some interest in over the past year as many of the core team behind the product like Ben Kaufman  (ed note: Buzzfeed emailed us to let us know that Ben Kaufman is still acting as company CMO through the end of this year even as he focuses on his new startup Camp) have moved on.

So will text-message powered coaching be the secret ingredient to establish Equal Parts as an up-and-coming cookware brand? Too soon to tell, but it’s definitely worth a shot.  While the Instant Pot may have become the first cooking gadget Millennials can call their own, the race to become the cookware brand for a generation is too big an opportunity to pass up.