Frank Green opens flagship store, eyes global expansion

Frank Green, the brand best known for its $60 customisable water bottles, has opened a flagship store in Melbourne and has plans to launch more around the world, according to founder and CEO Ben Young.

Frank Green, the online brand behind the cult water bottles, is launching a store in Melbourne.

Frank Green, the brand behind the cult water bottles and coffee cups, is launching an international retail strategy, starting with the opening of its first retail store in Melbourne’s Chadstone.

The flagship store incorporates over 1600 Frank Green bottles into its design and aims to provide customers with an “immersive brand experience”. It will feature customisation and monogramming services, a ‘hydration station’ for water refills and will house the brand’s products including cups, lunch boxes, bags, clothing and pet collars.

While the brand is best known for its $60 customisable water bottles, the store will showcase its extensive lifestyle product range, said Frank Green founder and chief executive Ben Young.

“From the time you get up in the morning to the time you go to bed, we’ve got a solution for you now. We’ve got a smoothie container for you. We do certified organic and fair trade coffees and teas. We have a tea infuser. We have a French press, a lunch box, a backpack and a bag to put your lunch in. We’ve got cutlery. It just goes on and on and on. If we can do it really beautifully, and stop single use plastic from being made and used we’ll do it. That’s the vision of Frank Green. We want to make sustainable living irresistible,” said Mr Young.

Frank Green founder and CEO Ben Young

The Melbourne store is the brand’s first, however, more are already in the pipelines with plans to open a Sydney and London flagship. The brand is also in the process of growing its brand internationally with multiple stores in Jakarta and Bali opening in the next month.

“At the moment Frank Green is all about international expansion, but, we’re making sure that we don’t lose our DNA and our roots being proud Australians as well. We have a really committed team in America, Europe and the UK, where we have warehouses and ­offices.”

It’s a sign of the strong growth in the reusable water bottle category, which is growing globally at a compound annual growth rate of 5 per cent. However locally, the category “is growing at a CAGR of 6 or 7 per cent every year,” said Mr Young. “It’s outstripping a lot of categories.”

Mr Young is particularly proud of Frank Green’s role in helping Australia’s reusable water bottle market to grow and mature.

“People used to see water bottles as a functional object to give you water but that’s not what they are now. People are emotionally connected to their water bottles based on the features and colours and customisation that we’ve done. I think it’s how we position our brand that makes us different. We call them emotional support water bottles. People can’t live without them.

“We’re not selling water bottles. We’re selling an enviable way of living that’s easy and inspirational,” he said.

The ten-year-old brand, is positioned as premium, stylish and sustainable. Its focus on quality materials and beautiful design has helped create strong differentiation in the market with these elements proving popular with social media influencers early on. The brand boasts a cult following and high awareness.

The bottle and cup designs have been a key element for the brand’s success along with the personalisation features, which enables customers to create bespoke colour combinations, switch out lids and bottle colours as well as monogramming. These features helped to engage younger, fashion conscious fans who opted for multiple products in various colour schemes to match outfits and days of the week.

“We’ve sold more water bottles in Australia than there are Australians,” said Mr Young.

Mr Young said Frank Green sales are up 30 per cent year-on-year, however, he admits that the high awareness of the brand’s bottles does not extend to its other products.

“We’ve reached a stage here in Australia where we are a household name. And, we get called iconic, but we need to go out and talk about the Frank Green lifestyle more, this enviable, easy lifestyle where we’re making sustainable living irresistible.”

Frank Green uses social media and communities to promote its products with a strong focus on owned and earned media, in addition to Google advertising and partnerships and collaborations.

Frank Green’s flagship store in Chadstone will feature its entire product range including lunch boxes, cutlery and back packs.

However, the brand’s strongest contributor to awareness and sales is word-of-mouth and customer advocacy. “Fifty per cent of people that buy Frank Green buy again, and then they buy for friends and as gifts because they love the experience.”

Mr Young said the bottle customisation is one of the strongest growth drivers for the business.

“We learned very early on that customisation was a real thing, because if you customise, and personalise, you’re probably three times more likely to use your reusable product on a daily basis.

“We learned that early with our research and it became absolutely fundamental to the business. And the manufacturers that were of a certain vintage, thought we were crazy and that we should just do what Henry Ford did and use black. We don’t want that, we have fifteen colours while a lot of brands only have six or eight. We love people for being different and we celebrate that.”

While the brand is now best known for its water bottles, it was its reusable coffee cups that were powering the business prior to that market collapsing overnight overnight in covid.

“Coffee is still a big thing for us. But, water bottles is our predominant business. With a coffee cup you might have one coffee and put it in your bag, but with a water bottle, you’ll take it to cricket, to yoga to soccer. You can have one by your bed, one in your car and so forth. That’s why that market is four to five times bigger than the coffee cup market.

“A water bottle is bought more than a coffee cup, which is great for our earnings profile because you don’t bank margin, you bank dollars,” said Mr Young.