• by Les Luchter , Staff Writer, April 24, 2025

Call it good timing.

Having become Grove subscribers shortly before COVID-19 struck, my family was largely saved from the great toilet paper panic of 2020.

The D2C home products retailer itself would reach its zenith of 1.5 million customersduring the pandemic, backed by advertising/marketing muscle.

Then, as Grove went public through investor Richard Branson’s Virgin Group Acquisition Corp., it retrenched on marketing in order to focus “on profitability and the bottom line of the business,” Vice President of Marketing Jason Buursma tells Pharma and Health Insider.

Now, with some 700,000 customers, the 13-year-old firm has returned to large-scale marketing with a connected TV (CTV) campaign -- and has expanded its messaging from strictly environmental sustainability to include a heavy dose of health messaging.

Even the firm’s “Be a Force of Nature” tagline is gone, replaced by “Your Home, Healthier.”

“Over the last few years, we’ve had to pull back on marketing spend a bit, and with that inherently comes a focus on lower-funnel, direct-response-type ads,” says Buursma, who joined Grove nine months ago from Health-E Commerce (which runs the FSAstore.com and HSAstore.com OTC retail sites). “We felt we were losing the ability to really connect with our consumers on an emotional level.”

CTV gives Grove that ability, he explains: “The targeting capabilities are really strong compared to other channels…We expect to live on connected TV indefinitely.”

The new campaign’s target audience? Primarily female head of households, Buursma says, with interest-based targeting in play for “people that purchase across similar stores and categories that we offer.”

Those categories now include VSM (vitamins, supplements and minerals), along with personal care, cleaning, wellness, baby, pet, kitchen and pantry.

Grove says its potential audience is “57 million conscientious consumers,” a figure attributed to research from Halstead Strategy Group. These consumers, says Buursma, “are really caring and making intentional choices about what they’re buying based on ingredients, sustainability, etc.”

The CTV campaign, launched two weeks ago, is highlighted by a :30 spot which shows a toddler walking around a home and taking a bath, the family dog licking the floor, and other household activities.

The hero :30 spot is running with two other :30s and two :15s primarily on paid CTV services like Hulu and Amazon Prime. (you can see additional spots here.)

The campaign marks creative agency Happy Monster’s first work for Grove, while media buying is handled by Keynes Digital.

Grove has also just run a two-week digital out-of-home placement touting its new health emphasis every 15 minutes on the ABC SuperSign in New York’s Times Square. That was a previously unused benefit of being listed on the NYSE, but the OOH may now move to “different locations around New York and elsewhere,” says Ryan Zimmerman, Grove’s director of communications and partnerships.

The marketing aspect is just part of other changes that have been afoot at Grove.

For example, a short-lived flirtation with brick-and-mortar retailing is gone, as well as Drew Barrymore’s reign as brand ambassador.

“We have decided to focus on the D2C experience exclusively,” says Buursma. “We believe we can provide better value there. We are trying to be the vetted one-stop shop for a healthier home.”

After focusing on sustainability as its core message for more than a decade, Buursma says Grove realized that “consumers today, while sustainability is a core element of choosing how they spend their money and put their dollars to work,” are also focusing on “the human health element of products, everything that’s in and around your home, your kids, your pets, your family.”

Grove CEO Jeff Yurcisin put it this way during a recent earnings call with investors: “We aim to build on the trust we've established an environmental sustainability by integrating human health education throughout our platform, helping consumers make informed choices that supports the health of their families, their homes and our planet.”

What you're [getting] is more consistent messaging pushing on human health.”

And even though my household now has bidets, let’s not forget the toilet paper.