How serial founder Eric Ryan builds brands by stealing from distant categories

Executive overview

Most consumer categories stagnate because incumbents optimise within existing frames. Eric Ryan's approach is to identify a "culture shift" the category is missing, then steal design and positioning ideas from completely unrelated fields.

He built Method by borrowing from personal care and housewares; Ollie by borrowing from beauty and lifestyle brands. The formula repeats: find the sea of sameness, locate the macro trend no one is serving, import the answer from somewhere else.

The core insight: innovate by stealing from as far away from your category as possible — never from your direct competitors.

Finding the idea

• Walk foreign grocery stores jet-lagged, sketching with a creative — forces reliance on form and graphic design over language
• Look for aisles that are a "sea of sameness" — visual uniformity signals an unserved opportunity
• Identify the culture shift the category is missing, not just a product gap
• Test the concept by asking 20 smart people for three reasons it will fail — empowers honest critique
• Break the launch into bite-size steps: prove the idea, then the product, then one retail account at a time

Building Method

• Stole from personal care (fragrance, design) and housewares (industrial form) to reframe cleaning products as lifestyle objects
• Reframed the category as "premium home care" — good for you, good for the planet, with design worth leaving on the countertop
• Combined high design with deep sustainability before either trend was mainstream in CPG
• Used industrial designer Karim Rashid as a "carrot" to get a second meeting with Target after an initial rejection
• Inverted dish soap bottle (inspired by a stapler) converted the sceptical Target buyer on the spot

Selling and the identity crisis

• Selling Method felt like winning a Super Bowl — then immediately felt like losing an identity
• 99% of net worth tied to one asset means riding every business ripple personally
• Recovery came the moment a new company was decided: purpose and identity snapped back instantly
• Ollie grew to $100M in four years; sold earlier than ideal, but personal circumstances drove the timing

Building culture at scale

• Two things matter most: people and products — get those right and everything else gets easier
• Products are a souvenir of the people who make them
• Build cultures of "artists and operators": creative innovation paired with operating rigor
• Use OKRs and written annual operating plans so every junior employee understands the full business — not just their slice
• Cross-functional transparency (finance knows sales, sales knows marketing) empowers junior staff to spot opportunities

The incubator phase and what he looks for now

• Co-founder model (not CEO) works only with the right team dynamics; without that, wind it down early
• Evaluating pitches: is the idea grounded in a major macro trend or culture shift?
• Product must have a meaningful point of difference — surface-level differentiation fails as barriers to entry collapse
• Does the founder give energy? A startup is a 10-year marriage — every text and call should feel like something to look forward to
• Recently joined Greycroft to launch a $150M consumer fund, applying the same operator lens to venture