Interview with Martijn van Seters, Co-Founder and Managing Director of nuud

We caught up with Martijn van Seters, co-founder and managing director of nuud, to talk all things from global expansion to the lack of transparency in the deodorant industry…
 

Tell us about nuud

 
Nuud is an effective & planet-loving deodorant. 100% natural, vegan and cruelty-free. Nuud comes CO2 neutral to your doorstep in a sugar cane tube.

Founded in late 2017, funded with our own savings until the day of today, we find ourselves selling in over 100 countries worldwide. Our brand seems to create fans instead of customers, so this is really exciting for us as founders. And if you consider our relatively small marketing budgets and see how many people have heard of the brand, we seem to have done something special.

Now having sold nuud to over 500.000 armpits, we aim to pass the 1.000.000 sometime next year.

How did you come up with the idea for the company?

 
The landscape of the deodorant world had been the same for tens of years; big marketing budgets pushed every consumer group right into the brand belonging to it. The marketing was often based on promises of freedom or herds of women chasing the guy wearing a certain deodorant.

Then the landscape was widened with the presence of various natural deodorant brands. While more and more consumers embraced these new brands, the consent seemed that they did not perform as good as the established brands. So that made moving from traditional brands to natural brands a choice between natural or effective.

We thought nobody should have to choose between the two of them, and that’s why we invented nuud.

Why are traditional deodorants bad?

 
More and more consumers are looking for transparency these days, not only for their deodorants but for all their products. I think this is a global movement that does not surpass personal care products and deodorants in specific. Companies like nuud try their best to be as transparent as possible. One of the results of that aim is that we want to bring the best product, not only for the end user but also for the planet. Our goal would be that people need less product for the same effect. Well, the fact that the 15ml tube (as opposed to a 150ml aerosol) lasts 7 weeks on average is proof of that goal. The goal of many traditional deodorants would rather be that people use more product instead of less.
 

What can we hope to see from nuud in the future?

 
That is a good question; with many other brands you see that they widen their product portfolio with all other related products. In our case however, we would need to find a product that would be equally special like nuud is, otherwise we feel that we are deteriorating our brand. So far, we haven’t found any radical new product yet.