Sunday offers a subscription service of sustainable lawn care products.
Coulter Lewis has become immersed in organic farming practices over the past decade as he helped his wife build their natural snack company, Quinn Snacks — spending time with the brand’s underlying growers and suppliers out in the fields. So when he bought a house and headed to the store to pick up lawn care products in 2018, he was expecting to find some of the natural options he was used to. Instead he had what he described as an Erin Brockovich moment. “I had just been at an organic farm in Nebraska, and then being at a home improvement store I remember being like, ‘this is really wrong,’” Lewis tells Forbes. “It was a pretty stark moment.” Despite the grass grown in private backyards technically being one of the largest crops in the U.S., there weren’t natural options like the ones he was used to seeing farmers use, but designed for a lawn. He decided to change that.
Lewis’ first thought was to make more sustainable products and sell them commercially through existing channels. But he realized that wouldn’t fix the majority of the problem. “As we started doing research and really learning about how the average homeowner thinks about their backyard, we found that almost no one knows about lawn care,” he says. “There is an expectation that you should [know], because ‘I’m an adult now’ or ‘a man,’ but the knowledge is really complex.” So he launched what is now known as Sunday, a direct-to-consumer lawn care company that operates as a subscription service and sends consumers the products they need, when they need them, based on their lawn conditions. Sunday says it has seen strong growth since it shipped its first box in 2019 and is raising more money to keep expanding.
The Boulder, Colorado-based company raised a $50 million Series C round led by BOND, with participation from existing investors Tusk Ventures, Sequoia and Forerunner Ventures, as originally reported in Midas Touch newsletter. This brings the startup’s total funding to $78 million. The company says its top-line revenue has grown 2.5x over the last year but declined to share further context. Noah Knauf, a general partner at BOND, tells Forbes that Sunday was a good fit for the firm’s strategy of investing in tech-enabled companies looking to innovate outdated industries because despite the size of the lawn care market, Sunday is the only real disrupter so far. “It’s amazing when you think about the amount people spend [on lawn care], it’s multiple thousands of dollars per year for the average family. It’s shocking to think of the lack of innovation in that space,” Knauf says. Knauf adds that as a homeowner himself, he understood the approach, as he didn’t know the composition of his lawn or how to properly take care of it until meeting the Sunday team.
To get the right formula, Sunday brought in Dr. Frank Rossi, a professor at Cornell — Lewis’ alma mater — and turfgrass guru to serve as chief science officer. The team did extensive research at a greenhouse at Cornell to test the potential closed loop care system, in addition to a beta trial of 100 people testing in their respective yards. Now, when people sign up for the service, Sunday purchases aerial images of their home to get a feel for weather and land conditions, and customers have the option to send in a soil sample; more than 90% do, Lewis says. That, he says, has helped the team collect what they think is the largest database of residential soil ever. From there, the team analyzes what each lawn needs and sets customers up on a plan that pulls from their more than 45 products with cheeky names like Dandelion Doom and Weed Warrior. Customers can also buy one-off products, but Lewis says the majority utilize the subscription model.
Lewis says he hopes customers look at Sunday as more than just a service to buy lawn care. He says the company’s internal mission is to serve the role of a friendly, knowledgeable neighbor, able to continually answer questions as different issues arise. He also hopes Sunday will have a meaningful impact on the environment, as traditional lawn care products are big polluters, and many people — who don’t fully know what they are doing — dump nearly five times as many chemicals onto their lawn as the average commercial farm. Sunday touts that it has already helped reduce lawn pesticide use by 35,000 pounds so far in 2021 and hopes to reduce it by 75,000 over the next year.
Lewis predicts the company will continue to expand into new categories and he hopes to put the funding toward building out the company’s consumer-facing tech capabilities too. “What I would really love to become and work toward is a solution for the entire outdoor home,” Lewis says. “Our customers are relying on Sunday for all the products they need and relying not only on the products but even more so on the digital tools and the ability to guide them. We really just want to truly be an ally to our customers and the partner they turn to to care for the outside of their home.”
