Smart TVs, refrigerators and other home appliances may pester you with marketing and perhaps even check your presence in the room using a front-facing camera. But at least the hardware is cheap!
That’s the promise.
Some companies, like the TV manufacturing startup Telly, take it to the logical extreme by offering free televisions in exchange for agreeing to data collection and advertising. Another startup taking a different approach to the same theory is Tovala, which was founded in 2015 and combines a standalone countertop oven appliance with a weekly meal kit subscription.
When asked whether the company plans to enable any retail or brand marketing opportunities, CMO Scott Braun said, “We haven’t done anything there from the revenue-generating side, and I’m not sure we will.”
Likelier, he added, the company would pursue relevant food or condiment-type brand integrations to include their products in meal kits. “The team is toying with a couple partnerships” along those lines.
Braun joined Tovala only a month ago, following stints as the marketing leader at the alcohol delivery app Drizly (acquired by Uber) and, most recently, at SimpliSafe.
The SimpliSafe business model is particularly apt for the current role, he said, since it makes home security hardware, which likewise was sold at cost or even a loss but made up for in long-term customer acquisition revenue via subscriptions.
The Tovala oven would retail as a standalone product for more than $300, Braun said. As of this writing, it sells on Amazon for $350. That’s because it is a functional countertop toaster oven. One doesn’t need the meal kit subscriptions for it to work.
On the Tovala site, though, with the meal kit deliveries bundled in (starting with six weeks’ worth of meals over the first six months), the oven goes for $69.
Tovala’s ability to target and acquire the right customers – those who are going to reliably order meal kits for potentially years to come – is the company’s lifeblood. For that reason, he said, the startup is a rigorous tester of marketing channels, with incrementality studies running constantly on old channels like branded search and new formats like podcast ads.
The company also allows customers to scan items from a grocery store and use the SKU info to set up a preset cook. Like for a particular type of frozen pizza or if someone recreates a Tovala meal recipe they received with grocery store equivalents (since the oven can steam, broil and bake in particular sequences).
Right now, that’s just a customer experience benefit. But the advertising and attribution temptation is right there, hanging like an apple in the Garden of Eden. Braun said they were not pursuing these right now.
But there are marketing integrations the company will pursue, he said.
For instance, there are theoretical partnerships just from the fact of Tovala having a subscription revenue stream. Meal delivery services like Instacart or Uber Eats, home office or education services (to include easy and quick lunches), retail memberships, wellness services and other types of subscription-based businesses could be bundled in interesting ways.
“Lots of different partnerships could make more or less sense for us to sync up with,” Braun said. “It wouldn’t be hard to think of some great fits.”
