EXCLUSIVE: Courteney Cox Aims to Beautify the Home Category With Homecourt
Courteney Cox wants to beautify your home with her new brand.
The actress, best known for her role as Monica Geller in the hit sitcom “Friends,” is making her first entrepreneurial venture with the debut of her home brand, Homecourt, which launches on Wednesday.
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The brand takes a beauty approach to products that traditionally fall under the home category — like dish soap and surface sprays — made with skin care ingredients and fine fragrances, as well as other beauty-specific products, like hand lotion. Cox had initially planned to create a candle line, but saw a white space in the home care category.
“We decided to make a beauty line for the home,” Cox explained during a Zoom call. “I’m obsessed with design and my home, and I wanted the home to smell like something that I’d want to wear. During the pandemic, we were so used to the smell of Clorox, but then you’re like, ‘OK, we’re still at home,’ and I don’t want my house to smell like that anymore.”
Cox teamed with former WWD staffer and Nécessaire cofounder Nick Axelrod-Welk and former Viktor & Rolf head of marketing Sarah Jahnke to create Homecourt. Axelrod-Welk is also head of creative and product development and Jahnke is chief executive officer.
Homecourt is launching initially with three products: hand wash, dish soap and surface cleaner. A hand lotion will debut next month and a candle and room deodorant will launch in March.
The products’ formulation process focused heavily on creating four niche scents developed by perfumers at Givaudan and Robertet to give the products a fine fragrance quality. The scents are “Steeped Rose,” “Neroli Leaf,” “Cipres Mint” and “Cece,” which is Cox’s signature scent. Cox’s scent is blended with notes of Guatemalan cardamom, dried mate absolute leaves, Sri Lankan cinnamon, Indonesian patchouli oil and other ingredients.
Courtesy of Homecourt
“I use two oils and one perfume and I mix it together,” Cox said on her signature scent. “We have an incredible perfumery, Givaudan and Robertet. They came up with exactly what we sent them as samples and it was great we could accomplish that because how do you know that there are three different perfumes and oils that have so many other things inside of them? They did a great job recreating my personal scent.”
The three executives then decided to add the other three fragrances to offer a range of scents that would appeal to a large customer base.
“Right now, home fragrance is mostly in candles or diffusers,” Jahnke explained about the brand’s focus on fine fragrance. “We’re really pushing home fragrance into new formats, so now instead of lighting a candle, you can do that, but you can also spray [the scent] on your counter and get that same experience.”
For the products like the dish and hand soaps, Homecourt looked to creating the formulas with a skin care focus to make the experience of dishwashing or cleaning more enjoyable and beneficial. The dish soap is blended with glycerin to hydrate the skin and the hand wash is blended with argan oil and Australian hibiscus flower extract to hydrate. The entire Homecourt line is also dermatologist tested.
“I don’t want to say that [Homecourt] turns it into a ritual because no one likes cleaning and we’d be lying to you if we said this makes cleaning enjoyable,” Axelrod-Welk said. “But just generally speaking, [the brand’s goal] is to make those moments better and make the idea of tending to your space a better experience.”
Homecourt is also committed to creating clean products that are sustainably sourced and packaged. While the brand is launching direct-to-consumer through its Homecourt.co website, Homecourt meets the Clean at Sephora guidelines. The products’ packaging is also all made from 100 percent post-consumer recycling materials and many of the ingredients are sustainably sourced. The products range in price from $20 to $50.
Going forward, the brand is looking at new categories (Cox expressed her desire to offer laundry products) and distribution for 2023. Homecourt’s overall goal, however, is to redefine the home care category and bring together these types of products under one brand.
“We’re redefining the space and this category,” Axelrod-Welk said. “All of these products should be sold under the same roof because you should want as good of a fragrance as you expect from your niche candle as from your dish soap and your surface spray.”
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