The Quiet Kingmaker Slipping Beauty Brands Into Your Hotel Shower

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- Of all the photos Chrissy Fichtl has received from friends around the world, her favorite is one sent to her of two bath products in a hotel bathroom. The bottles are Apotheke, the brand Fichtl started in her kitchen in Brooklyn, New York, in 2012; her friend found the toiletries in his room at the Crowne Plaza in Cairo and sent a photo with the texts: “Egypt” and “Apotheke can see the pyramids from there!!” That people are discovering her creation on the other side of the world “is kind of amazing—like, ‘Look at her here!’ ” Fichtl says, referring to her products affectionately.

In recent years, Apotheke has grown from a small company handmaking candles and soaps to a globally distributed brand sold in upscale boutiques and featured in 100,000 hotel rooms. Fichtl credits that hospitality exposure as key to the growth of the company, estimating that 20% of its liquid soap sales stem from that. Yet, she says, “I’m not pitching hotels. I’m not making product and shipping it and fulfilling it monthly and keeping up with all of the stock.”

Both that grunt work and the matchmaking is done by Hunter Amenities International Ltd., a 44-year-old company in Burlington, Ontario. Hunter scouts cosmetic, fragrance and lifestyle products to pitch to hotels, airlines, cruise ships and gyms, helping consumers discover brands they’re primed to fall for and putting products in the hands of the crowds that those brands want to convert. “If you’re in even 50,000 rooms, you’ll have 4 or 5 million guest impressions on your brand every year,” says John Hunter, the company’s founder. Hotels, he says, “are very interested in having the right brand that fits the person that’s walking through the door to stay there.”

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When Hunter first started the company in the early 1980s, he didn’t set out to become a beauty industry kingmaker. At the time, he was a 21-year-old business school student with an idea to sell mouthwash in repurposed Bic lighter vending machines, hoping to appeal to office workers with martini-and-garlicky-Caesar-salad breath. The mouthwash minis didn’t take off, but the machine he MacGyvered to fill them—a rack he’d built to lift 200-liter drums of product about 20 feet in the air and gravity-feed into mini bottles—was suddenly in demand as people preferred the more hygienic single use bottles. Hunter eventually landed business with airlines that wanted compact bottles of mouthwash and hotels hoping to splash their brand name on shampoos. But around 2009, he finally lasered in on the real market opportunity: brokering deals between hotels and beauty brands.

Today, Hunter Amenities distributes more than 45 brands in 100 countries, bringing in revenue exceeding $300 million through a combination of manufacturing fees and licensing deals. The founder is cagey about his client work, including how or exactly when deals happened, but he’s willing to take credit for at least one of the company’s most prescient licensing moves: putting Bliss, the irreverent spa and beauty brand, in W Hotels back in 2004. Hunter says the pairing was “one of those iconic ones where people said, ‘I stay at the W, I love the Bliss products.’ That was the first thing out of their mouth,” he says, that they “loved the amenities.”

In some instances, Hunter Amenities helps a travel and leisure client find the ideal product partner; other times it finds a beauty partner first, then—if it doesn’t already offer every product type a hotel might want, such as a shampoo or body gel—it creates samples in one of its five manufacturing plants around the world and pitches it to prospective clients. In the not uncommon instance a beauty company doesn’t actually own its formula, Hunter’s lab can reverse-engineer it through chemical analysis.

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When scouting for brands, Hunter Amenities is less interested in checking a particular product box than finding those with unique ingredients, compelling narratives and, these days, fertile social media followings. When Hunter signed Le Labo around 2009, it was still a tiny custom fragrance boutique in downtown Manhattan that hadn’t yet sold to Estée Lauder for an estimated $60 million. “I used to sit in the back of the Elizabeth Street store on a box with [co-founder] Fabrice [Penot] sitting on another box and him just going, ‘OK, well, here’s a little cap that I saw somewhere. It’s made of metal, and we’d kind of like our stuff to look like that,’ ” Hunter says. He stepped down as CEO in 2021 but remains the company president, still traveling more than 100 days a year to manage deals.

The beauty brands that work with Hunter Amenities earn only pennies on each sale from the hotels, airlines and gyms, usually about 5% to 6% of the total. But Hunter says this can add up to $1 million a year in revenue. Some brands forgo the licensing royalties entirely, eager to land as many deals as possible in exchange for more exposure. Once the brand is in a location, the goal is to get guests to sample the product—what Hunter calls “tryvertising.” If enough guests express the desire to buy a product in a size that brand hadn’t previously offered, brands will pay Hunter to manufacture versions they can sell themselves, which now accounts for 25% of Hunter’s North America business.

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The Schenectady, New York-based skin-care company Beekman 1802 says landing in hotels has been a critical piece of its growth strategy. About eight years ago, it created Fresh Air, a scent with notes of lemon verbena and clean linen, according to some guidelines from the stylish Andaz hotel chain. Today Beekman uses the scent in its goat-milk based shampoos, lotions, and other amenities distributed around the world, including on Princess cruise ships and Etihad Airlines—all thanks to Hunter Amenities, which pitched the skin-care brand.

Beekman co-founder Brent Ridge says it’s hard to quantify sales from landing in all these unexpected places. But he points out that even though Beekman’s Fresh Air scent is rarely advertised, it’s now one of the company’s bestsellers. “You’re in front of the customer in a very intimate setting where you have no other competition,” he says. “That’s a really hard thing to find.”