Q&A: YesColours founders John Stubbs and Emma Bestley on building a paint brand ‘that’s much more than that’

What made you start YesColours? 

JS: My father-in-law is a frustrated inventor; he was moaning about all the paint tins that had built up in his shed and garage and it got my product design brain thinking. I was on furlough, sitting at my kitchen table thinking about my next move, and from there I did some research and development into new packaging solutions for the paint industry, some research into how problematic paint tins are in terms of the customer journey, but also how difficult they are to recycle. 

I set up the business, raised some initial investment and brought Emma on board to design the colours. Then it was kind of a natural journey of developing the business and developing the brand and products from there. 

EB: The importance of your home and the colour you choose for it on your mental wellbeing is really important to talk about. We’re fascinated by neuroscience and the impact of colour in spaces and how they affect behaviour. 

We’re predominantly an ecommerce brand and we launched a design studio a few months ago, so we’re working on more design projects with interior designers. We’ve got these three pillars we’ve always looked at from the beginning which are: love colour, feel good, be sustainable.

Yes, we’re in the interior design world, and we’re talking about putting paint on walls, but we’ve always been a bit more than that. John says we’re a colour company that happens to sell paint, which I love.  

How has the brand evolved?

JS: I always wanted the brand to have deep links to culture and fashion. We had to carve out a niche for ourselves at the beginning and be really punchy with the colours and punchy with our packaging solution just to stand out. I knew we needed to create something that’s an ecommerce-friendly brand, but by the same measure, I wanted to create as many opportunities for ourselves as possible.

Paint was just the first product that we focused on, but as you can see from our socials and what we’re doing with Anthropologie and KitchenAid, there are opportunities for YesColours to live and breathe as a collaborative partner with other brands and other sectors, whether that’s fabrics or home decor products, 

Your packaging is quite different to other brands, a pouch rather than a traditional tin. Tell us about that. 

JS: We took a big risk with our packaging and it seems to be paying off. The inspiration for it was brought in from other retail products, like cleaning products, food packaging, etc. 

The typical customer journey for paint is when you finish the job with quarter-full paint tins, you either put them in the cupboard until they go rusty or take them to the recycling centre. Only a third of recycling centres actually accept them and when they do, 98% of them end up in landfill anyway. 

So the disruptive idea around the packaging itself is that we stop the waste being generated at the beginning of the purchasing journey. We also sell in single-litre units for ecommerce customers, so people can order more accurately. Rather than buying 2.5 litres or 5 litres, they can use what they need, clean and recycle their pouches at home and send any unused pouches back to us so they go back into circulation. 

EB: Another thing that’s so surprising about the pouch versus the tin is that we don’t get any complaints about damage upon delivery. We did so many tests and the pouch can actually withstand the weight of several humans. We’ve never heard a complaint about it leaking or bursting; it’s space-efficient and easy to recycle. 

Homes brands have struggled since we exited the pandemic, how have you navigated the slowdown?

JS: We launched at the end of lockdown, so we missed that huge DIY wave during Covid and that’s done us a favour because we didn’t inflate our valuation or our revenues to a point where we couldn’t sustain them.

We launched a paint brand after everyone had decorated, brilliant timing! But it means it has always been hard for us. Other brands that launched just before we went into lockdown were hoping to retain that 26% increase in paint sales that we saw during the period, but it hasn’t happened. The market crashed again and I think there’s only a 4% to 6% increase on paint sales this year. 

We started from zero and we’ve been growing monthly ever since. Our growth rate is about 240% year on year and it’s getting better, not worse. So we’re going slower, more incrementally, but we’re geting to a profitable business very, very quickly.