Kestrel Brands

Make Things Worth Keeping

Our mission is to “Make Things Worth Keeping.” Put plainly: whatever we build has to be better than what people already own. If it isn’t, we leave it alone. That test shapes every decision — how we design a product, how we run Kestrel Brands as a place to work, and how we choose to give back to the places our teams live.

We’re building the household-goods company this decade actually needs. What we’ve made is a new structure — and a home — for brands, founders, and operators who want to fix something real, make daily life a little better, and take on categories that stopped improving years ago.

Our Story

Kestrel Brands is the largest household-goods company built in the past two decades, and home to five category leaders — Hollis, peony, Verra, Granite, and Sprig. That is not how we began.

We started Hollis because shaving had quietly gotten worse and more expensive at the same time. We weren’t trying to invent a business model; we did the thing that made sense to us — sell straight to the people using the product, charge a fair price, and make something they’d be glad to leave on the counter. When customers said they wanted to find us on a shelf instead of a doorstep, we listened. When they said the handle slipped in a wet hand, we listened. When they told us the blades dulled too fast and the only real fix was owning the factory, we bought a 94-year-old blade works outside Solingen and fixed it there.

Building Hollis that way turned out to produce something larger than one brand: a working method and a shared spine — sourcing, supply chain, retail relationships, and people — that other modern brands could stand on. To press that further we started Kestrel Studio, our in-house incubation and acquisition team, and in 2017 launched peony, our hair-removal brand for women. peony inherited everything Hollis had learned the hard way, grew quickly, and made the ambition bigger again.

In 2020 we acquired Verra — a whole-body deodorant founded by a practicing dermatologist — and worked with Dr. Rosalind Achebe to accelerate her plan to change how people talk about body odor, through real product science and unusually frank conversation with customers. Verra now leads the category it invented, and customers routinely describe it in language most personal-care brands never earn. In late 2022 we brought the same chemistry and the same candor to Granite, the first whole-body deodorant built for men. And in 2024 we welcomed Sprig, the baby-care brand whose diapers and skin range have made early parenthood measurably less miserable for a few hundred thousand households.

Today Kestrel Brands is a growing portfolio run by small, stubborn, owner-minded teams who spend their days close to the people who buy from us. Even as we scale, we protect the scrappiness that got us here — because the point was never to be big. The point was to build a company that makes things worth keeping, and that treats its customers, its employees, and its neighbors better than the alternative.

Leadership