Industry
Why You Keep Seeing Element Brooklyn in Restaurant Bathrooms
A surprisingly common way to discover Element Brooklyn has nothing to do with an ad, a Google search or our own store. You go out to dinner, wash your hands, notice that the soap smells unusually good, and look at the bottle to find out what it is.
Our Hospitality Partner Program now supplies more than 800 businesses around the country — restaurant groups like Hillstone, bars like Dear Irving, hotels, offices, spas, and fitness studios from Mighty Pilates to CityPickle. It has grown into a significant part of what we do, but the appeal is remarkably similar to the reason we started making soap for people’s homes: if something is going to sit next to a sink and be used several times a day, there’s no reason for it to be an afterthought.
The bathroom is part of the experience
Hospitality businesses put an extraordinary amount of thought into details. A restaurant considers the weight of the cutlery, the temperature of the lighting, the music, the chairs and the typeface on the menu. A hotel can spend years deciding what its rooms should look and feel like. Scent is part of that environment too, even though it’s often treated far less deliberately.
Soap is an especially interesting piece of it, because almost every guest uses it. A fragrance can reinforce the character of a space the same way music or lighting does, while a generic industrial soap can have the opposite effect. If the rest of the room has been carefully designed, the thing you actually put on your hands deserves at least some consideration.
Element’s amenities bring such a thoughtful, elevated touch to our space. Our guests genuinely notice and appreciate them – it makes all the difference.
Hannah Leung, Director of Marketing, CityPickle
That’s why we work with venues on choosing a fragrance, rather than selling them a case of whichever soap happens to be most popular. A bright citrus like Mandarin Crush makes sense in one space; a darker wood like Kiso Forest or an aromatic green works better in another. For restaurants, we’ll even look at the menu and the wider atmosphere before making a recommendation. The range now spans soap, body care and home fragrance across our full library of scents.
The less visible part: refilling at scale
There’s another reason hospitality became so important to us. High-traffic spaces make the packaging problem around personal care impossible to ignore.
A bottle in your home might last weeks or months. A busy restaurant, hotel or gym can go through the same amount of soap in days. If every refill arrives in another decorative retail bottle, the packaging piles up fast. Hotels have historically gone further still, with miniature amenity bottles designed for a handful of uses.
Our hospitality program applies the same refill-first model we use at home, at a larger scale. Businesses keep their dispensers and buy product in bulk, and many of our local partnerships run as closed loops: empty bulk containers come back to us, are cleaned and sanitized, and go back into circulation instead of the trash. It isn’t as photogenic as the bottle by the sink, but it’s the part of the system that makes the biggest difference over time. Our closed-loop partnerships with refill shops work on the same principle.
For partners who need them, we also provide reusable countertop dispensers and wall-mounted fixtures at no charge, so it’s possible to move away from single-use amenities without making the bathroom look like a supply closet.
Our clients love the Kiso Forest collection – it’s the kind of detail that’s small but memorable.
Michelle Hatsushi, VP of Operations, Mighty Pilates
A different way to sample fragrance
There’s a marketing benefit too, although it’s not why we started. Fragrance is notoriously difficult to sell without letting somebody smell it. A hospitality placement solves that in the most natural way possible: people meet the product while actually using it, in a setting where the fragrance was chosen to fit.
By the time someone looks us up after dinner, they’ve already tried the soap. They know how it feels, what it smells like with warm water, and whether they’re still noticing it on their hands a few minutes later. That’s a far more useful introduction than most advertising can offer.
Our favorite example so far: a customer wrote to tell us they’d asked what soap was in the bathroom, were told it was Genovese, and ordered it before they’d even left the restaurant.
We’re happy to let bathrooms do some of our marketing for us.
If you run a restaurant, hotel, gym, spa, office or other hospitality space, our Hospitality Partner Program includes wholesale pricing with no contracts, free samples, reusable dispensers and help choosing a fragrance that suits your space.
