Tulu’s product-rental app in apartment buildings is a consumer insight bonanza for brands

You might expect brands to be ambivalent at best about Tulu, the self-described “tech-enabled amenity” app that lets apartment building and dorm residents rent products including vacuums and gaming consoles stored inside their buildings. After all, residents taking the elevator down to the lobby to rent vacuums are not buying vacuums.

Yet brands including Phillips, Ikea, and Bosch are joining the 5-year-old startup as partners, and are providing their products gratis. If that seems like a head-scratcher, this will really get you lathering up the Selsun Blue: Those brands weren’t pitched the idea, but approached Tulu themselves. All of Tulu’s brand partnerships, and a few in the works, have been “100% inbound,” according to Yael Shemer, who cofounded the company and serves as its CCO.

“They give us the items, and in return, they get consumer insights,” Shemer told Retail Brew.

Those insights, it turns out, are about as good as the brands could get short of piggybacking on apartment dwellers while they steam clean their couches or don their VR headsets.

Ground floor opportunity: Typically located in building lobbies, Tulu’s wall-sized units are like oversized futuristic vending machines, with residents unlocking the clear doors via the app.

Unlike renting a steam cleaner at, say, The Home Depot, where consumers pay an hourly or daily rate for an item, Tulu is subscription-based. Residents pay from $10–$12 monthly to use items for a limited time, such as 12 hours for air mattresses or four hours for projectors, and accrue additional charges only if they keep the items longer.

Today, Tulu is available in more than 500 buildings spanning 60 cities in 14 countries. About 250,000 residents reside in those buildings, with more than half (about 130,000) currently subscribing.

Brookfield Properties, Invesco, and Blackstone are among the real-estate developers whose buildings feature Tulu. Landlords pay an initial fee to set up Tulu in buildings, and the startup splits the subscription fees “about 50/50” with the landlords, Shemer said.

“So the landlords have motivation to make it work,” Shemer continued. “They can make it work by marketing us [and] by giving us a prime location in the building.”

Tulu gets in on the literal and figurative ground floor with new developments, persuading developers not only to carve out optimal spaces in lobbies, but to market Tulu as a space- and consumption-saving amenity.

“When we work in a building from the development stage, from the leasing stage, we already in our marketing try to convince people not to bring with them the essential items,” Shemer said. “Don’t bring your projector, don’t bring your vacuum, don’t bring your upholstery cleaner, so you can rely on Tulu.”

About 30% of its assortment is from brand partners, and the rest often sell the company their products at a discount, per Tulu.

Home sweep home: Ralf Rapp, who manages consumer user experience research at Tulu partner and German cleaning appliance brand Kärcher, said his company gets to determine both the specific products and specific buildings where they place them.

As behooves (bepaws?) a brand that makes vacuums, for example, Rapp wants pet owners’ input on their products’ effectiveness and user-friendliness, so Kärcher is apt to skip properties that ban pets and choose those that promote themselves as pet-friendly, he said.

Residents earn Tulu credits and cash when they use the app to film themselves using products and commenting on what they like and don’t like about them.

“For us, it’s important to research the data that [residents] give us so that we can develop the perfect product for this target group,” Rapp said.

Rapp noted that he can dispatch his own team to households to observe how consumers use products in Germany, but Tulu enables him to do so virtually in far-flung countries. Users in different countries may clean different floor coverings or crevices, and that insight informs how Kärcher designs new products and how the company might vary which attachments they include in the box from one country to another.

“We see different cultures in different countries have other cleaning habits,” he said.

After products are in Tulu buildings for six months, they return to Germany, where Kärcher engineers can evaluate how their components hold up.

They “can focus on the parts to see what’s happened, because real testing is [different from] testing in the lab,” Rapp said.

Tulu itself also monitors and tweaks products it includes in buildings, and Shemer said what residents say they want and what they actually rent can differ.

“At the beginning, we tried everything people asked for,” Shemer said. “Slowly, we learned that some people would like to think of themselves as people who use a sewing machine but don’t actually use a sewing machine.”