How this premium-priced cookware brand landed on Walmart’s shelves

Any home cooks worth their kosher salt will tell you they often don’t know exactly what they’re cooking up when they start chopping onions and reaching for pans. And that willingness to improvise and adapt is essential for the companies that make those pans, too.

Just ask Jordan Nathan. In November 2019, Nathan launched Caraway, a DTC cookware brand that promoted its ceramic nonstick products as free of PTFE and other PFAS and embraced on-trend colors. What he couldn’t have predicted was that just a few months later, consumers would be largely confined to their homes, cooking up a storm, and more likely than ever to shop online.

The height of the Covid-19 pandemic “brought the whole category forward,” Nathan told Retail Brew. “I don’t know any brands in the space who didn’t do really well, but being digital-first positioned us versus some legacy brands to capture all the online demand when customers couldn’t go into stores.”

While it started as a DTC brand and enjoyed success in the channel, Nathan knew even in its planning stages that he wanted retail distribution as well.

“We actually intentionally chose to be an omnichannel brand from an early start,” Nathan said, adding that a major reason for this decision was “a lot of purchases in the category are made in the registry process.”

According to wedding registry site Zola, the kitchen and cookware category—pots, pans, knives—is its most popular, added by 78% of registry users.

Since Crate & Barrel is a retailer Nathan said is “strong on registry,” the brand was in discussions with the retailer even before Caraway launched in Crate & Barrel stores in February 2021.

Today, its retail partners also include Bloomingdale’s, Macy’s, The Container Store, and Target, and retail accounts for the “low double digits” of Caraway’s overall sales, Nathan said.

That ratio could increase soon, since Caraway just got cooking with the biggest retailer in the world.

Cooking with gas: Caraway recently announced it was making its debut in Walmart stores, describing it in a press release as its “largest retail expansion to date.”

Nathan wanted to be sure he had both the crew and the sea legs before he set sail with Walmart.

When the brand debuted on Crate & Barrel shelves in 2021, Caraway had “five or 10 people on the team,” Nathan said; today, the team numbers about 100.

“We’ve gone through the reps of how to run the retail business, and we’re now more in a position to operationally support it,” Nathan said.

With Walmart drawing higher-income shoppers in recent years, not to mention increasingly working with more premium and DTC brands, Caraway is selling its existing line there rather than creating one that is lower priced.

“Typically they’re known for value, but they’ve been investing a lot into building in more premium brands,” Nathan said. “It’s a great partnership where we can help them expand that market, but also it helps us reach new customers who maybe weren’t aware about Caraway.”

Portion control: Even though it’s a cookware brand, Caraway doesn’t want to come in too hot when it comes to Walmart.

Along with being sold on Walmart.com, the brand is starting in over 500 of Walmart’s more than 4,600 US stores. At a higher price point than much of the cookware sold at Walmart, both the retailer and Caraway “want to start out in a smaller segment,” Nathan said.

Caraway cross-referenced the customer-location data of its DTC customers with Walmart locations to help pinpoint which stores to include in the initial rollout.

“On both ends, it’s a really great way to select the highest-opportunity stores, prove it out, make sure it’s working,” he said. “And then we can always scale up from there.”