Lawn-care startup Sunday lands distribution deal with Walmart

BOULDER — Sunday, a startup that aims to provide geographically customized lawn care materials, will start selling its goods at hundreds of Walmart Inc. (NYSE: WAL) locations across the country starting Tuesday.

The company, registered as This Land Inc., will start displaying its line of fertilizers and low-pesticide weed killers at 700 stores across the continental U.S, amounting to nearly 15% of the retail giant’s American footprint.

In an interview with BizWest, Sunday CEO Coulter Lewis said the startup had been in talks with the world’s largest retailer since the middle of last year, well before the company closed out its $19 million Series B.

Sunday’s original business model is in its subscription box. Customers would order a soil sampling kit and send it to a laboratory, which would combine data from that sample and available climate data for the area to determine which of Sunday’s products is best for that specific lawn. The customer would then get those products in a monthly delivery.

While that service isn’t going away with the Walmart launch, in-person customers won’t have access to those soil tests. Instead, the company is sending products that fit the soil and climate that are likely to match the conditions in that store’s state.

That change in delivery is in response to how customers have traditionally bought lawn-care products.

Lewis said the vast majority of customers are going into stores to buy the products when they need them, so placing Sunday’s products on dedicated store shelves would reach a population of homeowners that wouldn’t normally turn to e-commerce for lawn-care.

“The reality is this is not a category typically bought online, or at all,” he said. “In a lot of ways, it’s kind of 30 years behind the times.”

He also said the expansion into physical retail is part of Sunday’s aspirations to wean lawns in the U.S. off synthetic inputs. The company builds its formulations with nutrient-dense ingredients derived from naturally-occuring materials.

With Walmart’s reach, Lewis thinks it’ll be easier for homeowners to adopt that within their maintenance routine while targeting an industry estimated to be worth around $50 billion annually.

“It’s really about showing that the brand has the ability to succeed in that market,” he said.

Lewis wouldn’t specify the expected revenue or customer gains from the distribution deal, but said the company is estimating a doubling of its revenue growth this year after its revenue grew by 800% from 2019 to 2020.

Sunday currently employs 45 people.

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