19-05-2025
How Touchland Turned Into An $880 Million Hand Sanitizer Brand
Touchland's innovative formats and scents helped the brand become a top-selling brand
Church & Dwight announced it is acquiring personal care brand Touchland for $7oo million in cash and restricted stock at closing, and up to $180 million in earn-out depending on net sales for 2025, valuing the brand at $880 million. The brand, founded by Andrea Lisbona, first launched in Spain before expanding to the U.S. in 2018. It is now the fastest-growing hand sanitizer brand in the country and the second largest in the category behind Purell, totalling $130 million of net sales for the past twelve months through March 31, 2025. Turning a mundane product into a pleasant sensory accessory, Touchland is a great example of how any category can be disrupted and reinvented.
What small, disruptor brands often achieve very well is that they look outside their core product's category for inspiration, leading to innovative formats, route to market, brand positioning or marketing strategies. Touchland instantly stood out with its unique format: a sleek, thin, square bottle that contrasted heavily with the hand sanitizers consumers are used to. The product uses smart technology and a design that lets consumers know easily when it's time for a refill or a change of batteries. On top of a new type of packaging, founder Andrea Lisbona also sought to innovate on formula, combining both product performance and benefits by blending high-quality, moisturizing natural ingredients along with Denatured Ethyl Alcohol in order to kill germs without leaving hands dry or sticky.
The brand bet on scent innovation to differentiate itself, developing a series of scents, from Vanilla Cinnamon to Aloe Vera and Velvet Peach. With sixteen different scents, it clearly invested in providing a sensorial experience that fit an array of consumers' scent preferences, positioning itself as a skincare-forward hand sanitizer brand, earning the credentials of a beauty or skincare brand rather than a monotonous personal care one.
'Personal care usually sells through fear. Our goal is to do the opposite and empower people to live to the fullest and create solutions that people are excited to carry with them,' said Lisbona to Glossy a while back. Indeed, hand sanitizers are typically seen as functional products only, often associated to sterile or clinical environments, especially due to their emphasis on alcohol content and germ-killing claims. Purell and other labels have never done much in terms of branding, marketing or brand activations as they took their products for what they were: hand sanitizers. Touchland's founder had an entirely different mindset and approach to the category. The brand took a dull, ordinary product and turned it into a lifestyle accessory in no time, and this vision is what the brand's innovation is founded upon: 'Touchland was born from a bold vision: to reinvent overlooked daily essentials into extraordinary moments of delight. We believe every aspect of our everyday essentials should be exciting; little bursts of joy that can delight our senses and remind us of the magic in the mundane', reads the brand's website.
The concept took off quite quickly, boosted by the timely relevance of Covid in 2020. Priced at $10, the premium hand mists started selling through its direct-to-consumer website as well as at Ulta, Urban Outfitters, Amazon and Revolve. It is now present across 2,500 locations in the U.S., including Sephora and Target, and recorded a +203% YoY sales increase between 2023 and 2022, proving its relevance beyond the pandemic.
Inspired to reinvent a category by turning the mundane into fun and enjoyment, Andrea Lisbona also approached her brand's positioning and marketing from a highly different angle compared to its competitors, heavily contributing to gaining considerable market share. To drive appeal and elevate Touchland as a lifestyle brand, she turned to special editions and brand collaborations. From Hello Kitty to Smiley, the brand launched unique hand sanitizers and matching mist cases, which became instantly popular and amassed a 2,000 people waitlist in the case of the Smiley collaboration. In fact, every new product collaboration leads to a waitlist, with the next one being the special edition Disney set, which includes the brand's award-winning Wild Watermelon scent and Mickey Mouse Mist Case.
Disney x Touchland brand collab launching on May 19th
Another growth driver is the brand's popularity on social media. Since its launch through to its kickstarter campaign, Touchland has managed to build a strong, authentic online community, which continues to grow. Focused mostly on organic growth, the brand has expanded its reach thanks to being featured by celebrities like Kylie Jenner or Blackpink as well as micro influencers, with a following of beauty, skincare and lifestyle fans, who are gifted products and share if they like them, helping relay the brand's authenticity and credibility.
Its social media accounts reflect the brand's intent to be a true lifestyle brand embedded into the beauty sphere, positioning its products as everyday accessories. It leverages its Instagram account to elevate the brand and share user-generated content, while its TikTok channel is intended to show behind-the scenes and ways to interact with the products, highlighting the sensorial elements of the brand and leveraging short video formats meant to go viral. Using social media as a core strategic channel is uncommon for brands in the personal care space, but it's what has helped the brand gain so much traction. It probably would not have been able to achieve this without its innovative design and formulas, which fit very well the aesthetic and lifestyle features of both Instagram and Tiktok.
Andrea Lisbona and her team have managed to completely reinvent an overlooked category, transforming hand sanitizer into a desirable lifestyle and beauty product. Touchland's success shows how far innovative packaging and sensorial attributes can go in building consumer demand and attractivity, while also demonstrating the impact of challenging conventional approaches to category growth. By blending personal care with skincare attributes (and earny beauty awards along the way), Touchland has redefined how consumers interact with a traditionally functional, mundane product. Focusing on personal care essentials rather than short-lived beauty trends, the brand will continue to focus on cementing its position as a category disruptor while also expanding into new markets, leveraging the scale and expertise of its new owner to further grow its reach.
