Sojo Auto-Supplies Toiletries to Short-Term Rental Hosts Before Each Stay

01 /The Concept

Short-term rental hosts have a perpetual restocking problem that nobody wants to deal with manually. Sojo has built a supply automation layer on top of that problem.

The startup contracts with short-term rental hosts and supplies toiletries – shampoos, shower gels, soaps, and related amenities – manufactured under its own brand. The host connects their booking calendar from platforms like Airbnb or Vrbo to Sojo once. After that, Sojo reads the schedule autonomously, knows when guests are checking in, and delivers the agreed assortment to arrive before each new stay.

Hosts configure their preferred product mix and per-guest quantities in advance and can adjust at any time. Purchasing and fulfillment are decoupled: the host pre-loads a deposit, Sojo stores the inventory at its own warehouses, and delivery staff unpack and position everything at the property. When the deposit runs low, Sojo sends a replenishment alert. The host's only recurring task is topping up the account.

Sojo raised $5M in a seed round in spring 2021 and has now closed a $6.15M Series A.

02 /Why It Matters

The short-term rental market is a better distribution channel than it looks at first glance. By 2025, one in five Americans will have stayed in a short-term rental at some point – meaning roughly 20% of all potential consumer buyers pass through these properties. That's a meaningful reach for a D2C brand, at the cost of a B2B sale to the host rather than a retail acquisition battle for each individual guest.

The broader D2C market has made this calculation increasingly attractive. Online D2C sales in the US are on track to hit $214B by 2024, but the channel is intensely competitive. Customer acquisition costs are rising as the number of brands competing for the same digital inventory grows. Smart D2C operators are looking for alternative channels that either reduce acquisition cost or increase order value and LTV enough to justify higher acquisition spend. B2B channels – selling to a host, a hotel, an operator – can do both.

Sojo recognized this early and took the simplest possible version of the idea: toiletries are consumables, they're always needed, and short-term rental hosts are a concentrated, addressable B2B buyer pool. A [prior review](/review/test-drajvy-prodajut) covered Glimpse, a Y Combinator company that raised $8.4M to use short-term rental apartments as a marketing channel – placing durable goods like furniture and electronics in properties for guests to experience in context. Glimpse subsequently expanded the model into B2B discount showrooms for excess inventory. That parallel shows how much surface area this channel has for different product categories.

The short-term rental channel is also sitting adjacent to a large inventory overhang problem: excess stock at manufacturers and sellers reached $732B last year. Dedicated platforms to address that overhang – Max Retail ([related review](/review/max-retail)) at $8.2M and Ghost ([related review](/review/ghost)) at $25M – are another expression of the same underlying pressure.

03 /Opportunities

As competition for online consumer attention intensifies, finding distribution channels that sit outside the standard paid media funnel becomes genuinely valuable. Short-term rental properties are one such channel that most consumer brands haven't seriously engaged.

For personal care and household product brands specifically, Sojo's model is directly applicable. The replenishment logic works because the product is consumable, the demand is predictable, and hosts have a real operational pain point that the subscription eliminates.

Beyond personal care, the channel has broader potential. Glimpse's evolution from product placement into distributed showrooming suggests that the short-term rental context – guests trying things in a living environment rather than browsing a product page – creates purchase intent that traditional e-commerce can't replicate. Which product categories generate the most value from that kind of experiential discovery is still largely unexplored.