Launch in hotels and multi-unit buildings before expanding to consumers

Mechanism

Rather than launching a refill system cold into the fragmented consumer market, launch it first in hotels and multi-unit residential buildings (condominiums / co-properties). These environments structurally remove the hardest variables, and they prove the commercial case before any direct-to-consumer rollout.

Why these settings solve the hard problems by construction

Route density is free. A hotel is hundreds of "doorsteps" at one street address; a residential building is dozens of units at one delivery point. The route-density problem that defeats dispersed-household refill simply does not arise — one stop, many units.
No consumer-friction problem. The buyer is a facilities manager, a rational B2B purchaser who already thinks in bulk, contracts and cost-per-unit. The fragile "will consumers remember and return containers" variable is removed.
The buyer already wants it. Hotels face real pressure — and in a growing number of jurisdictions, legal bans — on single-use mini toiletry bottles, and many already use refillable wall-mounted dispensers. The behaviour exists; this supplies it better.
Cheap, contained proving ground. It allows the fill-to-order, swap-and-clean loop to be run and refined at small scale — especially the central cleaning economics, the line item the whole profitability case rests on.
Contracts give durability immediately. An annual B2B supply contract is, by definition, scheduled predictable demand — the batching/forecasting problem is solved on day one.

Operating profile and honest limits

B2B amenity supply and DTC home refill are not the same business — different product (bulk dispenser vs. branded home bottle), different sales motion, different margins. Treat the hotel/building phase as proving the loop, the cleaning economics and the profitability — then expand to DTC on the same central infrastructure.
Within a residential building, some last-mile friction returns (per-unit delivery), but it is contained to one address and is far milder than dispersed households.

Evidence

Hotel chains and regulators have already moved on single-use toiletry bottles, with documented plastic-reduction and cost figures — see attached case studies.