(Read to the bottom, you won't be disappointed!) method's new laundry detergent is getting lots of applause! From advocates, bloggers, design pros, and the industry in general! Personally, I love the new bottle! Four pumps, and it's done! I can't get over how easy it is to use. It's funny how we have to retrain ourselves when something this revolutionary comes along. Every time I pump it out, I just look into the washing machine and go "that
can't be enough detergent to clean my clothes?! There's nothing in there!" But I go with the flow! Less is more, Nathan. Less is more! And I get perfect results every wash!
Recently, method has even won an
International Design Excellence Award!
FastCompany.com had all the dirt:
"Method Products, the eco-friendly cleaning-products company, believes it has a winning strategy for scouting ideas. "We try and identify dirty little secrets in the categories we work in," says Joshua Handy, Method's senior director of industrial design, whose business card lists "disrupter" as one of his titles.
When Handy's team researched laundry detergents, it found three key problems. First, most laundry detergents are primarily water, requiring big jugs that, as they are hauled from factory to store to home, require the burning of lots of carbon. Second, Americans are chronic overdosers -- we use far too much detergent, which is bad for the environment, not great for clothes, and rotten for washing machines. Finally, laundry rooms tend to be messy, blotched with sticky patches of lint-covered soap spills.
Method's solution: develop a highly concentrated detergent (eight times the norm) and deliver it in a rugged pump-equipped bottle. The first clue that the team was onto something big: "People wouldn't give us back our prototypes," says Handy.
To the IDEA jurors, the innovation isn't just the detergent or just the bottle; it is the whole product. "Even though the pump structure is nothing new in cosmetic packaging, combining it with ultra-concentrated detergent prompted new consumer behavior that reduces both resources and water use," says Starbucks executive Fumi Watanabe, a judge in the packaging category. "Why hasn't anybody done this before?"
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And method was also recently invited, and attended the Dwell design conference!
"It’s crazy that a laundry detergent product is on the show floor at a design conference,” says Matthew Loyd, the vice-president of brand experience for method (or as he’s known internally, the “Brand Poo-bah.” But really, it’s not that crazy. Dwell on Design is the pages of Dwell brought to life and there are few things as necessarily for day-to-day living in the modern world than cleaning products.
method, a San Francisco–based company known for their teardrop-shape soaps and environmentally friendly attitude and approach, is one of over 200 companies sharing their wares and the stories of their products on the Los Angeles Convention Center show floor at the fifth annual Dwell on Design. Before taking the stage for panels about how to get published and prefab architecture, Dwell associate editor Miyoko Ohtake sat down with the method creative team to chat about the products and the new method Laundry Detergent, which debuted in January 2010. Here is Miyoko’s conversation with method design director (aka “Artsy Smartsy”) Sally Clarke.
What was your role in creating the new Method Laundry Detergent?The creative team is involved in the development. Rather than being given a product at the end and told to make a label for it, we’re involved from the beginning.
How did this product come to be?We started doing laundry and had the 3x version. People were catching on but we still thought there was a better way to do laundry. We tried a tablet monodose method but it wasn’t working so one of our designers made a prototype, showed it to Method co-founder Eric Ryan, and it was “Eureka!” We do a lot of design prototyping and experimenting..."
Read the rest of the article at
Dwell.com!
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Yet what could
possibly be the biggest news out of the Dwell design conference?
"Yippee! (method) told me at Dwell on Design that there is a method softener coming out in September! I've been waiting for it. - HoganMaggie"
Looks like method is also adding fabric softener to their new "lighthouse" laundry bottle packaging (probably also in the updated detergent scents!) I think you can trust me when I say this fall is gonna rock, method products wise! Just you wait!
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What have your experiences with the new laundry detergent and bottle been like? Pros, cons? Yays, boos? Applause, slaps across the face? Tell us!
UPDATE Looks like I might be right about my August instead of September guess! A fellow advocate asked method about the apparent lack of fabric softener on store shelves, and their response was: "are you psychic? check the shelves mid august." So expect to see a new "lighthouse" fabric softener bottle (in the new laundry scents) this August; and I'd definitely say this is when many of the other new items (kitchen hand wash line, new dish soap, etc.) will also hit! It's just a matter of a few weeks! We can do it! (Well, actually I'm not so sure, but I'm gonna try! Real hard like!)
As I've mentioned before, they're taking their new, highly awarded (in fact they just won another one!) and lauded laundry "lighthouse" shaped bottle, and placing it on your kitchen sink! Along with that, we know now that at least one new scent will be clementine (which I'm dying to give a sniff! Clementine, mmm!) Another interesting bit is this new bottle will hold 18 oz. of dish soap, compared to the previous 25 oz. (which from the image seen on thedieline.com site, seems to have been maintained throughout all three previous bottle versions.) Not sure if this will mean a reduction in the price or not (I'd go with a not, given how everything seems to be going up, up, up! Have you eaten at Subway lately?! Oh wait, I digress...) But the extra good news is it's concentrated! So you use less! So I'd call that a win-win!
