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Functional pack design makes concentrated cleaners make sense

Truman’s concentrated cleaning products give even entrenched home cleaner consumers a convincing reason to make the pivot from retail display case RTU spray bottles to a more sustainable e-comm model that eliminates the need to 'ship water.'

The automatically replenishing, subscription-based, direct-to-consumer home cleaning system from Truman’s consists of four durable PET spray bottles into which cartridges of replacement cleaner snuggly fit.
The automatically replenishing, subscription-based, direct-to-consumer home cleaning system from Truman’s consists of four durable PET spray bottles into which cartridges of replacement cleaner snuggly fit.

Truman’s is an online-only, direct-to-consumer, concentrated liquid home cleaner system that is taking the e-commerce path to create a simple, subscription-based, and sustainable home-care product toolkit. As the Lexington, KY-based firm says on its website, they are “The Coolest Cleaning Company on the Internet. Probably.”

For household consumables like liquid window, kitchen, or bathroom cleaners, concentrates have always made a lot of practical sense. Avoiding the shipping costs associated with a product that is composed of 95% water has long been common practice for institutional industries like hospitality, education, and foodservice. But at the consumer level, the retail store shelf format served as a formidable impediment to the general adoption of concentrates by your average consumer. Ready-to-use (RTU) home cleansers don’t require any assembly, problem solving, or instruction manuals.

“Historically, everything in this category has been sold ready-to-use off of the retail shelf because it’s an unassisted sale,” says Alex Reed, co-founder, Truman’s. Comparatively, a DIY concentrated liquid or powder mixing system, with attendant but separate spray bottle that a consumer may or may not already have, introduces confusion and complexity that the RTU bottle doesn’t suffer. Instead of a single product, a system is more like a recipe. In-store signage and expensive consumer education campaigns would be necessary to assist adoption.

“Because of this comparison, the retail environment held back innovation in the category. The ease of the unassisted sale was too difficult to overcome,” Reed says. Retail also has driven a lot of proliferation, notes Reed, which means in-store consumers have to sort through endless brands and varieties before finally finding the cleaner they want. Reed and Truman’s saw an opportunity to simplify by offering fewer products and cutting through the sensory overload.

“One of the dirty secrets of the industry is that you don’t really need a unique cleaner for every surface type,” Reed says. “You can make some generalizations, and your kitchen will have a different profile of soils and crumbs than your bathroom. But you should be able to use the same cleaner on your kitchen table that you use on your granite countertop or stainless steel appliances, and the same is true elsewhere in the home.”
Truman’s developed a suite of four concentrated cleaners, one each for the kitchen, bathroom, glass, and floors, all non-toxic and biodegradable. The system includes corresponding durable PET spray bottles. But didn’t we just establish that the concentrate kit format was a non-starter in the retail format? Enter e-commerce delivery.

Concentrates for e-commerce
In an e-commerce environment, shipping a ready-to-use bottle is extremely inefficient—billions of pounds of water and plastics are shipped needlessly, and the entire system is disposed of after use. Also, RTU bottles weren’t designed for the many more touches and rougher handling of the e-commerce channel. Leakage and breakage is an issue, one that’s only compounded when a cleaning product ships with another item, say an electronic item, and leakage ruins everything in the standard Amazon shipper. What’s more, household cleaners suffer from, for lack of a better term, the candy bar effect of e-commerce. Like a single candy bar, they tend to be so low-cost to begin with that, when purchased as single units online, the cost may double. It doesn’t make sense to pay the extra $3 for shipping on a $4 cleaning product.

The bottom line? Even though selling household cleansers in a concentrated format through e-commerce channels holds enormous advantages, it has yet to take off in the overall e-commerce environment.

“Concentrates haven’t become mainstream because the dispensing mechanism has never been very user-friendly,” Reed says. “It has involved a lot of powders or pods or liquid concentrates, things you have to mix by hand. But consumers aren’t always comfortable handling chemicals. Other consumers have said they lacked confidence that they were diluting it properly. We looked at it as a user experience issue, and that’s where Truman’s innovative refill cartridge, a concentrated cleaning product cartridge system, comes in.”

Refill cartridge and bottle mechanism
Truman’s concentrated cleaning product is delivered in a 0.33-fl-oz cylinder-shaped cartridge that is slightly over 3 in. long with a diameter of less than 1 in. A tiny flange jutting from the circumference of the circular top of the cylinder lets it fit into and rest on the correspondingly cylindrical neck of the spray bottle, like a bullet into a gun barrel or a peg into a cribbage board. A consumer is asked to first fill the spray bottle to a clearly marked level with water, then load the refill cartridge into the spray bottle’s neck, and finally screw on the spray head.
The cartridge is designed with an internal shaft or canal of its own, an open channel that runs through its 3-in length, right down the center. The straw that draws water from the reservoir below to the spray head above is thus threaded through the cartridge’s internal canal, through the neck of the bottle.

As the consumer twists the screw-top closure to affix the spray head onto the bottle, a patented mechanism opens the refill cartridge from the bottom and releases its concentrated liquid cleaner content entirely within the bottle, introducing it to the water below. The product automatically dilutes without any need for shaking or mixing, and an obvious fill line on the bottle means the correct dilution is guaranteed. Perhaps most important, the consumer never needs to touch the chemical itself, particularly in its concentrated form.

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