Venture with Whirlpool cleans dirty clothes fast

The new product pitched to Whirlpool Corp. executive Marc Bitzer three years ago wasn’t all that new. Whirlpool had tried to sell two previous versions of the device, which was designed to clean clothes that didn’t need much cleaning. Both flopped.

So, when about 20 designers and technicians came to Bitzer in July 2011 to propose yet another iteration of the same gadget, he was prepared to nix it.

“I was lukewarm, very honestly, because I had seen excitement before,” recalls Bitzer, who oversees North America, Europe, Africa and the Middle East for the home appliance giant.

Within two hours, Bitzer was a cheerleader for something called a Swash. He was converted by devotees who’d traveled from the Cincinnati headquarters of Procter & Gamble Co.

Three months ago, Swashes developed jointly by Whirlpool and P&G started showing up in select Bloomingdale’s stores and Delta airport lounges. Salespeople explained how the Swash, a 4-foot-high, steel-and-plastic box shaped like a radiator, could in just 10 minutes unrumple a cocktail dress or whisk cigar stench from a sport jacket, almost as if they’d gone through a wash cycle or a trip to the dry cleaner.

Online ads and videos said the Swash would cut dry cleaning bills in half by letting people re-wear dress shirts, sequined dresses, wool sweaters and other clothes they’d normally toss in a hamper after one wearing or, in the case of $300 designer jeans, never wash at all.

“Laundry-averse slobs, rejoice,” wrote a reviewer on Fast Company’s design website.

For the $499 price of a Swash now available nationwide – consumers could buy a new smartphone or an actual washing machine. The target buyer is “Sam,” a hypothetical, androgynous 30-something who has annual income of $80,000 and spends heavily on clothing. Whirlpool and P&G have sought their first Sams in discrete niches at three chains: the fashion-conscious at Bloomingdale’s, techie first-adopters at Best Buy and home improvement enthusiasts at Bed Bath & Beyond.

As executives from both companies say, the Swash serves a need that many people aren’t aware they have, or might decide they don’t have.

Scott Cooke could be the perfect customer – or not. A principal at marketing firm GCK Partners, he says he’s meticulous about his clothing.

“Swash sounds like my own personal miracle,” Cooke says. “I have a pair of A.P.C. jeans that only got wet once when I swam in salt water as the label says. I have similar rituals for shirts I don’t want to fade, sweaters by Martin Margiela that I don’t want to hurt by dry cleaning.”

He’s less certain about needing a Swash. “It’s a luxury,” he says. “It’s like something for single guys or Orange County housewives with a closet the size of my New York apartment.”

New product strengthenssymbiotic relationship

The companies declined to disclose specific Swash sales numbers. The product is hardly make-or-break for Whirlpool, with $18.8 billion in revenue last year, or P&G, with $83 billion. Even if it’s a washout, the Swash succeeded in inducing the companies to firm up a historically symbiotic relationship that had weakened.

Go Unlimited, a joint venture the two quietly formed to bring the Swash to market, is working on additional products. The Swash is a platform for other, entirely new ways to care for clothes, Whirlpool and P&G executives say, declining to provide more details.

Even though Whirlpool and P&G each introduce upward of 50 products each year, they no longer leap to mind as innovators. About the sexiest thing you can say about either is that Whirlpool was founded by ancestors of model Kate Upton.

The age-old Rust Belt companies, which rose to prominence last century on sturdy brands like Kitchen-Aid, Crest and Amana, have collaborated on-and-off for decades. Newspaper ads from the 1960s show a smiling woman in a red-and-white dress extolling the virtues of using P&G’s Tide detergent with a Whirlpool washer. Executives regularly ferry between Cincinnati and Whirlpool headquarters in Benton Harbor, Michigan. Whirlpool leans on P&G for consumer insight, while P&G relies on Whirlpool’s manufacturing chops.

In the late 1990s, the companies had gathered research indicating Americans increasingly were wearing clothes more than once between cleanings. More remarkable, they were admitting it. Michael Grieff, P&G’s research-and-development director for new business creation, says when he started at the company 23 years ago, “Nobody would ever talk about re-wearing their clothes. It was almost like talking dirty.”

Way to freshen upthat already worn shirt

Whirlpool and P&G thought people might go for an appliance that would freshen up already-worn clothes with a minimum of hassle. The two product failures followed.

The first, developed jointly and introduced in 2001, was a large, wardrobe-like piece of furniture that sold for as much as $1,200 and took half an hour to spruce up a shirt. In 2005, Whirlpool tried again on its own with a collapsible garment bag that used distilled water to freshen fabrics.

An issue from past collaborations nagged: The companies didn’t want to waste time haggling over how to split Swash revenue or seeking approvals up and down company hierarchies. Executives also wanted to do away with the P&G-this-Whirlpool-that mindsets of previous ventures and have the companies behave as one, with a singular goal: creating something entirely new to both.

They incorporated Go Unlimited, a separate entity owned 51 percent by P&G, 49 percent by Whirlpool, and staffed by a few dozen Whirlpool and P&G employees, some full-time, some part- time, all working together. Whirlpool ensconced its Swash team in a vacant building half a mile from the company’s main campus in Michigan.

The earlier Swash prototypes would not do for paying customers. Some of P&G’s early versions drew so much electrical power that they blew fuses. Spray nozzles inside the box, as many as 32 in some versions, left unsightly wet spots.

More prototypes were dispatched to test homes. Inside the boxes, consumers could hang an item of clothing, securing it with plastic clips attached to stretchy cords. Testers then inserted into the device a small cup – similar to a Keurig coffee pod – filled with a water-based chemical solution, and pushed a button to start the spritz-and-dry cycle.

A big challenge was figuring out how to get garments uniformly wet and then dry them within the 10-minute shower deadline. Proper wetting depended on variables including the viscosity, or thickness, of the solution inside the pod, and the relative size, number, and placement of nozzles dispersing it.

There had to be enough liquid to ensure coverage of a piece of clothing, though not so much that leftover would drip into the bottom of the machine. Drying heat had to be sufficient to remove wrinkles and restore fit without shrinkage.

Swash production began at a Whirlpool factory in Mexico in July. The companies won’t say how many have been built.

“People don’t know there’s a better way. It’s our job to teach them,” says Corey Moles, Go Unlimited’s 34-year-old head of sales, who has a Swash in his bedroom and uses it daily. At $499, Moles says, “We’re competing against an iPad.” Swash pods cost an additional $6.99 for a box of 12.

“You can’t really get through life without a washing machine, but you can get through life without this,” says Lloyd Shefsky, a professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and author of a new book on innovation.

Cristina Baus, a Euromonitor analyst, says the device will sell better to hotels than households.

“I don’t see it becoming the next ‘it’ thing,” she says. ■