Flip a category upside down - method Inverted Dish-Soap

The Challenge

Back in the day when I worked for Karim Rashid Inc in NYC, the founders of method, Adam and Eric visited. They had just started the method brand out of their apartment in San Francisco and needed help. They had wanted to secure a meeting with the retailer Target, but really needed to show the buyers something special.

Their challenge to us was “we need to disrupt this category” and that category was one of the most heavily traded, over SKU’d, commoditized, low interest categories around, dish-soap.

The Upside Down

I had some exposure to inverted dispensing from other consultancy projects , and thought it might be a good anchor for the project: in a category that had standardized on an upright bottle with a pull cap decades ago, it was a functionality upgrade, as I had notionally streamlined the action of dispensing. We coupled the inverted format with a sculptural “bowling pin” like form with a bulbous head, stable base and thin waist for squeezing: the iconic method dish-soap was born.

The design both launched method into the mainstream and almost killed it as well. After a very successful sell-in to Target, we were given 16 weeks to tool, fill and ship product to 100’s stores, and we did it (just!) Problems started when consumers, curious on how the product worked, would partially unscrew the bottom dispensing cap, and place it back on shelf, letting dish-soap slowly ooze its way out the bottle and over all other products (ours and competitors) on the way to the floor. Not an auspicious start to what become an incredible partnership, and career for me.