By Michael Newman, Lead Product Engineer, Launchpad
The other day, while wandering down the aisle looking for
cleaning products, I stumbled across an amazing contraption: Clorox’s bottle
with Smart Tube Technology.
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| No Way! |
As you
can see, it’s a nice little innovation consisting of a tube that runs up the
bottle allowing you to “spray every drop”.
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| Clorox Clean Up Uses Smart Tube Technology |
This is a huge leap forward from the days where all we
had was a little tube dangling down inside the bottle.
When the bottle got low
on liquid and you wanted to spray down toward the ground, the spray failed
miserably. It would just foam and dribble down your hand.
When this happened,
you would have to take off the spray head and re-orient the little tube
manually in order to continue spraying until the cleaning solution was actually
gone. Now, with this (seemingly) simple, yet incredibly effective innovation,
you don’t have to adjust a thing!
The question is: Why didn’t someone think of this a long
time ago? Other than having your idea carried off by a hawk there
are three things that consistently challenge product innovation, no matter
the industry:
- Technology - does the technology and process exist yet?
- Cost – Once the technology exists can you manufacture products at an appropriate cost to make it viable in the marketplace?
- Market Demand – Will consumers see the value in the product and make a purchase?
Technology:
As a product engineer, I can tell from analyzing the
bottle’s design that from a manufacturing perspective, this is a pretty complex
thing to mass produce. The tube
originates on the outside of the bottom of the bottle. It then winds up and
enters the bottle near the top so that it can connect with the internal
plumbing of the spray head. Based on my experience with plastic molding this took
a fair amount of R&D to figure out how to do this in a high volume
manufacturing setting.
Smart Tube Cost:
The old dangling tube is the industry standard for most spray bottles. That technology is undoubtedly
affordable given the sheer volume produced every year. It’s what everyone was
using, it’s what everyone knows, it’s cheap…
why change it? Clearly someone at Clorox believed that there was a
better way to do things, and took a risk. Which brings us to the third leg of
the innovation race:
Market Demand. Now that a new fancy bottle exists, can the
more expensive Smart Tube technology compete with cheaper options?
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| WDITOT? |
Yes, because being able to use every last drop without having to
disassemble the bottle is a an obvious incentive to buy this newer design. The
innovative tube instantly adds value in a meaningful way to the consumer.
Clorox has created a great innovation and delivered to
the market a prime example of a “why didn’t I think of that?” (Also known as
“WDITOTs”, social media is full of these kind of life
hacks, or genius
ideas that make your life better).
In fact, there is a very good chance that the Smart Tube was
thought of before, but the product wasn’t yet ready for the marketplace. There’s no such thing as a no-brainer. You
need the right technology, at the right price, for the right audience before
even the best innovations will stick. I can’t wait to be dazzled by the next WDITOT.
