Running Through the Legs of Goliath

How upstart Method is taking on the giants of the household products industry.

At the sparkling white offices of Method in San Francisco, sunlight is shafting through bottles of red, green, purple, and blue liquid, the cleaning products that Method sells. It should have a calming effect, but everyone at Method seems frenetic today. Eric Ryan, the 33-year-old co-founder, zooms past a glass-walled conference room on his cell phone, bright-eyed despite a weekend bachelor party in Mexico. On the other side of that glass wall, the other co-founder, Adam Lowry, 31, has improbably folded his six-foot-six frame into a small chair and is preparing for a fight.

Lowry is trying to explain the science behind Method's biggest launch ever--six air-freshening products in six scents for a total of 36 items--to Natalie Aronson, the brand manager for the air fresheners. One of Lowry's goals in starting Method was to bring environmentally friendly products to the mass market, so he's particularly psyched about a nonaerosol scented spray he's discussing now. But Aronson, who has been working on this launch since she joined Method 10 months ago, has concerns. In the next few minutes, she has to decide what text to put on the front of the spray bottle. If this thing is just a sprayable fragrance, she doesn't see how she can justify its $3.99 price.

"I'm gonna make a believer out of you! I'm gonna show you what this stuff does!" says Lowry. Gesturing to three jars of cat urine--or "L'Arome du Chat," as the formulation chief has scrawled on them--Lowry unfolds himself from his chair and bounds to the dry-erase board, where he begins a chemistry lesson on room spray technologies. Drawing squiggly figures on the board, he explains how the patented technology Method licensed sprays onto the odor, binds to the odor molecule, and changes its shape so it won't fit into the nose's receptors. It does this, Lowry says, without coating the nose in chemicals the way some spray fragrances do. When the cat-pee jars, each subjected to different room sprays, are passed around, Method's does smell fresher. "It's gonna be like the odor was never there and you lit a candle," Lowry says.

Aronson isn't sold. She suggests that the bottle note three attributes Lowry hasn't covered: nonaerosol technology, natural, concentrated.

Lowry pauses. "That's not gonna get across the performance of this in getting rid of odor."

What about saying it's a time-release fragrance? Aronson asks.

Right, Lowry says, it's a time-release fragrance with three fragrance blooms, and that's a big deal. But there's more going on. They continue to bat attributes back and forth. He emphasizes: no chlorofluorocarbons, low surfactants, no propellants. Aronson, twirling a four-color click pen in her mouth, offers long-lasting, odor-eliminating, and nonaerosol. "Consumers don't see the problem with room spray, and we don't have the money to teach a negative," she says. "We have to take a positive approach."

Lowry, getting a little exasperated, suggests noting that the technology is patented. Aronson ignores him, studying the prototype in front of her and muttering, "No harmful chemicals."

With time running out on this meeting, and a crowd of Method employees gathering outside the conference room for the next one, Lowry makes a final pitch. "The one thing we're missing is the aspect of safety," he says. "It's not gonna spot or stain, you're not breathing propellants."

"We don't want to mention anything about safety," Aronson objects. "It opens up a closet."

"Before you say that, remember our entire brand is about safety--if it's not on there, the question is why is it not safe."

"But the consumer doesn't see safety as an issue."

"I disagree with you."

Unfazed, Aronson removes the pen from her mouth and smiles. They settle on "nonaerosol," "no propellants," and "2x concentrated" with "odor eliminator" wedged under the product name. "I think this is quite a story," she says. "I'm really pleased."

It is quite a story. In the five years since it was founded, Method has invigorated the consumer products world by exploding much of the industry's conventional wisdom. The company is best known for its bottles, which look more like vases and sculptures than containers for cleaning products, but the story goes beyond that.

When Method started, cleaning products represented one of the most sluggish, antientrepreneurial categories around. Industry giants Procter & Gamble, the Clorox Co., Colgate-Palmolive, and SC Johnson had been founded as far back as 1806; each had massive infrastructures, thousands of employees, and billions in sales. Each also had jumbles of brands; P&G, for example, sold cleanup spray under Mr. Clean, dishwashing soap under Cascade, liquid dish soap under Dawn and Joy, hand soap under Ivory, and air freshener under Febreze. The brands focused on efficacy and price, the packaging was loaded with product claims--"Removes soap scum!"--and the products mostly looked pretty similar to their competitors and pretty similar to how they looked 50 years ago. "Up until [Method]," says Felicia McClain, senior editor at Mintel International, a Chicago market research firm, "we saw little to no innovation in that segment."

Method put one name on all of its products so they would reinforce each other.

So Method did everything differently. It put one name on all of its products so that they would reinforce each other. Where P&G owned factories, Method outsourced everything. Where P&G took years to get products to market, Method took months. Today, P&G has 140,000 employees, Method has 45. The upstart made its packaging recyclable and products biodegradable, avoiding bleach and chlorine. It designed dish soap and laundry detergent bottles to look like bowling pins and figure eights. It based its entire organization on speed and innovation, so that, even when the giant companies copied it--as they do regularly now--Method would be a step ahead. "When you run through the legs of Goliath," says Eric Ryan, "you need to spend a lot of time thinking about how to act so you don't put yourself in a place you can be stepped on."

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