Green Product Design Case Study: Building a Better Bottle with Replinish

An excerpt from a great article in Core77, read the full post here.

"Five years ago I had an epiphany while I was ironing my shirt. I found myself wondering why it was that my ironing spray had to come in such a big bottle? Why couldn't it come with a concentrate I could dilute myself in one integrated bottle, not two separate containers? In fact, why didn't all of my household goods couldn't come in a more sensible, compact concentrate mixing system. The solution I saw in my mind was an integrated bottle built for mixing concentrates.

One morning in April I opened The New York Times to find the article "As Consumers Cut Spending, 'Green' Products Lose Allure" by Stephanie Clifford and Andrew Martin. The crux of the article was that consumers are not willing to pay more for 'green' products, especially in hard times.

As a green products entrepreneur, I believe they shouldn't have to. Consumers can be green and save money, we just have to design better products so they can do both.

Spurred on by my ironing epiphany I went digging in the patent universe to see what ideas were out there; I wanted to know if an integrated bottle system already existed. It didn't. I saw that Arm and Hammer had come out with an "Essentials" line in 2008 that consisted of an empty bottle with two packages of cleaner concentrate shrink wrapped to the bottle. Although its intentions were admirable, it did not offer the consumer the integrated approach to mixing concentrates and reducing packaging waste that I was thinking of. I knew then that I had to fundamentally rethink what a bottle should look like and what purpose it should serve."

continue reading