Design Matters: How Replenish is Reinventing the Household Cleaner Bottle

We normally reserve start-up company coverage for Friday, but we wanted to be among the first to scoop the launch of Replenish – a new company with a much smarter way to distribute household cleaning products.

!ADVERTISEMENT!

The basic idea isn't rocket science (click on link below to see video): selling and distributing concentrated product is cheaper and greener than shipping water and extra plastic all over the country. The smart part comes from a very clever design.

Replenish offers consumers a reusable PET squirt bottle similar to the bottles they're accustomed to using for many household cleaning products. The key difference is that the bottle is part of a system to which the user attaches smaller "pods" of concentrated liquid which are then diluted by adding water to the larger bottle. Better yet, each pod of concentrate can fill the larger bottle four times – meaning you get four times the cleaning solution at a bit more than the price of a single bottle of a competitor's liquid.

What makes the product significant, and likely successful in my eyes is that it doesn’t preach "green". The cleaning fluid itself is designed to be as innocuous as Method, Ecover, or Seventh Generation (though I'd invite a biologist or chemist to comment on that once the full ingredients are posted on their site). Where it differs from the usual "green" product is that, like Method, Replenish strives to use sexy design to move beyond any crunchy green stereotype to meet the desires of a more complicated and diverse consumer.

Continue reading and watch video: http://www.triplepundit.com/2010/10/replenish-redesigns-squirt-bottle-startup-tuesday/