Creating Disruptive Laundry Businesses for a Sustainable Future

How can laundry positively affect the lives of 1 billion people in 5 years? Driven by this bold mission, Unilever approached RKS to help foresee opportunities in the segment and create new ventures that could create substantial sustainability and business impact. With intensive Opportunity Sessions held at the start of the project with global teams, the Opportunity Areas to innovate were focused around 3 key challenges related to the laundry process:

1. Enable the usage of less water or net zero water footprint
2. Reduce or eliminate scrubbing and wringing involved to clean clothes
3. Promote wellness to the user during the washing process

RKS’ Research & Strategy team conducted deep exploratory expeditions in India, Netherlands and the UK aiming to study and compare different laundry needs, behaviors, values, sustainability lifestyles and future scenarios between these different countries. In addition to these findings, the team explored Unilever’s key internal R&D assets and conducted comprehensive tech scouting in other categories in order to evaluate how different technologies could be leveraged to generate new and relevant solutions. Armed with these, in addition to insights into the time, effort and risks involved in water collection in India and globally, the team led multi-day Creative Emergence Sessions in London with three dozen stakeholders from marketing, human factors, research, innovation and scientists from a global pool. Lead through Psycho-Aesthetics, Journey Maps and other tools to stimulate innovation, three rooms were built out to be visually immersive, each focusing on one of the three challenges. From hundreds of brilliant ideas, 8 potential business ventures were ultimately selected by the teams and were later explored more deeply and visualized. Three opportunities were captured into comprehensive value propositions and business plans by RKS and were awarded next stage venture funding.

Three disruptive ventures were selected with the goal to redefine what the future of laundry could be about: a product that drastically reduces the use of water as well as detergent for superior cleaning results based on Unilever owned technology; an integrated washing system that recycles water traditionally used in hand-washing; and a new generation of laundry products empowered with the ability to sanitize hands and provide essential nourishments through skin on contact with clothes while repelling disease-infested insects from attacking the human body. Consequently, this would graduate laundry from providing cleanliness to being an essential health partner for humanity.