blog

it’s been a long time coming, but it’s finally here (drumroll, please) – we’re unveiling the new methodhome.com website (pssst… you’re on it right now)!

here are a few of our favorite improvements:

1. people against dirty

• represent yourself with a snazzy new profile
• review your favorite method items
• vote on the ‘fab five’ to select the next item for a members-only 50% off sale

2. the shopping experience

• meet our new online shopping partner, drugstore.com
• spend less on shipping, including free shipping for all orders over $50 (and free for an order over $25 if it’s your first time buying from drugstore.com)
• explore the entire range of method products, including previously exclusive items

3. methodology

• get to know us better
• check out our humanifesto (back by popular demand)
• stay up-to-date with our better-than-before blog (the very one you’re reading)

the site is a work in progress, so keep checking back for more fun stuff. we’d love your feedback. what are you excited about?

josh handy our senior industrial designer at method blogs for the popular package design website called “the dieline”. josh looks like moby and writes like david foster wallace. read on to better understand dishsoap: branding at its most weird by josh handy.

the old dish

over the years, consumers have been trained by ubiquitous advertising to believe that cleaning is a chore; a boring dirty business that needs to be completed as quickly as possible. product development efforts in the dish soap category have largely eschewed the actual task and have instead focused on adding “benefits” like softening your hands, saving baby animals, or reversing the aging process. brand strategies seem to involve everything but the proverbial kitchen sink. by assuming that people would rather be doing anything but the dishes, marketers have transformed the category into a cluster of contextually irrelevant “meta-claims”. as such, the products in the category have languished. this is branding at its most weird and self-involved. many dish soap brands seem to have lost faith in their core proposition – to clean dishes. it is these types of dull categories that are ripe for re-examination and re-staging.

the new dish

at method, we think this category has gotten off-track and in our attempt to get this product right, we are launching our fourth foray into the dish soap category. dish soap is a pillar of the company, but we have never been satisfied with our ability to balance the needs of our business, customers and consumers.

many packaging designers will remember our iconic bottom dispensing “bowling pin” dish soap designed by Karim Rashid in 2001. the high cost and quirky nature of the design pushed us into a much more conventional execution several years later. this one we nicknamed the “butler” and it played very close to the category. this ultimately was the reason for its downfall. ‘not special enough!” was the protest from retailers and consumers alike. the decision was made to redesign again in an attempt to hit a sweet spot of price, form and function in the category. our next dish soap had to be iconic and “counter-worthy”, yet conform to the category norms in terms of format. the “leaf” bottle was the result. while it looked beautiful, it quickly was likened to a “slippery fish” by people who picked up the bottle with wet hands. this simple miss allowed us to the see how blind we had become to the real challenge in the category: to serve the dish washer in search of a universally superior experience.

the realization that people do their dishes in different ways is a key consumer insight that has been downplayed by the category and we largely overlooked. forgetting what we “knew” about doing dishes, we went back to basics. through direct observation, we discovered that there were three main modes of dishwashing: the “fill up the sink with soapy water” mode; the “dose the soap directly on the sponge” mode; and the “pour the soap directly on the dishes” mode. none of the products on the market served all three approaches and that’s the insight we used to inspire our latest design, the “dish pump”. by simply putting the dish washing experience at the center of the proposition, and designing the soap and the package to actually help in the task, we have a product that does a great job of actually helping the dish washer. ionly wish it hadn’t taken four tries to get there!
 

san francisco isn’t known for it’s warm summers, so when we do get a day of heat our office breaks out the shorts, sundresses and sunglasses. we’ll remember our 4-day heat wave this week as we pile on our jackets for another cold summer day.

“the coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in san Francisco.”- mark twain

there’s been a lot of talk in the news lately about salmonella. while we can’t do anything to help with the egg recall, we thought this was a good opportunity to talk about what you can do to control the spread of germs that can make you sick in the home.

here are some tips on how to disinfect your kitchen and help prevent salmonella transmission.

1. always wash your hands after using the bathroom + before and after handling food. use hot soapy water for 20 seconds or more to effectively clean them.

2. always wash plates and utensils thoroughly with hot water and soap before you prepare any food.

3. correctly use your method antibacterial kitchen cleaners on food preparation surfaces:

• to clean the surface: just spray and wipe.
• to sanitize the surface: wet the surface with the spray. leave on for 30 seconds. allow to air dry. sanitizing the surface does kill salmonella.
• to disinfect the surface: wet the surface with the spray or wipes. leave for 10 minutes. allow to air dry. disinfecting the surface also kills salmonella but a greater percentage of them.
• the difference between sanitizing and disinfecting is that disinfecting offers a higher level of killing than sanitizing. prevent cross contamination.

4. once a utensil/ plate has been used with raw meat, do not use it again without thoroughly washing it.

5. be aware of keeping food the correct temperature to prevent bacterial growth. a great resource for understanding how cold or hot to keep food is the USDA site.

for more on our antibacterial line, check out the faq’s here.

for more information on the salmonella outbreak, read more on the CDC or FDA. for more information on salmonella, learn more here.

hopefully this has helped clarify how to better protect your home.
 

just like teenagers can have crushes on their teachers, adults can have crushes on companies. it’s what is known as a “brand crush.” it happens when you adore everything about a company from their product, to their newsletter, to their facebook posts.

i officially have a brand crush on a local San Francisco company called Betabrand. ever since they hand delivered a pair of their USA pants straight to our office just in time for my boyfriend and me to crash the winter Olympics in Vancouver they have secured me as a fan.

last year betabrand (previously named cordarounds) had a food fight. random, right? i heard they were doing a sequel and knew this was the perfect opportunity to help them clean up a bit. check out our un-food-fight.

for extra credit, can you guess all the foods used in the un-food-fight? we'll randomly choose one correct respondent to receive a method laundry detergent 50 load bottle. but hurry you only have until August 27th by midnight PST! hint there are 17!

here at method, we’re on a mission to inspire happy, healthy homes. we’re also out to put the hurt on germs. and with some big seasons right around the corner (back to school, holidays, flu), this seems like a pretty good time to get a head start on fighting dirt and germs. please welcome method antibac -- our first line of EPA-registered botanical antibacterial cleaning products, including:

• method antibacterial bathroom cleaner, 28oz
• method antibacterial kitchen cleaner, 28oz
• method all purpose cleaning and disinfecting wipes, 35-count canister

we’ve partnered with the good folks at CleanWell™, makers of the thyme-based disinfecting technology, to bring you a patented antibacterial, antiviral and antimicrobial formula that kills 99.9% of household bacteria like E.coli, salmonella enterica, influenza A and H1N1 virus on hard, non-porous surfaces.

our antibac bathroom spray is formulated especially to target soap scum and hard water stains while our kitchen cleaner is designed to cut through grease and grime. both of these products are effective at killing 99.9% of household germs on hard, non-porous surfaces throughout any room in the home. in bright colored bottles and nature-inspired scents of lemon verbena and spearmint, kicking germs to the curb with our new antibacterial cleaners will look and smell as good as it feels.

antibac is a new line for us and in the past, we’ve been pretty vocal about our decision not to develop disinfecting cleaners because we hadn’t found a technology that met our strict ingredient standards and principals. but we recognize that some people prefer to use antibacterial cleaners for surfaces like toilets and sinks and we’re excited to add botanical disinfecting cleaners to our home cleaning product family. antibac is now on U.S. store shelves at Target and other retailers across the country. they will be available soon on methodhome.com as well.

we’d love to hear what you think and answer any questions you might have.

i walked into the kitchen the other day to find these pictures and note pinned to our bulletin board. pretty cool.

what have you reused our containers for?

hi there. my name is mr.pickles and i speak for the fishes (or at least the fishes in the method office). say hi to heidi and pat finn too. hi! we live in a tank at method and this is our first time blogging.

method adopted us a few weeks ago to be the spokesfishes against dirty. they set us up in this tricked-out tank and are recording our every bubble (think real world for fish). we’re here to talk about the dirty ingredients in your dishwasher detergent that make their way to our rivers and lakes.

one of the dirtiest ingredients is called phosphates. it travels from dishwasher, through the city pipes, and empties into our water. it’s a fertilizer and it causes an overgrowth of algae blooms. the algae is not only hard to navigate but it also depletes the water of oxygen and without oxygen we can die.

so we’re broadcasting live 24/7 to get the word out about smarty dish. these dishwasher tablets leave your dishes sparkling clean but are free of phosphates and chlorine bleach. yippee!

keep tabs on us via twitter and justin tv. bloop, blooop.

we believe good design can change the world. that’s why our own josh handy was chosen as a judge for nau’s grant for change competition.

this is nau’s second year holding their competition to help launch “the next big thing.” nau has been a friend of method for a few years. they design clothes that are sustainable, high performing and beautiful (like, really beautiful).

there are ten finalists: five finalists were voted on by the public and five where chosen by nau. the winner will be chosen next tuesday July 27th and be awarded $10,000 for their project.

read up on the ten finalists.

remember in high school when your parents thought it would be a fun experience to invite sven from denmark to come live with you as part of a student exchange program? he lived in your converted rec room, you introduced him to your friends, you took him to civil war battle grounds, and you cheered him on in soccer. well, our co-founder, eric, also thought it would be a good experience if we had an exchange student here at method. meet dan.

there are a few key differences between sven and dan. dan isn’t danish. he’s english. dan isn’t in high school. he’s the creative director at innocent drinks, a smoothie company in the UK. and dan isn’t living in our rec room although we have seen him play a little ping pong.

dan’s doing an exchange with method to share ideas about what he has learned at innocent and steal ideas to take back to his team. as part of this exchange he promised to blog a little about what he has learned.

i’ve been working at innocent for over 11 years, since we started making smoothies. i’m not allowed out much, so imagine my excitement at being able to visit another place that makes nice stuff.

so what have I learned?

i learned that it isn’t just innocent that has trouble keeping a tidy kitchen. even method, the home of people against dirty, sometimes has to put out an APB to make sure everyone washes up their used coffee mugs. while i was there the whole company took a vow that they will never, ever fail to wash the dishes, ever again. i hope they stick to their promise.

i also learned that if you have a bunch of really smart, bright, friendly people working together, then they can do pretty much anything they set their minds to. the potential is limitless. method is a business that’s doing so many good things they don’t know which ones to talk about first. this is a good problem to have, like your diamond shoes being a little bit too tight. and even though there aren’t really any diamond shoes (except maybe on katie’s feet – she strikes me as someone who might have some diamond shoes) method is rich, because they have great people with great ideas making great products.

it made me want to go home and work even harder on innocent. i was inspired and pinched plenty of good ideas. i tried to explain a little about what we do back in london. there’s a weird sibling relationship that the two businesses have – long may that continue.

and i will miss the coffee in san francisco. they have some very good coffee.

sincerely, dan

shucks, we’re blushing.

dan, thanks for the writing class you taught here at the method office and the great nuggets you shared about innocent drinks’ culture. we can’t wait for our designer, sally, to do her exchange at innocent and pinch some ideas of her own to bring back to us.

p.s. katie would like it to be known that her diamond shoes are hand-me-downs.