The irony doesn’t hit you immediately. Besides being called “precious snowflakes,” millennials are often labeled as soft, yet they’ve accelerated the decline of fabric-softener sales.
The folks at Procter & Gamble have reached peak first-world problems when it comes to the laundry additive. The company that controls more than half the $1.3 billion U.S. market for liquid softener with Downy and Gain can’t get millennials to buy their products.
According to Shailesh Jejurikar, P&G’s head of global fabric care, most millennials “don’t know what the product is for.”
The history behind fabric softener, as detailed by the Wall Street Journal, is that the most common complaint from consumers was that clothes came out of the wash feeling rough and scratchy. In the 1960s, fabric-softener became the instant fix and was popularized around that time. It wasn’t until innovations were introduced to detergents and washing machines that made the process of cleaning clothes less harsh. Additionally, popular athletic gear often instructs consumers not to use fabric-softener to ensure the fabric lifts and traps moisture.
It seems like an absurd problem to some, but fabric-softener sales in the U.S. fell 15 percent between 2007 and 2015. To put raw numbers on it, sales in 2007 were over $800 million and dipped down to $598 million in 2015.
While eco-friendly millennials don’t want to use more chemicals in their homes, a drastic dip in sales could hurt companies’ bottom lines. And with that, jobs could be the prime casualty.
It’s unlikely that P&G is going down that route as they have rebranded their fabric-softener products to “fabric conditioner.” It plays on the words shampoo & conditioner to get millennials to think that it is essential to add fabric conditioner to their laundry.
It’s a trial balloon for P&G to see if sales will return back to 2007 levels. But, most importantly, it’s a test for millennials to see if they’re gullible enough to use it.
