Cincinnati, OH – In recent consumer news, Proctor & Gamble has announced a new addition to its Tide family of products: Tide Harmony. Tide Harmony will be joining the already extensive Tide family of products including Tide, Tide with a Touch of Downy, and the ever-popular Tide To Go. P&G President and CEO Trevor McClatchy made the announcement at the companies annual shareholders meeting. “Although the economy is tough right now, we hope that this new revolutionary product will help increase overall sales and continue the tradition of excellence at Proctor & Gamble,” said McClatchy.
Mr. McClatchy then revealed be Tide Harmony. “It is the first detergent that will let you mix whites and colors,” he explained. “We believe that we are not only making great strides in the science of laundry detergent, but also in the realm of race relations. This is it. This is the final frontier in forming a color blind world, both in and out of the laundry machine.”
After the conference, this reporter had the chance to sit down with the head of Tide’s R&D division, Don Von Johnson, to discuss the thought process behind the creation of Tide Harmony. Mr. Von Johnson seemed very passionate about and proud of his new product. “We just thought ‘enough is enough’. Here at Tide, we treat clothes like people… people you can make, and buy, and wear.” Although English is not Mr. Von Johnson’s first language, he quickly realized the connotations of what he had said and we shared an awkward moment of silence before continuing. “The point is that ‘separate but equal’ is wrong for people and should be wrong for clothes as well. We can’t continue to fool ourselves into believing this Pictionary.” When asked if he was sure he meant Pictionary (after I described the game to him), he then changed his statement to “[…] believing this charade.”
When asked if he would be able to share any of the details of the development process, Mr Von Johnson, like any loyal employee at such a company, would not reveal many details. He did however divulge that, “it was not easy to bring the whites and colors together. We had to integrate them slowly and carefully. In many of the first attempts, the end result was not pretty. There was a lot of [color] bleeding going on and many of the clothes came out of the wash completely different from when they went into it. It was a painful but important process, and I think the history books are going to show that what we did was [scientifically] right.”
Along with a large duffel bag of swag, Mr. Von Johnson thanked me for covering the story by providing me with a test sample of Tide Harmony. In order to provide a fair and accurate representation of capabilities of the new laundry detergent, I decided to run several trials with different colored garments.
The first wash was with a white shirt and a yellow shirt. This went relatively well as the t-shirts seem to come to a territorial understanding within the first wash. The second wash, a white shirt and a red shirt, had a great deal of color bleeding. Subsequent washes seemed to resolve most issues, but it still seems as though the red shirt feels down-trodden by the white shirts. The final wash paired a white shirt and a black shirt. The results varied from wash to wash; some resulting in harmonious understanding and others turning into uncontrollable torrents of violence inside the washer.
After my tests I contacted Mr. Von Johnson to ask if he had any insight into my findings. “Dr. King had a dream,” he said. “I, too, had a dream. And still have it. But when all you do is work with and think about laundry detergent, a lot of your dreams have to do with laundry detergent. All I can do is try to do the best I can in my field by making as many strides as I can and only hope that others may follow my lead. I may be walking in the dark, but at least my shirts will be clean.”
~ Matt Essert
