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Tide is the best-selling laundry detergent in America, controlling close to 40% of the market, with parent company Procter & Gamble holding roughly 60%. So why is P&G spending years and millions to reinvent it? Because the company’s mantra is it would rather disrupt itself than let a competitor do it first, according to The Wall Street Journal.
P&G’s latest bet is Tide evo, a flexible three-inch “tile” made of six layers of compressed detergent fibers that dissolve in cold water. It took more than a decade and 50 patents to develop.
The gamble isn’t cheap or guaranteed. A box of evo tiles runs nearly double the price of Tide pods, and some early customers feel like they’re being taken to the cleaners. One industry consultant questioned what unmet need the tile actually solves at that price. But P&G has done this before. When it launched Tide as the first synthetic detergent powder in 1946, executives were warned it would cannibalize their existing brands. Earnings tripled over the next decade.