thedrifter
02-05-06, 12:10 PM
Loyal flush
Talk about cash flow. Wisconsin's presence in the powder room might surprise you.
By RICK ROMELL and JOEL DRESANG
rromell@journalsentinel.com
Posted: Feb. 4, 2006
It's our own super bowl: When America flushes, Wisconsin wins.
Today, some 90 million football watchers will sip soda, guzzle beer and, at halftime, hit the bathroom in numbers that will send a Niagara-like surge of water down the nation's toilets.
Wherever a bathroom door closes, opportunity knocks here. In business terms, Wisconsin is king of the throne.
Talk about economic clusters: We claim firms that describe themselves as the country's largest producer of toilets (Kohler Co., in Kohler) and the world's largest maker of toilet seats (Bemis Manufacturing Co., in Sheboygan Falls), not to mention the world's thickest concentration of makers of toilet paper (in the Fox Valley). To finish the job, we've got Glade. Each year, S.C. Johnson & Son's Sturtevant factory turns out millions of cans of the nation's top-selling air freshener.
The Super Bowl itself testifies to our dominance: Kohler supplied the 880 toilets and 370 urinals at Detroit's Ford Field. Georgia-Pacific, which runs two mills in Green Bay and is the country's biggest producer of away-from-home toilet paper, furnished the tissue.
"Wisconsin does seem to have a pretty large share of the bathroom market, from the plumbing to the toilet paper," said Patrick Schillinger, president of the Wisconsin Paper Council. "It's not bumper-sticker type of material, so that distinction might go less noticed than other flashier industries."
The bottom line: Wisconsin reigns supreme among some ubiquitous products that are not the topics of polite conversation. And more goes into those items than meets the eye.
The power of low flow
For decades, toilets didn't change much. You pulled the handle and sent huge amounts of water - as much as 7 gallons - rushing into the bowl. With a surge like that, waste didn't stand a chance.
Then, in the 1990s, the federal government ordered that each flush use just 1.6 gallons. The old designs, which relied more on volume than waste-moving science, couldn't cut it. Users often faced the unpleasant double flush.
So manufacturers beefed up research capabilities. At Kohler, that meant using something called "computational fluid dynamic software," hiring PhDs in fluid mechanics and testing, testing, testing to develop low-flow but powerful toilets.
"It's unbelievable how much is going on under the hood," said Kathryn Streeby, an engineer and Kohler's marketing manager for sanitary products.
The very nature of American toilets posed a challenge. In Europe, toilets typically use the "washdown" method. It's like a waterfall: Water rushes straight into the bowl and pushes waste out through a wide trap. That's great for expelling solids but not so great for keeping the sides of the bowl free of unsightly residue.
Most U.S. toilets, meanwhile, are siphonic, with the familiar swirl. That helps clean the bowl. The problem is that creating a siphon requires a long, curvy, narrow trap, making the toilet more likely to clog. But Americans won't accept the alternative of a dirtier bowl, Streeby said. In essence, we've opted for the plunger and Europeans for the brush.
To make sure its designs both move waste and leave the bowls clean, Kohler tests constantly. More than a dozen staffers take notes on the performance of toilets at home, switching models every few months. In the lab, the firm flushes such things as sponges, golf balls and children's toys.
Then there's soybean paste. Bean paste, it turns out, simulates human waste so well that many communities look to it as the standard by which they judge whether toilets qualify for rebates for reducing water use.
Bean paste is part of Kohler's battery of tests, and the firm's Highline Pressure Lite toilet, Streeby said, can flush a whopping 1,000 grams of the stuff. "I would say the average male payload - and I really shouldn't know this information, but I do because it's my job - is 200 grams," Streeby said.
So goes the conversation in Kohler's sanitary products wing. "It gets very graphic," Streeby said. "I think we've lost our shyness."
Titletown of TP
Few household products are more indispensable than toilet paper.
Georgia-Pacific says each American uses an average of 22 pounds a year, including almost 4 pounds away from home. One in four households replaces a roll at least every other day.
Green Bay is the Titletown of TP, home not only to top-selling Charmin but also to Quilted Northern, the No. 2 brand.
The top three makers of toilet paper used in the home - Procter & Gamble, Georgia-Pacific and Kimberly-Clark - all have significant operations in the Fox Valley. Together, they control 84% of the market, which eclipsed $3.4 billion in 2005, not including sales at Wal-Mart, according to Information Resources Inc.
Chinese emperors used bath-towel-sized sheets of toilet paper more than 600 years ago, but mass consumption emerged only in the last century, according to Robert E. Kravetz, a retired gastroenterologist and medical historian in Phoenix.
Through the ages, in lieu of toilet paper, people improvised salty sponges on a stick, balls of wool soaked in rose water, wads of straw or grass, pages from books and catalogs, and frayed ends from rope, Kravetz wrote in the American Journal of Gastroenterology.
Essentially, all the materials served their purpose, Kravetz said. But paper has become a cheap, efficient, disposable, convenient and widely available alternative.
Consumers, meanwhile, have clamored for increasingly sophisticated toilet paper. A 1935 ad in Ladies Home Journal boasted that Northern Tissue, the predecessor to Quilted Northern, had no splinters. Now, tissue users expect it to be soft, strong and absorbent. They expect it to vanish when they're through with it. They expect it to be there when they need it - with minimal roll changes.
In Neenah, Kimberly-Clark periodically employs a local sensory panel to help gauge the softness of its Scott and Kleenex Cottonelle toilet papers. When University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point professor Gerard Ring was a scientist at Kimberly-Clark 20 years ago, testers wore blindfolds and nose clips to heighten their sense of touch.
Dave Hollenberg, director of the Paper Technology Transfer Center at UW-Green Bay, said softness is perceived not only by how many fiber ends touch the fingertips, but how the tissue looks as it drapes over objects and how it sounds as it's rattled.
You don't want the tissue to pill or come off on your fingers, and you don't want lint flying off of the tissue, Hollenberg said. On the other hand, you want the tissue to break apart beyond the bowl without tell-tale "feathering" of fibers after the flush.
"Out of sight, out of mind," Hollenberg put it.
Paper scientists continually tweak the blends of wood fibers, the chemistry and the machine specifications to perfect the product. One discovery: The hard fibers of the eucalyptus tree give toilet paper the fuzziest feel.
In making tissue, which takes form from a pulpous slurry, technicians try to fluff it up by blow-drying it rather than pressing out the water. They develop drier ways to bond the fibers. They emboss patterns on the tissue, crepe it and ripple it to give it a cushiony texture.
Marketers, meanwhile, probe for intimate consumer insights. For instance, Charmin uses feedback from its toll-free customer lines, as well as reflections from focus groups and even home visits. Among the findings:
• Tissue users average 16.44 sheets per solid-waste visit. That's dropped from 17.8 sheets in 1996, which Charmin attributes to the development of thicker tissue, meaning fewer sheets are needed for the same "hand feel."
• Although the average sheet count is the same for both sexes, women, generally more concerned about protecting their hands, gather more tissues a pull.
• Ten years ago, equal proportions of users folded the paper and crumpled it. Since then, folders have taken a 10-point lead over crumplers, again from a sense that thicker sheets provide more hand protection. Meanwhile, a decided minority wraps the tissue around their hands.
Best seat in the house
Humble as it is, the toilet seat is the foundation on which Bemis has built a business that employs almost 2,500 people in North America, Latin America and Europe.
They feed a substantial market. Seats in the home get replaced every seven years, on average. In the U.S., sales of all brands total 40 million to 50 million a year.
Some of those are plastic, but most are molded from wood ground to the consistency of flour, mixed with resins and compressed under heat. Though not as durable as plastic, wood has a better feel, said Scott Thomson, Bemis marketing director for North American plumbing products.
"When people sit on them, you don't have such a sensation of 'Ooh, that's cold,' " he said.
Whether a seat is wooden or plastic, flat or contoured, plain or padded - soft seats account for perhaps 15% of Bemis' retail sales and come decorated with everything from palm trees to Venetian brocade - consumers would do well to consider their choices: A survey cited by Bemis found that 76% of adults said they inspected their friends' toilets.
In some homes, there's a lot to check out. Kohler, for example, offers a seat called the Heated French Curve, which provides a toasty perch, and the "Peacekeeper" system, in which the toilet flushes automatically - only if the lid is closed.
Bemis recently took another tack in the up-vs.-down wars, introducing the "Harmony" seat and cover, which slowly close themselves when the toilet is flushed. Then there's Chief Executive Officer Dick Bemis' baby: the Purité Personal Cleansing Spa, a heated seat that does everything but clip your toenails.
Touch the control panel, and nozzles emerge to spray your bottom with warm water. Choose from what the company terms "a shower-like flow," a "pulsating cleanse," or an oscillating setting that delivers "a soothing massage." Let the warm-air dryer complete the job.
Millions of Japanese do pretty much that every day. Americans, though, have been slow to embrace toilet washdowns.
"It's a struggle," Bemis said of the Purité's reception since its introduction two years ago. But he isn't quitting. Bemis thinks a market will develop and, having a Purité seat at home, work and "every location I use frequently," he's convinced of its value.
"I believe in it," he said.
Smell of success
Americans spent $543 million on home air fresheners last year, and Racine's S.C. Johnson, makers of Glade, had 47% of the market, not counting sales from Wal-Mart, according to Information Resources.
"We sell over 100 million cans a year," said Petrell Ozbay, an S.C. Johnson spokeswoman.
The top spot for the top-selling air freshener?
"Obviously, the bathroom is a very popular spot," Ozbay said.
Bathrooms are challenges to deodorize, said Dan D'Amico, director of applications and new technology at Belmay Inc., a New York-based developer of fragrances for S.C. Johnson and other companies.
"It is a very aggressive area of the house," D'Amico said, citing the strong smells there, including mustiness and mildew. "Plus, it's a small room and more prone to be overcome by a malodor."
At Belmay, perfumers design fragrances from a palette of 3,000 raw odor materials, blending as few as 10 and as many as 200 to meet clients' specifications for scents for particular applications and demographics.
To test bathroom air fresheners, Belmay closes off a lab room and lets the aroma build up from a chemical synthesis of animal fecal odors. Half an hour later, technicians apply the air freshener, close the door again and return to check their success later - 10 minutes for a spray freshener, an hour for a diffused plug-in dispenser.
Plug-ins are growing in popularity, but aerosols tend to be more popular for the bathroom because of their instant delivery, D'Amico said.
Depending on their volatility, different fragrances linger longer, said Victor Rouchou, a perfumer at Belmay. Spray a citrus scent, and it could last 10 or 15 minutes, he said, but a heavier fragrance, such as Glade Country Garden, would go twice as long.
Country Garden and Rain Shower are "the standby old stalwart scents for us," Ozbay said.
When S.C. Johnson launched it 50 years ago, Glade came in two scents: Blossom and Evergreen. Ozbay couldn't name all the fragrances now, but it's fair to say they include an air of success.
Talk about cash flow. Wisconsin's presence in the powder room might surprise you.
By RICK ROMELL and JOEL DRESANG
rromell@journalsentinel.com
Posted: Feb. 4, 2006
It's our own super bowl: When America flushes, Wisconsin wins.
Today, some 90 million football watchers will sip soda, guzzle beer and, at halftime, hit the bathroom in numbers that will send a Niagara-like surge of water down the nation's toilets.
Wherever a bathroom door closes, opportunity knocks here. In business terms, Wisconsin is king of the throne.
Talk about economic clusters: We claim firms that describe themselves as the country's largest producer of toilets (Kohler Co., in Kohler) and the world's largest maker of toilet seats (Bemis Manufacturing Co., in Sheboygan Falls), not to mention the world's thickest concentration of makers of toilet paper (in the Fox Valley). To finish the job, we've got Glade. Each year, S.C. Johnson & Son's Sturtevant factory turns out millions of cans of the nation's top-selling air freshener.
The Super Bowl itself testifies to our dominance: Kohler supplied the 880 toilets and 370 urinals at Detroit's Ford Field. Georgia-Pacific, which runs two mills in Green Bay and is the country's biggest producer of away-from-home toilet paper, furnished the tissue.
"Wisconsin does seem to have a pretty large share of the bathroom market, from the plumbing to the toilet paper," said Patrick Schillinger, president of the Wisconsin Paper Council. "It's not bumper-sticker type of material, so that distinction might go less noticed than other flashier industries."
The bottom line: Wisconsin reigns supreme among some ubiquitous products that are not the topics of polite conversation. And more goes into those items than meets the eye.
The power of low flow
For decades, toilets didn't change much. You pulled the handle and sent huge amounts of water - as much as 7 gallons - rushing into the bowl. With a surge like that, waste didn't stand a chance.
Then, in the 1990s, the federal government ordered that each flush use just 1.6 gallons. The old designs, which relied more on volume than waste-moving science, couldn't cut it. Users often faced the unpleasant double flush.
So manufacturers beefed up research capabilities. At Kohler, that meant using something called "computational fluid dynamic software," hiring PhDs in fluid mechanics and testing, testing, testing to develop low-flow but powerful toilets.
"It's unbelievable how much is going on under the hood," said Kathryn Streeby, an engineer and Kohler's marketing manager for sanitary products.
The very nature of American toilets posed a challenge. In Europe, toilets typically use the "washdown" method. It's like a waterfall: Water rushes straight into the bowl and pushes waste out through a wide trap. That's great for expelling solids but not so great for keeping the sides of the bowl free of unsightly residue.
Most U.S. toilets, meanwhile, are siphonic, with the familiar swirl. That helps clean the bowl. The problem is that creating a siphon requires a long, curvy, narrow trap, making the toilet more likely to clog. But Americans won't accept the alternative of a dirtier bowl, Streeby said. In essence, we've opted for the plunger and Europeans for the brush.
To make sure its designs both move waste and leave the bowls clean, Kohler tests constantly. More than a dozen staffers take notes on the performance of toilets at home, switching models every few months. In the lab, the firm flushes such things as sponges, golf balls and children's toys.
Then there's soybean paste. Bean paste, it turns out, simulates human waste so well that many communities look to it as the standard by which they judge whether toilets qualify for rebates for reducing water use.
Bean paste is part of Kohler's battery of tests, and the firm's Highline Pressure Lite toilet, Streeby said, can flush a whopping 1,000 grams of the stuff. "I would say the average male payload - and I really shouldn't know this information, but I do because it's my job - is 200 grams," Streeby said.
So goes the conversation in Kohler's sanitary products wing. "It gets very graphic," Streeby said. "I think we've lost our shyness."
Titletown of TP
Few household products are more indispensable than toilet paper.
Georgia-Pacific says each American uses an average of 22 pounds a year, including almost 4 pounds away from home. One in four households replaces a roll at least every other day.
Green Bay is the Titletown of TP, home not only to top-selling Charmin but also to Quilted Northern, the No. 2 brand.
The top three makers of toilet paper used in the home - Procter & Gamble, Georgia-Pacific and Kimberly-Clark - all have significant operations in the Fox Valley. Together, they control 84% of the market, which eclipsed $3.4 billion in 2005, not including sales at Wal-Mart, according to Information Resources Inc.
Chinese emperors used bath-towel-sized sheets of toilet paper more than 600 years ago, but mass consumption emerged only in the last century, according to Robert E. Kravetz, a retired gastroenterologist and medical historian in Phoenix.
Through the ages, in lieu of toilet paper, people improvised salty sponges on a stick, balls of wool soaked in rose water, wads of straw or grass, pages from books and catalogs, and frayed ends from rope, Kravetz wrote in the American Journal of Gastroenterology.
Essentially, all the materials served their purpose, Kravetz said. But paper has become a cheap, efficient, disposable, convenient and widely available alternative.
Consumers, meanwhile, have clamored for increasingly sophisticated toilet paper. A 1935 ad in Ladies Home Journal boasted that Northern Tissue, the predecessor to Quilted Northern, had no splinters. Now, tissue users expect it to be soft, strong and absorbent. They expect it to vanish when they're through with it. They expect it to be there when they need it - with minimal roll changes.
In Neenah, Kimberly-Clark periodically employs a local sensory panel to help gauge the softness of its Scott and Kleenex Cottonelle toilet papers. When University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point professor Gerard Ring was a scientist at Kimberly-Clark 20 years ago, testers wore blindfolds and nose clips to heighten their sense of touch.
Dave Hollenberg, director of the Paper Technology Transfer Center at UW-Green Bay, said softness is perceived not only by how many fiber ends touch the fingertips, but how the tissue looks as it drapes over objects and how it sounds as it's rattled.
You don't want the tissue to pill or come off on your fingers, and you don't want lint flying off of the tissue, Hollenberg said. On the other hand, you want the tissue to break apart beyond the bowl without tell-tale "feathering" of fibers after the flush.
"Out of sight, out of mind," Hollenberg put it.
Paper scientists continually tweak the blends of wood fibers, the chemistry and the machine specifications to perfect the product. One discovery: The hard fibers of the eucalyptus tree give toilet paper the fuzziest feel.
In making tissue, which takes form from a pulpous slurry, technicians try to fluff it up by blow-drying it rather than pressing out the water. They develop drier ways to bond the fibers. They emboss patterns on the tissue, crepe it and ripple it to give it a cushiony texture.
Marketers, meanwhile, probe for intimate consumer insights. For instance, Charmin uses feedback from its toll-free customer lines, as well as reflections from focus groups and even home visits. Among the findings:
• Tissue users average 16.44 sheets per solid-waste visit. That's dropped from 17.8 sheets in 1996, which Charmin attributes to the development of thicker tissue, meaning fewer sheets are needed for the same "hand feel."
• Although the average sheet count is the same for both sexes, women, generally more concerned about protecting their hands, gather more tissues a pull.
• Ten years ago, equal proportions of users folded the paper and crumpled it. Since then, folders have taken a 10-point lead over crumplers, again from a sense that thicker sheets provide more hand protection. Meanwhile, a decided minority wraps the tissue around their hands.
Best seat in the house
Humble as it is, the toilet seat is the foundation on which Bemis has built a business that employs almost 2,500 people in North America, Latin America and Europe.
They feed a substantial market. Seats in the home get replaced every seven years, on average. In the U.S., sales of all brands total 40 million to 50 million a year.
Some of those are plastic, but most are molded from wood ground to the consistency of flour, mixed with resins and compressed under heat. Though not as durable as plastic, wood has a better feel, said Scott Thomson, Bemis marketing director for North American plumbing products.
"When people sit on them, you don't have such a sensation of 'Ooh, that's cold,' " he said.
Whether a seat is wooden or plastic, flat or contoured, plain or padded - soft seats account for perhaps 15% of Bemis' retail sales and come decorated with everything from palm trees to Venetian brocade - consumers would do well to consider their choices: A survey cited by Bemis found that 76% of adults said they inspected their friends' toilets.
In some homes, there's a lot to check out. Kohler, for example, offers a seat called the Heated French Curve, which provides a toasty perch, and the "Peacekeeper" system, in which the toilet flushes automatically - only if the lid is closed.
Bemis recently took another tack in the up-vs.-down wars, introducing the "Harmony" seat and cover, which slowly close themselves when the toilet is flushed. Then there's Chief Executive Officer Dick Bemis' baby: the Purité Personal Cleansing Spa, a heated seat that does everything but clip your toenails.
Touch the control panel, and nozzles emerge to spray your bottom with warm water. Choose from what the company terms "a shower-like flow," a "pulsating cleanse," or an oscillating setting that delivers "a soothing massage." Let the warm-air dryer complete the job.
Millions of Japanese do pretty much that every day. Americans, though, have been slow to embrace toilet washdowns.
"It's a struggle," Bemis said of the Purité's reception since its introduction two years ago. But he isn't quitting. Bemis thinks a market will develop and, having a Purité seat at home, work and "every location I use frequently," he's convinced of its value.
"I believe in it," he said.
Smell of success
Americans spent $543 million on home air fresheners last year, and Racine's S.C. Johnson, makers of Glade, had 47% of the market, not counting sales from Wal-Mart, according to Information Resources.
"We sell over 100 million cans a year," said Petrell Ozbay, an S.C. Johnson spokeswoman.
The top spot for the top-selling air freshener?
"Obviously, the bathroom is a very popular spot," Ozbay said.
Bathrooms are challenges to deodorize, said Dan D'Amico, director of applications and new technology at Belmay Inc., a New York-based developer of fragrances for S.C. Johnson and other companies.
"It is a very aggressive area of the house," D'Amico said, citing the strong smells there, including mustiness and mildew. "Plus, it's a small room and more prone to be overcome by a malodor."
At Belmay, perfumers design fragrances from a palette of 3,000 raw odor materials, blending as few as 10 and as many as 200 to meet clients' specifications for scents for particular applications and demographics.
To test bathroom air fresheners, Belmay closes off a lab room and lets the aroma build up from a chemical synthesis of animal fecal odors. Half an hour later, technicians apply the air freshener, close the door again and return to check their success later - 10 minutes for a spray freshener, an hour for a diffused plug-in dispenser.
Plug-ins are growing in popularity, but aerosols tend to be more popular for the bathroom because of their instant delivery, D'Amico said.
Depending on their volatility, different fragrances linger longer, said Victor Rouchou, a perfumer at Belmay. Spray a citrus scent, and it could last 10 or 15 minutes, he said, but a heavier fragrance, such as Glade Country Garden, would go twice as long.
Country Garden and Rain Shower are "the standby old stalwart scents for us," Ozbay said.
When S.C. Johnson launched it 50 years ago, Glade came in two scents: Blossom and Evergreen. Ozbay couldn't name all the fragrances now, but it's fair to say they include an air of success.