“Everything I know, I learned from someone else” is a quote from our co-founder Jerry Lippman that has become famous around our 75-year-old Family Enterprise, and that’s for good reason. Jerry valued learning as a basic right of every person, and, though he was not afforded the opportunity for formal education beyond the 10th grade, he was an ardent lifelong learner and believed in the power of both schooling and learning on the job. Today, we honor Jerry’s passion for learning by embracing Always Learning as one of our GOJO Values. Always Learning happens through formal learning, learning from the work we do every day, and reflecting on both our successes and failures.
Over the course of our 75-year history, Team GOJO has done a tremendous amount of learning. From testing and developing products to receiving valuable insights from customers that we then apply to our next innovations, learning is built into our DNA. We have learned from both our failures and our successes. However, some of our most impactful learnings have come from when we have stumbled. While no one wants an initiative to fall short of expectations, it is a reality for every business. The most important thing is to fail smartly, learn from our mistakes, and then apply those learnings going forward. No story from our last 75 years demonstrates the importance of learning from failure more than our unsuccessful launch of the world’s first liquid shower soap, Shower Up.
In the 1980s, Joe Kanfer, who was CEO at the time, recognized an opportunity for a liquid shower soap when he discovered that 73% of soap (which was all bar soap back then) was used in the shower. At the time, liquid soap for use at sinks was quickly replacing bar soap, becoming a successful retail item. Joe believed that it only made sense that liquid soap would also work in shower settings. Sensing an opportunity, GOJO built in-house manufacturing capacity and capabilities to make liquid shower soap and launched Shower Up into the consumer market. As part of our marketing efforts, GOJO hired celebrity Ed McMahon, famous for his role on the Johnny Carson show, to introduce Shower Up as part of a television advertising campaign. Shower Up sales in the first 30 days were nearly as much as GOJO annual sales the year before. Retailers purchased Shower Up by the truckload, excited by the promise of this new category. Unfortunately, consumer sales did not take off.
In true GOJO fashion, time was spent evaluating our approach and trying to understand how to learn from this failed product launch. There are two key reasons why Shower Up was unsuccessful. First, at the time of the launch of Shower Up, women were the primary soap buyers in the household, and they did not trust brands they did not know. Shower Up and GOJO were relatively unknown to women and more well known by males. Further, the product and packaging design were more male-oriented. After all, GOJO had a legacy of serving predominantly male users with our heavy-duty hand cleaner and we did not yet understand the female consumer. Second, we did not understand the in-use experience. Most people used bar soap without a washcloth or loofah. Liquid shower soap, which could easily drip through fingers, required people to use a washcloth or loofah, which was uncommon at the time. (As it turns out, a well-known lotion brand launched their own liquid shower soap after Shower Up failed with a loofa attached to the bottle, and they were successful at signaling and supporting new behaviors.) These types of learnings have helped shape our go-to-market approach for decades. In particular, this experience taught us to understand the actual users’ experiences and needs and not just fall in love with the solution. For the past decade, we have been calling this focusing on “Jobs to be Done.”
Moving Forward Quickly After Failing Fast
Shower Up is a great example of what it means to fail fast, analyze, learn, and move forward. Not getting bogged down by failure and accepting that it is one of the most powerful opportunities to adjust, Joe discovered an opportunity to use the manufacturing capacity put in place for Shower Up. We used the new capacity to produce liquid soaps, hair care, and body care as a contract manufacturer for St. Ives. This experience turned out to build GOJO capability with these types of formulas which we leveraged when we entered the away-from-home dispensed hand soap market just a few years later.
We got into this market by developing a push-style dispenser for a bag-in-a-box soap refill. There was a new pull-style dispenser that was taking the market by storm, upgrading from bulk-refill dispensers. Joe wanted to come up with our own pull-style dispenser to compete. Henry Orr, our lone engineer the time, had a different idea. Henry had used pull-style dispensers for other types of products in his past and experienced the challenges of them getting pulled off the wall. So, he designed a push-style dispenser with the insight that its use would reinforce its stability on the wall, thereby revolutionizing dispenser design. It was the beginning of our market-making innovation and leadership in liquid and foam soap dispensing which are at the heart of GOJO and our success to this day.
And the learnings about the consumer market from our Shower Up experience were indispensable when we launched PURELL Hand Sanitizer to Consumer in 1997.
Rarely in business is there success without failure, and at GOJO we share stories about those failures so we can learn from them and move on to new opportunities – some of which result in incredible opportunities and wins. Our GOJO Value of Always Learning challenges us to try new things and keep what works, seek insights from everyone and everywhere, and share our learnings. As learners, not knowers, we all at GOJO are encouraged to learn from our mistakes and build upon them for success.