In 2018, The Pink Stuff was little more than a household cleaning product with a cute name. “The Miracle Cleaning Paste,” as it said on every package, was only sold by two retail chains in the UK. At a factory near Birmingham, the Pink Stuff line operated for about two hours each month. That was enough.
“It was a brand with many uses,” said Henrik Pade, chief executive of Star Brands, the company behind the product. “But no one used it.”
In fact, The Pink Stuff – which is bubblegum pink – had quite a few fans. One of them was Sophie Hinchliffe, a then 28-year-old hairdresser in Essex, about 30 miles east of London. Ms Hinchliffe had, of course, found out about The Pink Stuff on Instagram and started posting daily videos to her then-new account @mrshinchhome. All the videos were snippets of her non-stop campaign to spruce up the house she had just moved into with her husband.
There was Mrs. Hinch, as she called herself, scrubbing the grout lines in her bathroom with a toothbrush. Here she polished her candlesticks. If it had stains, The Pink Stuff would clean it, she told her small but growing audience. Don’t buy new tiles, she advised. Spend 99p and restore the old ones. She also recommended other brands. The pink stuff was easily my favorite.
“Hinchers,” as their followers soon dubbed themselves, found something meditative and satisfying in watching a talkative, glamorous, yet personable woman clean up the mess. And these people weren’t just gawkers. They asked the head washer for product tips.
When “hinching” became a verb in Britain – defined as “to brush vigorously” – The Pink Stuff’s days of obscurity were over. Stores that carried it found customers waiting for shopping carts to come by so they could grab all the little tubs they needed. Or more.
“I thought, ‘Guys, what did you do? I can’t get one!’” Ms. Hinchliffe said in a video interview. “Then The Pink Stuff got in touch and said, ‘Would you like us to send you some?’ And that’s where I got to know the whole influencer world.”
Ms Hinchliffe, who has 4.8 million followers on Instagram, never moved to TikTok – “It’s hard for me to keep up with one platform,” she explained – but The Pink Stuff did. According to Star Brands, videos related to Pink Stuff have been viewed more than two billion times on TikTok.
The virus surge
The Pink Stuff joins a hodgepodge of once-obscure products transformed by the internet and TikTok in particular. This list includes the Hoan Bagel Guillotine, the Stanley Tumbler, and the Carhartt Beanies, just to name three. However, sales increases achieved through online fame can be temporary. Just because a new product gets on the viral bandwagon – look, it’s the Dash Mini Waffle Maker! – doesn’t mean it will stay there.
According to Star Brands, which began tracking online mentions of The Pink Stuff a year and a half ago, the hashtags were viewed by around 20 million people each week. Sales have quadrupled since 2018 to about $125 million a year, a modest sum compared to giants in the field like Clorox, which has annual sales of over $7 billion. But a few years ago, no one at the company’s headquarters in Leeds would have thought this number was possible. The factory now runs three Pink Stuff lines throughout the day and the workforce has more than doubled. The product is now sold in 55 countries and is available at Walmart, Home Depot and Amazon.
“We don’t spend money on traditional advertising,” Mr. Pade said. “It’s completely viral. It’s a little scary because we have no control over our brand’s message.”
Marketing experts say that puts The Pink Stuff in a precarious position. When the fortunes of a previously unknown product are determined by social media, they are at the mercy of forces that can be monitored but not controlled.
“The goal should be loyalty, not virality,” said Marina Cooley, a professor of marketing practice at Emory University. “Virality is dangerous because it is fleeting and has no stickiness. People get excited by the first interaction and then look for the next viral thing.”
The original version of The Pink Stuff was released in 1931. It was just as pink as it is today, but had a decidedly less charming name, Chemico Bath and Household Cleaner, and came in a gray glass container. In 1948 it was packaged in a pink can, but it was not until 1995 that the manufacturer fully adopted the color of the product and adopted the current name. New owners took over Star Brands in 2018, hoping to breathe new life into some cleaning products. They soon hired the brand’s first in-house social media guru, but sales barely budged until the Mrs. Hinch phenomenon began. The company didn’t contact her until well after she had built a following. (They offered her a free product, but didn’t pay her for her recommendation.) The whole thing was a coincidence. “You can’t plan to go viral,” Mr. Pade said.
Welcome to #CleanTok
As TikTok became more popular, Pink Stuff hashtags became part of #CleanTok, videos that offer tips, tricks and hacks for the hygiene-conscious. It has been one of the platform’s most resilient niches for several years. To date, there have been about 110 billion views of #CleanTok videos worldwide, far more than #BeautyTok with 78 billion global views, according to figures provided to Unilever by TikTok.
A typical #CleanTok video features a so-called “cleanfluencer”—some with more than a million followers—working on a sink, pan, or floor with a specific cleaner and brush. There are usually before and after pictures, making these little vignettes a cross between a commercial and an episode of Law & Order. They start with a mess and end with a judgment.
“People find it very calming,” said Lori Williamson, a Toronto-based cleanfluencer who recently racked up more than a million views for a video of her cleaning a hairdryer. “Others say it’s motivating.”
She has collaborated with 20 brands but not The Pink Stuff. She learned about it after it was introduced by Ms. Hinch, but before Star Brands ramped up production, which was the case in 2020, and bought a North American distributor, which was the case last year.
“It cost $24 to purchase,” Ms. Williamson said. “I was so angry.” (It’s now $4.99 on Amazon and available in about 30,000 stores around the world.)
How well does The Pink Stuff work? The vast majority of #CleanTok videos are stories of triumph – The Pink Stuff conquers every surface in a bathroom, The Pink Stuff brings a sneaker back to life. Someone in the comments section always asks the same question: Does the pink stuff have a name?
There are also Pink Stuff failures, such as pots that remain covered in baked-on dirt. One woman warned that The Pink Stuff didn’t repair the scratches on her car, which the company wasn’t designed to do.
Wirecutter, a consumer review site owned by the New York Times Company, tested The Pink Stuff and concluded that it was good but overrated.
A happy ending
Ms. Hinchliffe began posting videos to manage her fears and help her connect with others like herself who were more comfortable at home than with strangers.
“If I felt a little anxious or panicked for no reason, I would grab my mop, vacuum or cloth, just turn on the music and get to work. ” She said. “And I found that I was no longer focusing on what I was worried about.”
With her fame, Penguin called Random House. Her 2019 debut Hinch Yourself Happy was the first of a handful of books to reach No. 1 on the Sunday Times bestseller list. Brands also called. Ms. Hinchliffe is now working with Procter & Gamble to develop Mrs. Hinch versions of cleaning products. Once a year she travels to the company’s offices in Brussels and refines the scents. Today she lives in a five-bedroom farmhouse with her husband and children, as well as a dog, chickens and alpacas.
A happy ending is harder to predict for “The Pink Stuff.” It no longer depends on Ms. Hinch, but if the goal is to create a lasting product, Star Brands still has some work to do, said Professor Cooley of Emory University.
“It doesn’t sound like there’s an adult in the room running the cult,” she said. “There needs to be someone setting a communication strategy – working with influencers, working with retailers.”
Four years ago, when Gen Zers discovered Vaseline, Unilever made a handful of new versions of the 152-year-old Vaseline, like Vaseline Gluta-Hya, which was said to be ten times more “brightening” for the skin than Vitamin C. In other words, the company was aimed at the new target group.
Star Brands’ Mr Pade says The Pink Stuff interacts with influencers but there’s no point in trying to control them. The tub design has been tweaked a bit and the company runs a four-person social media team that keeps tabs on hashtags and produces internal posts. Otherwise, the Pink Stuff convoy drives itself. Supporters of the brand can spot sponsored content from a mile away, Mr. Pade said, and they don’t like that.
“At some point interest will wane as the popularity of cleaning is overtaken by sex or drugs,” he predicted. “But once people find out about The Pink Stuff through social media, they give it a try.”
Audio produced by Tally Abecassis.
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2024-02-11 10:01:02
www.nytimes.com
