The teardrop-shaped soap bottle that helped take Method from an experiment in a San Francisco apartment to shelves at Target just got a redesign: The company is now making a version in glass, in an attempt to nudge consumers away from creating more plastic trash.
“With this bottle, what we were hoping to do was bring some of our commitments to sustainability and design together and kind of use it as a test – and see how the consumer responds,” says Saskia Van Gendt, who leads the company’s sustainability team.
It’s a small test. The bottle, for now, is only available at SFMOMA’s museum store, so it won’t lead to any immediate widespread changes in how people buy soap. But it points toward the company’s larger interest in helping customers shift to buying refills instead of new packages.
Already, refills are a growing part of the company’s business. While Method wouldn’t share figures, it says that refills are projected to grow “strong double digits” this year. Thin refill packages use less plastic, and have an 82% lower carbon footprint. “It’s a huge unlock around sustainability if you can get a consumer to reuse the bottle that they’ve already purchased,” she says. “So we’ve tried to figure out all of the different ways to influence that.”
Quelle: Method