Method's Blue Bottle Strategy

A story about how Method Soap founder Eric Ryan identified market opportunities by looking for "seas of sameness" in retail stores.

"He said basically when looking for business opportunities, he walks down the aisles of a grocery store and waits till he sees a 'sea of sameness.' For soap, he went to look at the soap aisle and it was just a bunch of green bottles of the same product in the same shape sitting there everywhere.

So we came out with a different bottle that was blue and had clean ingredients - that was going to be our thing. That became Method Soap. He did the same thing with band-aids. The band-aid section was another sea of sameness. While everyone was trying to make band-aids this nude color to match skin tone - but nobody's skin is actually that color - we took a different approach. We believed every cut is a badge of honor, it's a great story to tell, so we wanted to put a badge on that wound that stands out."