Laundry Add-Ons - The Sure Way to Grow Your Sales

Grow your sales with laundry add-ons

A short feature to round out this 3-part mini-series on the Laundry category. You can find parts 1 and 2 here:

• Part 1 – Laundry Detergents
• Part 2 – Fabric Conditioners

The laundry add-ons category is worth more than £100m in the UK market. Whilst it’s dwarfed by laundry detergents (£900m) and fabric conditioners (£430m), it’s still important to get right. There are many shoppers who are loyal to specific products, and you can encourage customers to grow their baskets by shopping across the full range.

Stain busting

More than 60% of the category is stain removal, and Vanish is the number one brand in this segment with more than 80% share. Vanish is a trusted brand, and with its bright pink packaging it stands out on the shelf and acts as a beacon to shoppers, so if you don’t have it in your range it’s a good idea to rectify that ASAP. There are powders, liquids and sprays, and dedicated versions for whites and for colours. The top SKU in the UK is Vanish Oxi-Action 500ml spray, so that’s the place to start for most retailers. Next comes Oxi-Action powder, which is available in various sizes to suit different retailers and there’s a PMP version for convenience stores. There’s also a trade-up option to Vanish Gold powder, which offers the highest level of stain-busting for the consumer and helps you grow your basket value incrementally. Again, there’s a PMP version available for convenience stores.

Antibacterial prowess

Through the pandemic, one of the segments that grew exponentially was anti-bacterial laundry cleansers. A product that was fairly niche before the pandemic suddenly became a must-have for shoppers all across the nation, to the point that it temporarily knocked Vanish off the top spot in the SKU rankings. Even as we move out of the period of Covid restrictions, the 2.5-litre variant is still the number two laundry add-on SKU in the UK market, and other pack sizes are available to suit retailers of all types.

A clean washing machine is a happy washing machine

Following along with the anti-bacterial theme (…sort of), it’s important to stock washing machine cleaners. There are a number of products available, each of which does a slightly different job, from managing the build-up of limescale to killing germs and tackling odours. The biggest brands are Calgon, Dettol and Dr Beckmann. Calgon tablets are used in every wash for ongoing cleanliness and have the added benefit of softening hard water. Dettol and Dr Beckmann (along with other brands) are used on a separate, specific wash cycle as a one-off cleaning operation.

The best of the rest…

With stain removers and anti-bacterial cleansers making up the majority of the segment, you could be forgiven for forgetting about other areas… but to do so would be to lose sales. Colour catchers are next up. Dylon is the market leader here, which is a brand more commonly known for its fabric dyes but we’ll save that for another day (…perhaps). Colour catchers are products that magically* prevent colours from running during the wash cycle, reducing your risk of white t-shirts taking on the embarrassingly-obvious shade known affectionately as ‘red sock left in the wash’.

Alongside colour catchers, there are ‘whiteners’ or ‘brighteners’, which cleverly make your white washing a more vibrant shade of… well… white. There’s a bit of an overlap here with stain removers targeted specifically for white garments, with some products claiming both stain removal and extra-bright whites. A number of brands play in this area, especially taking into account the cross-over with stain removal, but Dr Beckmann is the key brand to look out for.

Finally, there’s spray-on starch for extra-crisp collars and cuffs. The product seen most frequently in the market is Spray Starch 300ml from Dylon.

So that’s it – a round-up of the laundry add-ons market. A valuable category that will help you drive shopper loyalty and grow basket value with incremental add-on sales. And who doesn’t want that..?

*N.B. no actual magic is involved… that doesn’t exist.

Data source: Nielsen – Laundry – Total Market – Value Sales – MAT we 01/01/22